The Muse of Lies

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Copyright, 1936 by BENJAMIN DeCASSERES

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To man alone has been given the power of conceiving himself other than he is.

—Jules de Gaultier.

TO MY FRIEND ARTHUR LEONARD ROSS

The zMuse of Lies

FOREWORD

The “Muse of Lies” is a growth. It was not pro­ jected in cold blood. Its contents are the messengers from the mysterious sources of thought to the brain and to paper that came to me over a period of years. These messengers are planets, satellites and tiny asteroids that were born and are dependent on one central sun, the central sun of my being since boy­ hood—Illusion.

Illusion is the universal truth. All that exists lies to the senses and the mind. Maya, the Goddess of Illu­ sion, rules the phenomenal and mental worlds. God’s method is illusion, says Emerson. The essence of this book, the core of its thought, is that the Lie shall set you free. All is Fiction—which implies a Reality, forever hidden from us.

It is written, like all I have written, in the many rhythms of my character, which I always obey. Every idea and epigram herein came to me spontane­ ously and was put down as it came. They glided into my consciousness at the seashore, in parks, in the subway, in cafes, in the bathroom. There have been very few changes made after they were born. I try to prove nothing. I try to disprove nothing. 1 record. This is a book of moods; but all moods are dictated by one’s special sensibility, one’s unique identity, out of which no one can step, as one cannot step out of one’s shadow. The academic mind, the logical mind, the reasonable mind, the Marxian mind will find nothing in “The Muse of Lies” that is to its liking. It is the product of the genius of Caprice and Irony, the two mighty children of Illusion. B. DeC.

THE MUSE OF LIES

A MUSE OF LIES. The phrase is from the gor­ geous “The Martyrs” of Chateaubriand. THE MUSE OF LIES! What a magnificent thought! Of course to Chateaubriand the Muse of Lies was Greek—one of the Nine. But I shall make her the Tenth Muse, and she shall lead all the rest. All worship at her shrine. She is the bright, wanton sister of Maya, the Hindu Goddess of Illusion, the artificer of mirages and mocking tomorrows. She presides at the birth of the conscious atom, and it is only the eye of genius and old age that can pierce her scintillant veils. All the acts of life are poems to her glory, and each human being contributes a syllable to her memoirs. She has a private Helicon and a public Hippocrene—for all mortals must drink from her founts. Muse of Lies, bathed in the incense of human hopes, human dreams and human curses, around thee I draw with the blood of mankind a magic circle and crown thy mocking face with cypress wreaths—and corn­ husks ! In the Dome of Lies

I am kept alive by the galvanic battery of ideas. My respiration is mental. At this very moment a planet is going to pieces somewhere in the abysses of space, a strange comet in a strange Whereabouts has riven a sun whose decentralized fires have upset a whole sidereal system, sending billions of beings unknown to me into oblivion. 9

THE MUSE OF LIES

These things keep me alive, keep me aflame at the top. The fleet of my dreams is bottled up in my skull, but their giant engines send their life-vibrations all through my hulk. Now it is night, and I gaze up at the stars, the tum­ brils of strange humanities moving toward the eter­ nal guillotine of mechanical extinction. The thought of that strange adventure of those stars, loaded with their vermin-gods, keeps me Here for a little while. And my soul, which is the breath of many gods, gives me pride and power, and the apocalyptic visions of a nameless destiny. Do I not record the stupidities of common-sense and the irony of the righteous will? Is not this world to me a psychic theatre? In my consciousness there work the lapidaries of many curious hells. Then there are the lawns of light and ladders of wind to the Empyrean, where I gather the manna on which Shelley and Keats kept themselves alive. And on rainy days I disinter the corpses of moon-Titans and the souls of the dead dreamers who once lived in that Temple of Ice. The starlings of my fancy and the famished ravens of my intelligence that I send forth for treasure, and Pride that flames like a monstrous eye on the stem of my will—these things, all these things, keep me Here a little while. Banners and Swords

The Upanishads—those tremendous dream-loops, psychical syntheses of ghastly circumferences—are instances of ghost-fabrication raised to its highest point of efficiency. Man looking at himself in the delirious dimension. Desire that has starved out the living fictions of everyday life. Imagination that has, literally, created other worlds. 10

THE MUSE OF LIES

“What have you done in life,” asked the Shadow at the Black Portal after he had died. “Nothing,” replied he who had died. “Greater wisdom hath no man,” said the Shadow at the Black Portal. Glory is to receive a letter from Everybody after you are dead! The doorbell rings night and day, but there is no answer. At the moment after death I may meet Satan, but he will be no stranger, as all my life I have known him as Hope. The Life-Lie

Life is a temple erected over the floorless cellar of Ennui, crowned with the topless domes of Imagi­ nation. It is a mosaic of beautiful lies, an arabesque of iridescent illusions. One must continually seek definitions for Life—noth­ ing else is really important. “To live one’s life,” as they say, is banal; one must live life some way—as Nero or Saint Francis, it is unimportant; but to de­ fine Life in a thousand definitions, that is the privi­ lege of the few. The Empire of the Ridiculous is safe from those who live in it and contribute to its absurdities—and may the foolishness of the world never grow less! The God-Lie

That marvellous sentence of Voltaire’s, “If there were no God, one would have to be invented”! A profound psychological truth uttered long before 11

THE MUSE OF LIES

Jules de Gaultier gave to us his astounding and beau­ tiful philosophy. In hours of great agony I have gone unto that Being. A myth? No matter. I created him, and communed with him, which may be a greater thing than that he should have created me and communed with me. I have put to him that almighty Why?—that ages-old word, as old as any star, as old as the first thought on any star. No answer. That made no difference either. That I could ask that question was of profound psycholo­ gical value. Art thou a Mathematician or Aesthete, a Playboy or a Sinister Spirit, or one working out a gigantic prob­ lem of which we are only the fractions or algebraic signs? No answer. But something answered in an­ other way. I was calmer, felt a feeling of “safety” that no blind faith could ever beget. I was with the Great Camerado, speaking to him. Something like being his equal swept over me. A myth? Maybe. But a pragmatic myth. Banners and Swords

The unpleasant is the mother of movement.

I have no identity in the Infinite. In Time I am known as so-and-so. But in the Infinite, in the Eter­ nal, what is my name? In art obey nothing but the imagination; in practical life obey nothing but the rat in the mind. The Janus-Faced

As a man I scorn the gods; as a god I scorn men. The 12

THE MUSE OF LIES

difference between men and gods is the difference between living and seeing, between becoming and being. I have raged against the Pervasive Spirit, which means that Spirit is divided against itself. My “blasphemy” is sublime because I am both god and man — that is, one who sees and one who acts. The Holy Sex-Ghost

Can a eunuch be a mystic? Inconceivable. Mysticism and eroticism are almost identical. Mysticism is the unexplored azure and aura of sex craving. The Holy Ghost is a wraith and walks the seas of love with nectar locked in the blood, Therefore chastity is urged by the Church if you wish to see God. His face may be evoked in sperm, Let the magic oil flow into the brain, said Balzac, All dreamers, mystics and poets are heavily sexed, I have never dreamed passionately of the Eternal, the Infinite, the Everlasting It that all my flesh has not become tumescent. And at the moment of the supreme climacteric with my beloved I am with the Innominate. Revelation or Delusion

Castes and grades of consciousness—in that lies all the difference between men. It is curious the ruses of speech and thought we use in order to escape the existence of a Supreme Power. Francis Thompson —one of the glories of the language—has expressed it somewhat in “The Hound of Heaven.” The minute we recognize a Power existing under various manifestations and aspects that moment we recog­ nize the existence of God. The deforming process begins in ascribing attributes of good and evil to It. 13

THE MUSE OF LIES

The grade and amount of consciousness determine our communion with this Supreme Essence—whose purposes may be satanic for aught I know. This Power is, nearly all the time, to us at least, subcon­ scious. In the worm It is barely conscious of itself. In me, for instance, It is supremely conscious of itself, surveying itself under the aspect of the Eternal and the Infinite, as It did in the brains of Emerson and Spinoza. The natural history of God is still to be written. It must be done by a sane mystic, of the type of mind of Spinoza, Emerson or Maeterlinck. To let myself go in the presence of this stupendous certainty in me would mean insanity. The hallucinating awe, the godolepsis of my whole psychic nature, must be held in rein by an assump­ tion of unbelief, a dash of cynicism, a thread of hatred in Its presence, as the Presence incarnates itself in me. This unbelief, cynicism and hatred are ruses of It itself, to preserve Its own equilibrium in my mind. This almighty Presence, which comes to a sort of unstable Selfhood in genius, turns on itself, doubles on itself, balances itself by blaspheming itself. Climbing to the summit of Fatality, It stands upon a pin-point of awareness in my brain by the use of these balances and weights. And to preserve this posture it is sometimes necessary for It to laugh. Sanity in the Infinite and Eternal can only be pre­ served by curses and laughter. Genius, or the revelation of the Supreme Power at its highest point under the conditions of life on this plane (and are there others?), must always seem a madness to the crowd. For in the crowd the Pres­ ence has not differentiated itself. It browses and is bovine. What does the slugworm think of the lark? No matter. 14

THE MUSE OF LIES

And all this may be an illusion—all this sureness of this Supreme Awareness that has incarnated itself in my high-caste consciousness. But whether It is deluding me or I am deluding myself is of no im­ portance. Both processes are identical. A. Tragic Paradox

I was planted with my roots upward toward the sky, planted with my roots in the Mystical Dimension, in the Neant, in the ether of the Imagination, and have grown downward into the earth. But I feel that where my roots are there is my Home. I seem to be hanging head downward from Somewhere—a NotHere, anyhow—trying to touch the floor of Mother Earth. Banners and Swords

Two thoughts fill me with ecstatic awe, fill me with the ineffable and the sublime: God and junction with the woman I love. The perfect coition and the Per­ fect Correspondence—is there any difference? The Ideal is a form of the will-to-vengeance. Were there no physically unfit could the Ideal exist? Is not all dream, both actual and figurative, based on some balk of a bodily appetite? Is not every poem the issue of some defect of the will or a failure to scale the Impossible?

Love is a veil to hide thought from the brain, a screen to shut out from our sight the diabolistic Master at work in his workshop. 15

THE MUSE OF LIES

The Millennium

The fiat of the creative imagination—when dreaming and execution will be one and the same. That will be the wireless age of the soul. The fatiguing task of materializing the panoramas and landscapes of consciousness! Matter is, as Plato said, the eternal clog. To write without ink and without the movement of the hand, to paint without a brush, to produce a great symphony without an instrument, on the air, as it were, to be copied on paper by a secretary—will we ever reach that light of psychic evolution? That old “superstition,” that there were certain minds that could “wish awav” the health and life of another, why should that not be reversed? I may yet reach the point where I can do consciously what the mind does subconsciously. I may yet invent and create as does the fabled God. Banners and Swords

In using the word Eternity there has always been the connotation of something opposite to Time. Any thing being other than in time is inconceivable; it is transcendental abracadabra. Hence the rolling of the eyes and the other physical scenery and accoutre­ ment of mystical humbug. Eternity is the endless prolongation of Time; incessantly recurring minutes. Eternity is Time—it is the word we use to express our inability to conceive an end to succession, not the opposite of it. (“The reverse of this—that there is only Eternity and Time is its perpetually melting shadow—is just as true,” whispered the Muse of Lies in my ear.) 16

THE MUSE OF LIES

My prejudices are my strength; my “Olympian seren­ ity” is composed of all my weaknesses.

I hold a telescope to my eye and there is a fixed star at the other end, five hundred billion miles away. I hold a pistol to my temple, and from Somewhere to Nowhere is a matter of two seconds. But both space and time are illusions!

Justice conjuring God to punish the wicked—the vision of Dante-Hugo. But can justice ever punish? It is unjust to the wicked because they cannot do otherwise than they do. Free will—Hugo and Dante could not face that lie. They run about their business by the million every day. I see them. I touch them. Making money. Loving. Drinking. Laughing. Calculating. Going in and out of theatres. But I want to laugh—laugh loud and long, provocatively and satanically, hysteri­ cally—sobbingly. They do not know what I know. They do not see what I see. Look at them! Impos­ sible to keep a straight face. Impossible!

All explanations are in my mouth. I am the Pope of Pessimism, the Grand Llama of Nihilism, Isis who laughingly rends her own veil for you and shows you her hollow udders and her transparent skull of a thousand horrors. The soul of the optimist is my background. I love their belly-wise prophecies and their genito-urinary metaphysics. The Jest

The “History of My Adventures with God” should 17

THE MUSE OF LIES

be the title of all my books. I have dropped every­ thing at that call; gone into conference with that Idea in the middle of all sorts of things. I say “the his­ tory of my adventures with God,” but it might be written, “the history of my adventure with His prob­ lematical existence.” All has hinged on that, all has swung on that. Every word, every idea was a trail. And in that series of adventures I never seemed to be doing a work personal to myself, but something that partook of a universality; something that was being done for all beings; trying to unlock a tremendous secret that should be a gift to eternity, or to time, or to the world. It began at puberty; God flowered in the life-force; or at least the quest for Him, or It. I was like a great builder who had all the materials for a magnificent building except terra firma on which to build it; it was like the feeling of being alive without breath; or as if one had all numbers up to the infinite in his mind except the figure 1. Here was a pretty how-do-you-do! Here was a strange, absurd trick: I, fully alive, with an imagina­ tion that domed the universe and a consciousness that put me in touch with invisibles—I did not know anything about the Cause of myself, was totally ig­ norant of myself, had been suddenly thrust, as it were, into a kind of a logical dream without knowing anything about my initiator! What an adventure!—forever “to be continued.” The Ghost Man

At times an astounding sense-of-mystery ’whelms all my senses. I am a shadow that floated out of sperm; a possibility that became resistibility; an im­ material desire kernelled in a cell; a myth, a nothing; 18

THE MUSE OF LIES

in my mother; then an urge, a thrill toward sub­ stance, a limning and shadowy-definite outline of the corporate, the just-perceivable. I dream over the embryon of myself, see myself, feel myself, as that meta-physical, supra-physical, or sub-physical phan­ tom, involved, quiescent in the seed. Now, after many years of post-phantomic life, I strike myself, pinch myself, and in spite of the corporate sense of being I still have that ghost-sense, that surety of being, in my essential self, behind this screen of boughs and leafage and branch which I call my body—a meta-physical substance, an other than this bodily creation; something finer than a brain, than a skin, than a perambulating ossuary and a blood-duct. Subtle, evasive proof came to me that in that seed, in that non-being—so-called non-being because not a definable state to our human sense—I was more completely alive, more surely real, more certainly a something than I am in this bodily state, where all is fugacious, intangible and unintelligible. This is the core and essence of my mysticism which no scepticism can destroy—it is fundamental, beyond thought. It is in no sense bound up with “religious” feelings or symbols. It is awesome, hallucinating, marvellous, but not reverential—that Thought, my thought of thoughts; or, rather, feeling of feelings. To write the history of one’s metaphysical existence! But where are the words? To exist in the formless, the infinite, the indefinite. A Consciousness occupy­ ing all of life at once. A sense of being there, and not here, and still not knowing anything of there. The condition of non-being plus a tremendous aware­ ness, the condition of nothingness plus a body. Ploti­ nus, Blake, Amiel, Shelley, Spinoza, Poe, Schopen­ hauer, Goethe and Baudelaire would understand these phrases; to the heavy-footed mind of today 19

THE MUSE OF LIES

they are the jargon of insanity or the fumiste. Pride the Liar

You are at the end of your agony. You cannot suf­ fer any more. A numbness moves over your con­ sciousness like an eclipse over the face of the Sun. You walk, and walk. Woman cannot calm. Liquor cannot dull. The years pelt you like stones. Your thoughts mob you with slung shots. The people that pass you are ghosts. You are walking, walking, walking to the summit of Pain. Beyond this walk there must lie death or insanity—or a rotten drunk. There is a hollowness in your head and heart—floor­ less abysms of the Numb. Then a thought rises like a living thing from the deeps of one of those abysses. It is this: you are being “tried.” It is a proof, a test, a gauntlet. Supreme and last triumph of egotism—that thought; the last journey of Pride; the poultice of ice on your wounds. And then you roar with laughter.

The Answerers

When one addresses the angels demons answer; when one addresses demons angels answer. It is these strange antitheses and deceptions that give to life its strange flavor, its exotic charm. To call on one thing and to be answered by another; to labor for a certain end and to find we had labored for its opposite; to spend one’s life climbing to the top of Mount Sinai and after one is there to find not the Promised Land but the flowerless and dismal stretches of sub-polar lands, the edelweiss at most, 20

THE MUSE OF LIES

and chimeras frozen in the depths of lifeless winds— this pampers the curiosity and deepens the heart of the Enigma, and folds us up in supra-subtle medita­ tions. The Evolution of Hell

Science has got rid of one hell and substituted an­ other; for fire it has given us infinite space and anni­ hilation at the grave. The ghastly hell in which the stars pitch and roll; the white and blue hell in which the individual is the terrifying centre; the engulfing Nothing beyond the last breath—are these worse or better than a solid, substantial Hell? For the gen­ eral the Infinite is caviar. Give them back their Hell and Heaven. Leave the Neant to the strong. My Special Lie

That life is a spectacle, a show, a tragic vaudeville created for me—and for me alone—there is no rea­ sonable doubt in my mind. Science itself—pure ration­ ality—will not allow me to budge an inch from this view. This panorama that lies in perspective radia­ ting from my consciousness—my uniquity—is ego­ centric. Psychological Ptolemaicism is the rigid scientific side of Romanticism. The world, its values, its scenery, its colors, its combinations, its motives, change with the evolution of my consciousness through the years. My special temperament, my special plexus, my special liver, brain, stomach, blood, evoked this spe­ cial Show, gave it a personal meaning, untransferable, inalienable. No one will ever see this Thing again as I have seen it; no one ever saw this Thing before as 21

THE MUSE OF LIES

I have seen it, felt it and dominated it. Because I am I, this Spectacle is mine. It is inwrought in me! it sends me personal, secret messages in a code the key to which is my inmost character. And it will die with me, collapse like Prospero’s dream, disperse like a mirage into a leaden cloud. Others will build their Spectacles, but mine is invio­ lable—a golden treasure walled up with me at the moment of death that will defy all adventurers. The Play that I saw is the Golden Fleece that no Jason will ever find. No one will ever paint that dream on the canvas of Reality as I painted it; no one will ever find those strange colors and eerie lights that I used. Others will create more wonderful, more beautiful, more subtle, more terrible projections; but they will not be mine. And so I shall lie down and wrap around my soul the universe, a marvellous shroud emblazoned with runes and ciphers and hieroglyphs that carry in their depths my special secret, my special vision, my special cri­ tique of the marvellous little wakefulness that I have called, for want of a better and more adequate word, MY life. The Rediscovered Country

Matter only exists as matter—that is, as ultimate, ir­ resolute reality—before puberty. After that all fades into spirit, essence, the unknowable. It is because at the time of puberty we return through physical channels to an ante-conceptual state. We feel at the period of adolescence the subtle undertow of the meta or sub-physical. Reality melts; desire and dream quicken. We are visited by strange memories of an innominate Self. It is a partial return to the Infinite, to the Neant, to the wombs of matter and motion. 22

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Banners and Swords

Music is the ecstasy of duration; time become melodi­ ous sound. Pinion your thoughts on paper before they wing their way into the thin azure of Memory or the black arcanums of Oblivion. Captive butterflies of gorge­ ous colors up from the tropic regions of the blood— transfix them with golden pins, dead but immortal in their immobile beauty.

Hope is as necessary to thought as to life, and as meaningless. Hope, the butterfly-scorpion!

I am the suckling of a star—fire and dust worked to a conscious effigy by a Force. Ah! my immortality—I shall rove as an eternally repercussive thrill through the spine of posterity; maybe be the goose-flesh of its thought. I change my eyrie each minute. But in the small in­ finity of my skull I sometimes knock my head against the azure itself. Like the Sphinxes of Zim-Zizimo, I have an enig­ matic word carved on my brow—my special mystery.

Dreams are made up of images that walk upside down like persons seen in a ripless pool.

I have been with Medusa—and you can see where the nails of her spite have sunk into the soft flesh of my thought. My emotions are often abstract. I call it thought. 23

THE MUSE OF LIES

The labyrinths of a child’s simplicity—that consti­ tutes the astonishing and paradoxical sweetness of their souls.

Those who hate and are cowards launch their hatred at Satan; those who hate and are brave launch their hatred at God.

What has happened on Earth since the beginning shall remain a dead secret between It and me. The spectacular credo, the pronunciamento of Pure Intelligence: All’s well that ends ill.

Samskaras

Habits have life, are entities; they have a soul, are the Homunculi of our greater, more completely ag­ glomerate self. Yes, they even have a voice. One can hear these Things of the Shadow, these more than mechanical half-identities. They are spirits of the deep. The Hindus call them Samskaras—ghosts. They are subtle and protean, these immortal children of our will, these Habits. Do we ever conquer a habit? It is inconceivable. They change their form at the moment of “death,” like that larger, huger habit which I call myself. Habits are infoliate and exist in the embryon. They swim in the sperm, that marvellous foreworld and milky nebulosity of each being; and they grow in us, exfoliate, as we did in our mothers. “Habit is the man”—and man is only a thousand thousand habit­ larvae linked by memory. 24

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Thoughts

There are two kinds of thoughts—chair-thoughts and walking-thoughts: static and dynamic. But of what is any thought the measure? Of nothing but the feeling that engendered it. Walking through the forest my thoughts are mystical, pantheistic, cos­ mically sensuous. In a chair they are sedate, ra­ tional, incisive, wide-eyed. The forest-feeling and the chair-feeling. My Unhuman Nature

The Presence, abstract of all presences, or a sublime identity of which all presences are the miniature? Aristotle and Locke versus Plato and Spinoza. Not what is true, but what serves, counts. There is no other criterion of anything. Pragmatism, Epicurean­ ism, Utilitarianism are the last words in philosophy. The Presence that I am conscious of in me exists be­ cause it pleases me that it should exist. That which is not anthropomorphic cannot be con­ ceived. My temperament demands an anthropomor­ phic Absolute—Presto! it appears. Lie or truth—I care not. That Presence, then—the Absolute Reality behind my flesh-and-mind seeming—I neither hate nor love. It is beyond such gross terms. Awe, curios­ ity, thrill, even a sort of hobnobbing and cheek-byjowl intimacy—these I experience before It, ironic ghost of Me, a tremendous, mythic, unhurnan DeCasseres. The Art-Lie

To turn my temperament, my special emotional and 25

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mental nuance, into ink, and to make of each sen­ tence a prose poem—that is the unattainable ideal. I seek, the absolute of Beauty through ink. A “tru­ ism,” a “witticism,” an “epigram” is only true when it is beautifully said. I stand at the very ends of the ages. No new analy­ sis or synthesis of anything is possible. There can be no new kind of anything. All has been done. Sub­ jects are limited, like objects in space. There is no new way of saying old things, no old way of saying new things. Literature, art and philosophy—life it­ self—is today purely plagiaristic. Why then do I persist in writing, in turning my tem­ perament, my special vision, into yards of ink? It is the instinct to live. It is the instinct for the Beauti­ ful—and with me both instincts are identical. Well, maybe I say something “new,” perhaps vary an in­ finitesimal point from the rest of the race; am slightly unique; am “different” by a slight vibration. And this slight “difference,” this trivial variation must get itself into ink. What else is genius? What else is an “original”? I cannot escape the law of psychological evacuation. And now I remember my most forceful epigram: Every action is a substitute for suicide. How to Remain Insane

Perfect sanity is a condition of absolute indifference, scepticism, equilibration, Pyrrhonism. A person be­ comes insane at the moment any feeling or thought dominates and obscures another feeling or thought. To hold an opinion, a belief, to have a special bias in any direction for anything at all, to make the slight­ est movement of the body, to “prefer” any one thing to another thing—even in the matter of food—this is 26

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the beginning of disequilibration and contains the germ of lunacy, which is merely a specialization of character carried to its highest development. But as life is inconceivable without bias, motion, di­ rection and as a condition of perpetual equilibrium is possible only among the yogis, life goes on—must go on—by an infinite series of insane acts. That is why life to the highest form of philosophic and aesthetic genius will always seem irrational, insane. All choice is monomania; and in the daily conflicts of choice, in the stupendous clash of personalities—or special forms of lunacy—it is the equilibration and neutrali­ zation of opposing forms of insanity that keep life barely up to the living point. Thus lunacy is a con­ dition of life on the planet Earth. A world of per­ fectly sane creatures—Pyrrhos, Spinozas, Montaignes—would result in the annihilation of the LifeForce. Banners and Swords

There is a geological, atmospheric, ethnological, cli­ matic, racial, sociologic, ancestral, sidereal, stellar, morphological, histological, historical, pre-natal eter­ nity which weighs, motivates, inflates and directs every act of each creature on the planet Earth—and yet there are those who talk of “free will” and “blame”! Suppose the Earth did not turn on its axis. Sup­ pose it had only one motion instead of three. Would two and two make four then? Suppose the sidereal system were not travelling at an inconceivable rate of speed toward Vega in Lyra, but remained static. Would incest then be a virtue? 27

THE MUSE OF LIES

If you can lie without blushing, turning pale, low­ ering a lash, feeling a lump in your throat or moving a muscle that would not move if you told the truth, you have conquered life. I carry my heart like a watch of exquisite sensitive­ ness in a case of burrs and cactus.

Everyone has two lives: the life one lives and a memory-life in the consciousness or subconscious­ ness of some one else.

The Yawn-God

I have written a number of books, but what have I said that could not be uttered in a yawn? In fact, I have analyzed my yawn, my special perpetuate yawn, and translated, sublimated, that physical phenomenon into words. I have put that yawn born at pubescence under the microscope, spectroscope and x-ray. I have made the yawn dance, weep, laugh; at times the yawn is lyrical, dithyrambic; at other times it thinks and moves up from the metaphysical arcanum in paced and measured motions. The yawn is my metaphysic, my lever, my instinct­ to-do and my instinct-to-loaf. My writings might well be called the Saga of a Yawn, the Epical Adven­ tures of a Yawn, the Esoteric Meanderings of a Yawn. My yawn is Logos, the Word, the Egg in the nebulae of my being. My blood, heart, brain and genitals yawned (at puberty) before Time, Eternity and Circumstance; and my rapture in the presence of Beauty, Power and Sex-Love is the hosannah, the jubilee, the cosmic hymn of the Great God Yawn. 28

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Don Quixote

When one surveys his acts for a day and simultane­ ously evokes the feeling of eternal time there is born that rarest of things—cosmic humor. And beyond cosmic humor the creative mind cannot venture. Cosmic humor is the basic principle of every great tragedy as well as of every great comedy. It is in “Orestes,” “King Lear” and “Tartarin.” Fate, Chance, Time versus the finite act, thought or feel­ ing—no work of art can be great unless these two empires are juxtaposed. From that standpoint the crucifixion of Christ was a comedy, a piece of Na­ ture’s sublime buffoonery. Was he not the Don Quixote of mysticism whose deeds were shaped by— what cosmic Cervantes? The Progenitor

The great psychological problem is to differentiate consciousness and thought. Many forms of animal life and children for a long time after their birth have consciousness without thought; proof that conscious­ ness in itself is not dependent on thought, but vice versa. Consciousness must precede thought; is a condition of it—hence can exist without it. The mystic, the seer, the prophet, the poet are at the top of psychic development because their consciousness is mightier than their thought; for this reason they outrank the scholar, a mere thought-machine. The Light Sinister

To transmute the subtle-sinister light in my brain into written words, to utter in inked characters the 29

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remote and rare coloring on certain surfaces of my consciousness—that is what I call my style, the com­ plete and exact rendering of my special fatality. I think in terms of eternity, and as I have none of the common motives for living that influence most men, I live, in a sense, in terms of eternity. Hence the light and coloring that emanate from my completest expression will lie beyond the spectrum and the prism. Strange, unearthly gleams come forth from my work; that is because those strange, unearthly gleams are solarized and exist in the marvellous uni­ verse that I call I. Reverence

The more we adore God the stupider we become. Reverence is the enemy of thought; and yet it is reverence that carries life onward. The lightning of my thought travels backward and sets in fire whole forests and jungles of reverential attitudes. I have ankylosis of the knee; it will bend to nothing. I am capable of all attitudes but that of reverence. I adore, I love, I hate, I admire, I am awe-struck—but rever­ ence is unknown to me. I find reverence everywhere the equivalent of stupidity and psychic obesity. The Siderealists

There is a curious correspondence between the mo­ tions of the Earth and the human spirit. The Earth revolves around the Sun, and that is the psychic con­ dition—the mental motion—of most men, of almost all who have ever lived. They live wholly through the process of revolving around some one else. They are dependents. The Earth also turns on its own 30

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axis—so do a few human beings; they have char­ acter, poise, ego. Their motion is double—around some central sun and on their own axes—self-de­ pendent and interdependent. But there is a third class of mind—very few in any age—that imitates the motion of the sidereal system itself, which is travel­ ing at an inconceivable rate of speed toward some un­ known point in the Infinite. It knows not whither, whence, nor why; nor does it know that which at­ tracts it toward the Unknown. These few psychic organisms that correspond to the vertiginous, fabulous and ghastly orientation of the Sun and all its planets and moons have the sense con­ stantly present of having lived for an eternity in a perpetual flight through time and space, headed nowhither, any whither; beyond starland and spaceland and timeland, it may be. They are incandescent, thinking, conscious, infinite-struck psyches whose flight is sidereal, mystical, unstaked, unlimned. It is curious that the Old Mother grunting around the Sun who sweats out thee and me should beget these few Siderealists, these marvellous freaks of the psyche whose motions are the fatal motions of the Sun itself. The Imp of the Irrational

That marvelous god of unreason, puppet of the irra­ tional, that dazzling Epic of Surprise—Man—travels roughshod over all the little systems that are made to enclose him. He is the imp of the irrational. His­ tory is a world of his own creation—and what a world! What exudations of transcendent nonsense! What Gargantuan edifices of vapor and rainbow­ tissue! What vicious stabs and jabs toward con­ sciousness! It is not his reason that makes him 31

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“godlike,” but, on the contrary, his unreason, his spontaneous, unthinking activity—his genius for achieving a comic sublimity, a sort of divine stupidity. Banners and Swords

Give us this day our daily Ideal, so that we may per­ form some new fantastical foolishness in trying to realize it! Keep our eyes well glued on the daily millennium, so that this comic ghost shall not fail in its diurnal caper. Behind this monstrous web of words that I have spun what sort of a Being crouches? God!—if I only knew! About that Spider behind the logos-web I am as ignorant as any one. A great philosopher is one who dramatizes his su­ preme defect. Every great metaphysical abstraction is the pus, the delicate issue from a fatal and incur­ able disease of the will. The Lie Rational

Whether a man does or does not believe in the free­ dom of the human will—there is no other test that can be applied to him as a thinker. Around that prop­ osition of freedom or fatalism all things revolve. If I am told that a man is “educated” or “cultured” or is a “prophet” I immediately inquire, “Does he believe in the freedom of the will?” If he believes in the freedom of the will he ceases to exist for me. But, above all, must the human race in the mass never be­ lieve that the will is not free. Otherwise the Spec32

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taele would cease, and the eye of Fatality would have not where to pose its vision. The Tomb-Giggle

I do not desire to become a reality, but a myth. If I told you I had committed every crime in the calen­ dar you would smile and say I lied, because I am pos­ ing, or I am vain, or I am imaginative, or I am imitat­ ing Byron or Baudelaire, or some one of the rowdies of literature. But the jest lies here, O gentle reader —the jest, inviolate and unpublishable in my soul of souls—that in the last analysis you do not know whether I am lying or posing, whether I really have been guilty of every sin and crime and perversity or not; and so I leave you puzzled, sneering, believing, scoffing by turns; and that is the cause of the eternal giggle that you hear from my tomb. Not that I am guilty or guiltless, but that your little noddle is puz­ zled perpetually—that is my chef-d’oeuvre, a bit of my instinct to tease and torture. A Revery on Nothing

Curious state of mind: to desire, to imperatively de­ sire, to express something beautifully, rhythmically on paper, and yet have no theme. As I set this down I have not the slightest notion of what I want to say, or whether I have anything to say; but there was an order, a desire, an urge, to take up the pen. The ghosts of a thousand profound reveries, the wraiths of a thousand allegories are floating around in my brain, but they have not come to their ninth-month. So this is a themeless theme, a theme on a theme, or what you will. 33

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Writing for itself alone? Why not? To substitute the means for the end, to make the means the end: is not that the very essence of dilettantism, scepti­ cism, nihilism, connoisseurism? Every passion justi­ fies itself in satisfying itself—the dimmer the con­ sciousness of ends the greater the pleasure of the act. To express one’s self, to exude one’s self, that is the natural call. What one expresses, what one exudes, is of no importance. Possessing character, angles, the sense of eternity, one must always say something. This differentiates this passion for expression at any cost from that of the mere scribbler, who is generally a narrator of externals, a reporter. What is literature? Putting a flame in the heart of mere words and winging the syllables. Some thoughts are so great that they do not require words to express them and some words are so beautiful that they do not require any thought to send them into the azure. Plotinus had no words for his thoughts; Swinburne had no thoughts for his words. Each had reached the absolute of his style. What is beautiful in Plotinus is the inexpressible; what is beautiful in Swinburne is the expressible. Here this “themeless theme” ends. Banners and Swords

Every night I see a Bethlehem Star that leads me to some cradle-manger, where I find enswaddled amid dung and swine another “Truth.” How well I know thee, Star of Bethlehem, mirage and perpetual projection of my satanic curiosity! That a Colossus should live in a pygmy—that is my perpetual arraignment. That the universe should exist in a phantom—that is my everlasting astonish­ ment. 34

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Everything that is mysterious, enigmatical, hidden tends to divinity. Whatever we do not understand begins to flash with halos. God himself is not a mystery because he is God, but he is God because he is a mystery. Those few tremendous spirits who have spent their lives seeking Him do not know what they gained by not finding Him. This quest has the same fascination as calling every day to see a man and being told each day that “he is out.” After a year of this, this man who is “always out” whenever you call will also begin to be a god, a mythic being in your imagination. Slowly but surely he will enter your heaven—though in truth he may be an absolute nobody. The Ideal as the vehicle of vengeance. The Ideal as the backed-up and dammed instinct-to-evil and de­ struction glittering in the mind like the golden and purple scales of coiled and somnolent serpents. The Ideal is the paralytic’s dream. The Ideal is the Beautiful born of Pain and Death. Lying some­ times for years motionless and dreaming like a Sphinx in the whirling sands of the arid soul, it sud­ denly comes to life—this Ideal. It yowls, it spits fire and rages, and turns a man or woman into a god or a fury, carries him or her to the gallows, to the Pan­ theon, to the electric chair, to sainthood, to the gut­ ter, or to Golgotha.

It must be enunciated over and over again that in­ sanity is the law of life, of action, of history and of all great, vital thought, and that reason and common­ sense are by-products, accidents, the keel and com­ pass of the Flying Dutchman known as the human soul. 35

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In profound sleep the phantoms become busy, plan­ ning out the day to come. They quarry in the past and plan for a past that they go eternally forward to meet. On waking suddenly I have caught their van­ ishing footfall and the confused murmur of their dy­ ing speech. And I believe I face the Future! The Ironic Mirror

In literature irony is the touchstone of greatness. Only the story that ends ironically is true. It is also true of great poems and allegories. The perception of the insoluble and the contradictory, of the per­ verse, of the theme, however great in its livable hour, melting inexorably in the nothing of eternity and ultimate inutility—that must be the kernel around which the written words are husked. At the end comes the ironic and nihilistic aesthete— myself, for instance; I am an end, the end of a Mis­ sissippi of thought and psychic evolution, a widespreading end that empties into some unknown Gulf. What things the waves of my being have seen since that first little trickle back in the Itasca of my first memory? Strange lands, strange shadows, haunted twilights, burning summer suns and celestial mirages flung from the Rockies of the spirit! At the end, Irony, Beauty, and Nothing; a mighty involuted spectacle, moving in space, a projection of my own mind. Life is beautiful when the passions are safe in their lair and one by one the magic mirrors in the chambers of the brain part the curtains that cover them, and into their flashing depths stars, mankind and the miracle of springtime enact for me for the millionth time their parables of the Great Mystery. 36

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The Inner Temple

The sublimest of all the adventures of man, his airi­ est fairy tale, his most dignified attitude, that which gives him eclat in Time and standing-room in Space is his philosophical and metaphysical speculations. Why am I ? Who am I? What am I? Why is any­ thing? What is anything? Every philosopher and metaphysician knocks with bare knuckles in the name of all men and in all ages at the door of the Inner Temple. Pure thought, pure curiosity, pure speculation are naked. Art, literature and music come to the same door and knock, but they come veiled in glowing stuffs and dazzling accoutrement; and their knuckles are swathed in velvet and eider­ down and sparkle with precious stones. The philosopher and metaphysician are always ridi­ culed by concrete minds, sometimes even by the lords of literature; but those naked, bleeding knuckles re­ sound insistently and forever on that door in spite of, and maybe because of, that very laugh behind them and around them. They “do not come in contact with life.” True. They, having gone through the nursery in other lives drowned in oblivion, seek con­ tact with Another. May the door never yield! For that will be the end of the fairy-story, children—of all fairy stories, and of all the Grimms and Ander­ sens of the mind and sensibility. The Eternal Echoes

What we call originality is the reincarnation of echoes. Ancient ideas and formulas ricochet and re­ sound through the thousand thousand abysses and chasms of the mind—echoes of other voices, rever­ berations of other battlefields, the sounds from which, 37

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like the light from some stars, outlast their origins. These echoes call for bodies; and it is the new bodies that house them that create the illusion of originality, of newness. The spirit—the eternal echoes—never dies, but the bodies pass. It is thus that we reiterate eternally the same truths and falsehoods, but the style, the form in which we house the echo, is tran­ sitory—which makes it more precious than the soul. The Will-to-Lie

Everything tends to become mythological. Every fact aspires to be fiction. Every truth has in it the inextinguishable impulse to become a beautiful lie. Even in language itself is this true. There is a myth­ ology of words: hyperbole, metaphor, simile. The whole Olympus of figuration and imagery in lan­ guage—what is it but the aspiration of intelligible sound to seek the domain of the myth, to glitter im­ mortally in its Asgard? The impulse-to-unreality is a profound universal law, true of everything animate under all conditions. If we knew the psychological scaffolding of animals we should no doubt find this same law in them in germ, also in plants and the barely conscious forms of sea-life. All things tend to become other than they are. This is a world-formula extracted from the great world-formula of Jules de Gaultier that man is dowered with the power of con­ ceiving himself as he is not. Verily, 1 say

As each great impulse, emotion and thought rises in the domain of consciousness, seize it and go whirl­ ing away with it maenadically, frantically, like one 38

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who flings himself suddenly into a great masked ball and seizes all the women in turn and dances with each one the dance of life-and-death. If I Were Impresario

z

Had I the power to make the experiments on this planet that throng my head! What charivaris! What nuances of good and evil! What fandangos! For instance! The soul of woman has never been revealed yet in all its wonder, its shame and its glory. The surface has alone been scratched. So were I the great planetarian Experimenter I should, by a very simple device, raise the Petticoat once and forever. Conceive a male sex-strike on the planet-Earth—to last for ten years. It must involve every male sexu­ ally capable. A decree making him the passive sex, the person to be courted, pursued by women. The ultimate of woman would come screaming into the day. We should see the glory of the naked feline beast. The sentimental inanities of the ages would crumble before our eyes. The Schopenhauerian Thing-in-Itself would dance its frenzied cancan across the planet. Beleaguered man! Eternal Uterus! Grand explosion and evaporation of piffledom! Sublime debacle of Airy-Fairy Lilian! Hadi the power!—O thou mythic Puck! The House United

If you merely think the way you think, you will be interesting but harmless; if you only feel the way you feel, you will be a sentimentalist and quite harmless, too. But if you think the way you feel and feel the way you think, you are a dangerous man. That was 39

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the tragedy of Christ, Nietzsche, Shelley and Byron. Their sensibilities and their brain were one. Psychi­ cally, a house divided against itself can stand. The brain may know, oh, a thing or two, but the emotions say, “Hush! tell it not in Gath. It must not leak out. The people must not,” &c., &c. The heart may revolt and start to build barricades, but the brain at last says, “Better not. Your skin is precious.” But a complete unification of Will and Intelligence, sen­ sibility and vision—this house will not stand: ahead glitters Calvary, the gallows-bird, the dead idealist in the ditch, like Dmitri Roudine; or the corridors of the House of a Thousand Fancies, Nietzsche’s final realm. The Super-Pitman

Time is that super-stenographer, that perfect stenog­ rapher, that stenographer who has epitomized the Pitmanic system, who at the end of our lives sums up all we have thought, felt, said and done in the barest perceptible symbol-sign. It means something, but who but ourselves, now dead and bodily evanes­ cent, can translate it back into the running saga of our lives? Psychic Triolet

The panic of the unfamiliar, like that feeling one has on waking up in a strange house in a strange city after two nights of heavy drinking, that is the way I feel toward life. Each day that feeling comes to me —each minute of the day in all these many years— that panic of the unfamiliar, that sense of being in a strange room, in a strange house in a strange city. 40

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Even my body leads a psychic and mental life. At times I seem a glowing consciousness—nothing else. The brain is only an incident in the effulgency. My body, every atom of it from toe to hair on my head, takes on an awareness. Spontaneous, inflammable consciousness inundates every cell of my body. Is it blood phenomenon or a tumescence of the psychic life, straining to envelop the finite and the concrete in the infinite and the imponderable?

Every “fact” as it passes through my mind—yea, every image as it rises from the sea-depths in me and begins to flow on the horizon of consciousness—is surrounded by a corona of pale fire—the infinite facts, knowledge, learning. These are the penumbra that hide from us the Sun. Eclipse of God. Aew Lies for Old

After a thousand thousand attitudes, postures, feints before the Real, evasions, mental pirouettes and satiric perversions, Sincerity comes forward, gradu­ ally at first, to claim its own. This is the most tragic moment in the life of the bored and romantic sensi­ bility, when one is about forty. Now he must “play the game straight.” Tinsel has turned into granite over night. The brilliant, amusing epigram and paradox return as a sheaf of swords pointed straight at the heart. Momus feels the breath of melancholy sweeping over and drowning his laughter. The dancing glint in his eyes suddenly becomes a full-orbed stare. Pegasus riding the heavens preceded by the fanfare of the mad dithyrambic angels of Hoity-Toity Land suddenly volplanes to the common highway and 41

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obeys an inexplicable impulse to stable with the mules and donkeys. Sincerity, Reality, Prose—triple-mouthed trumpet of bronze preceding the reign of Commonsense. Banners and Swords

On my soul there are two uneffaceable marks—the hoof of a blasphemous Titan and the soft kiss-print of Proserpina.

Against the existence of minds like mine a law should be passed by the Powers That Be. If the mouth of my soul were not muzzled with laughter!

I have been opening some of the veins of my thoughts, and I find their blood is red and gray. Red—that’s for a venomous hope. Gray—that’s for defeat. If a man could live in the belly of a leviathan or the bowels of a mastodon long enough he would invent a cosmology based on his surroundings that would be as marvelous and as probable as any cosmology yet conceived. There is no miracle impossible to the imagination.

Our Hopes are like tragic groups of radiant Chris­ tians who walk into the ring of hungry lions. And from everlasting to everlasting there are the Radiant Dreamers and the Devouring Lions. Two of the greatest landscape artists of the ages, Victor Hugo and Dostoievsky. What scenarios for souls! The infinite macrocosm and the infinite mi­ crocosm . The external universe and the internal uni­ verse. Tremendous canvases splashed with all the 42

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colors of the spectrum across which passes a tiny shadow, Man. These two artists, locked in their separate cells, almost tunnel to one another; almost together achieve the Absolute. He

Christmas Day, 1914. Ah! I remember. He was born on this day. Was he not superb?—a raffine of dreams. Glistering, gleaming, pathetic idealist, with the serpents undulating in his hair and a splash of ether in his eye!—a purple star fallen from some dead heaven on the road to some living hell. He assaulted the throne of Jupiter with laughter, the tragic laughter of prophets and souls that are for­ bidden to forget. He drove the Sick Man of the Stars into his tomb. The heroic stench from the battlefields of Europe were tinct with the perfumes of his soul. Mil­ lions still believe that the stars, those bonfires in the ether, are the eyes of the Lord Jesus. The Homeric melodrama of Western civilization still carries him billed in the leading role. He may have been an un­ happened Fact: all the better; the things that do not happen are the most potent. He was, anyhow, the poet of misery, continuing the legend of my Lord Buddha. Moses once stood upon Mount Sinai. Christ lived there (at least on dit). Ah! say what I will, he was beautiful!—a rainbowtorn from its grooves in the sky and absorbed into the blood and bone of a man. Like Buddha, a sinister gap in the insouciance of the races. One of those superfluous persons who cumber time and adorn the Infinite. He solved no problem; let that be his Glory. Ah! he was beautiful: the inventor of a new illusion; 43

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a new Chimera. He brought to us a new value. Un­ consciously, he fathered a new and gorgeous form of hypocrisy. He gave us a new reason for dying and hinted at a Heaven more mysterious than any sensibility had yet evoked from the abysses of the blood. He painted a God, unveiling nothing (sub­ lime wisdom or sublime ignorance—what matter?). He fabricated the Port de Neant, which he called Sal­ vation—did this untutored Shelley. He was both Bride and Bridegroom to a thousand thousand vir­ gins and celibates. Was He not a great artist—a new myth-maker, the great dilator of the human imagination; a Grimm, an Andersen, an Aesop, a La Fontaine, a tragic Mun­ chausen, a Don Quixote conceived by a Raphael? Gloria in Excelsis! He lied about the Real success­ fully—and greater wisdom hath no man or god. The Cellar of Pride

The profound trickiness of saviors! The very depth of ruse, the last secret passage in the road to posthu­ mous glory, the utter underground slab of the edi­ fice. It was Mahomet who when he knew he was going to “pass” called on any one whom he had wronged to come forth and spit in his face; and Christ intoned from the cross, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” Seraglio and Father, forgiveness and spit-at-me. Flap, flap, flap! —and the Chimera mounts, mounts, mounts. Clouds of Glory

In the luminous beetle the theory of the aura and nimbus becomes a fact. High forms of consciousness

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emit a light; and though this light is not strong enough to tell the time by in a dark room, as in the case of the luminous beetle, it is strong enough to un­ tell the time, for to those who are dowered with the aura there is a permanent sense of being beyond sequence. The forms of consciousness change in the high-powered individual, but the sense, the certainty, that his consciousness is a light flowing out from the dynamos hidden in the brain-cells—flowing some­ times rhythmically, sometimes jerkily—never for­ sakes him. All matter being porous, no two atoms ever coming into contact, it happens sometimes that the light gets beyond the skull-house. One may literally go through life “trailing clouds of glory.” The Chameleon Eye

When one has the eye of the chameleon in one’s brain, an eye which can turn on its own axis every minute and see into one’s self as well as into the infinite around one—that is to have the Evil Eye, the Eye of All Knowledge. It is to have a merry, humorous Eye, in the retina of which Time itself twinkles, in which the human race parades as in the reflective nothingness of a mirror. With such an Eye one stands behind all landscapes and all horizons. The Belly

Kings and democratic rulers must make friends of the people as trainers do with animals—through food or fear. If people are well-fed they care nothing about the form of government under which they live. So every savior, every demagogue, every revolution­ ist must, to achieve dominion over crowds, teach 45

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them no longer to fear and make them believe they are not eating enough, that they are entitled to more rations. In history there is no other “psychology.” The “as­ pirations of a race,” the “ideals of the people,” the “reaching out” process of the “man with the hoe” are all creations of sentimentalists and crowd-sucking demagogues. All the races of the Earth are like a family of planets that revolve about one sun, the Belly. The remotest national dreams end in the Belly, and disorders and revolutions that seem the farthest removed in their motives from the stomach­ needs all lead back, when analyzed, to the Belly and a roof to house it. The Ringmaster

War is still the great creator of compulsory heroism, as the quotidinal and ghastly life of the poor is still the creator of compulsory grandeur. How much of the heroism, the grandeur, the nobility of private acts is deliberate? One may as well speak of “disinter­ ested motives” or “free will.” Pride, Pride, Pride is the eternal ringmaster of the psychological circus, and his assistant is Fear. At the crack of his whip—Pride, like all ringmasters in all circuses, is always in evening dress and wears a high hat, even in the morning—we mount the back of any old spavined and superannuated paper-winged Al Boraak, turn thrilling somersaults through paper hoops and ride our troubles bareback, with a forced, moony smile at the audience—quite imaginary—that applauds us (the applause sounds strangely like the impact of our own palms on one another). Thrill­ ing! Marvellous! Don’t miss your footing! Don’t run away (ah! I know that traitorous thought in 46

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your soul; that sly plot in your mind!). You must go through with it to the end. You are not happy, heroic, grand or noble. You are simply doing “stunts” as the whip cracks. And the Ring­ master never sleeps. Light

The “value” of an object in a picture is determined by the light that streams on it. In the human psyche there is a spontaneous light, the immaterial effluvia of one’s sensibility, that evolves for him all the ob­ jects, external and internal, on which that light falls. Everything in life will be determined in the rays of that light. The brain is like a frame. All that we know and feel take their places in that frame like objects in a pic­ ture. If we are destined to think of everything and to see everything in terms of eternity and fatality, the light that streams on the world will be wan, moony, phantasmagoric, eerie, changing, fantastic. Nothing will be real in that picture which our sensibility has painted for us, for the light that bathes all the ob­ jects of time will render the canvas of consciousness itself evanescent and wraithsome. The sense of the eternal and the infinite, of the fatal­ ity and helplessness of all matter and mind in their countless combinations and tableaus, with the con­ sequent phantasmagoric aspect of the world around us, gives birth at last to the aesthetic life, the spec­ tacular sense. It is the final summit of genius, the snow-capped crater of the last peak of the spirit, the retina of the Mystical Eye itself. To be predestined to see life, to see one’s self, to see even those one loves deeply, under these lights—that is a supreme tragedy, neutralized and even rendered profoundly 47

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joyous in the exaltation of Pride and the knowledge that one’s judgment is the final judgment—on this plane at least. Mystical Cruelty

There is a sort of cruelty existent in minds of a cer­ tain type that is religious—that is, it is an attitude in front of the Mystery. To perpetrate a cruelty puts one, as it were, in direct relation with Nature, with Destiny, with Fatality; in a word, with God. That obscure satisfaction that millions have felt in the presence of some great calamity—such as the sinking of the Titanic, the Sicilian earthquake, or the butcher­ ies and enormities of the World War—is the dilation of Truth itself in the buried psyche. “I told you so,” we whisper to ourselves. “That’s the real innards of things, of the Thing.” This is the mysticism of cruelty—which rises to its superb grandeur in Iago in fiction and the Marquis de Sade in real life. There is an hypostatic union with the Nature-of-Things which can be reached only through cruelty, diabolism and the infliction, laugh­ ingly, of pain on another. Must not the Devil, too, have his messiahs, buddhas and idealists? The Heart of Things laughing away the Little Lord Fauntle­ roys of philosophy is a supreme ruthlessness. So there are certain souls who when they are ruth­ less feel the very “spirit of God” enter their souls; they are epiphanies of something that is eternal. Even a ruthless judgment brings us up against a finality, gives us the joyous consciousness that we are participants of the Law. And the exalted satisfac­ tion that is felt in bringing pain to another is born of the sense of power triumphant (the most obvious of psychological explanations) and that obscurer 48

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need—the need of imitating the World-Spirit at its sublimest zenith. The Wonderful Saga

Could one live consciously in a child’s brain up until its fifth year, but especially during its first year, and record the dawn of Me and Thee, of This and That, of Object and Subject! We should have the fairy­ tale of all time, the story of the centuries, the Won­ derful Saga. With a Freud to record and a Blake to sing what they experienced, what they saw, in that enchanted realm—what would all the other books be worth? W onder-Glister

The mind dowered with the unfadable glister marches perpetually around the problems, like a tiger that prowls around fire, seeing a Figure seated in the shadow; circling, puzzled, curious.

wonder­ supreme a great­ sniffing,

My Special Craving

I have that marvellous, dangerous gift of seeing everything a rebours—backwards. Knowing what 1 know, merely because a thing is universal, univer­ sally believed, puts a suspicion in my mind. Excep­ tional brains require exceptional truths; exceptional sensibilities require exceptional universes. But if my truth and my universe come some day suddenly to be the common and accepted truth and universe, I should probably find the threadbare and common­ 49

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place, even juvenile, beliefs of the billion-headed Crowd to be quite acceptable as marvels. What the ego desires is not truth, but uniquity—a special private orbit for its cosmical cancan. “T. o be different” is to be divine. To know that I am a sud­ den and monstrous variation from the type, that I am one of the World-Spirit’s eccentric dreams, that I am without ancestry and posterity, as unallied as radium, as paradoxical as Time—that suffices in it­ self. The Ultimate Truth go hang if it put a stop to that! Le Jour de I’An

Today I am “convinced,” after the mental renewal of a deep sleep, that the world, all that is, is pure spirit, that matter is only one of its forms, that other than the “immaterial” there is naught. Never has the certainty of the ghostliness of all things come to me with profounder intuitive and analytical bases to rest on than when I walked the sun-flooded streets crowded with people on this first day of January. In the sunlight, with that mon­ strous careening hell of the ether blinding my sight, lighting up all the filth of slushy gutters and bring­ ing out every stain on the stones of houses, render­ ing all things concrete and definite and familiar with the magic of its yellow—then more firmly than ever did I pronounce, while being jostled by thousands of food-fatted and wine-steeped theatre-goers, the word Spirit. But how many are as utterly “convinced” of the very opposite of this! How many pronounce just as firmly as I do “Matter”! Question of sensibility. Question of individual reactions. But is there a hierarchy of sensibilities?—Castes of Certainties? 50

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Without a doubt. The Brahmans of the Earth have pronounced the word “Spirit”; those below have pro­ nounced the word “Matter.” Why “below”, then? Because they who pronounce “Matter” are totally destitute of the Intuitive; they dare not analyze their “atom”—which, by the way, may not exist. The Mocking Eye

From the plane of Eternity all is life. From the plane of Time all is death, or nearly so. To go from a profound and restful sleep into a vivid co-ordinated dream suddenly projected on the plane of conscious­ ness, and which lasts but a second; then to relapse into a profound and restful slumber—that is the life of each one of us. We are as a flashing thought across an eternity of darkness. The illusion of hu­ man consciousness is quantitative. It is the decep­ tion that a tiny gas burner gives in a large room; it throws a light everywhere, but animates nothing; rather accentuates the immobility of walls, furniture and the gas-fixture itself. Immobility, death, the unconscious surround us everywhere. Seven-eighths of our active life are passed unconsciously. We are posthumous dreams of dead things. But once transcend time, and all this immobility, death and unconsciousness vanish, and there is felt nothing but life—life without end, with­ out beginning, timeless, spaceless, useless, purpose­ less; a life more hideous than any conceivable form of death; eviscerated of any God; a fulgurant, mysteri­ ous Force, whose essence is a perpetuate and obscene passion to create, to fecundate, to litter the enormous eternities with variants of its own blind Will. And consciousness—even the forms it takes in the time­ less—is its mocking eye, the enormous and unthink­ S1

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able mirror wherein I see its blasting beauty and its obscene atheism; a mirror wherein it mocks itself and sees in flashes the suffering worlds and its own unnumbered Calvaries. Banners and Swords

Modes of feeling may prolong themselves in the brain long after the parent-feeling has vanished in some ancestor, like an echo from a voice tossed and thinned across a thousand chasms and moors, or like an aura that outlives its body. To travel away from death and life simultaneously— strange motion. One cannot remain static, so one rises straight to the zenith, like a flame caught be­ tween two contrary winds of equal force. When one is caught between two millstones one must become a spirit; there is no choice.

I am a ghost that is always saying mass over his poor body; a revenant in profound revery over his own mummy which it has accidentally found in a strange star-lit Museum of Space. There are two kinds of veils between the I and Reality—opaque and diaphanous. Those who move behind the opaque veils are sentimentalists. Those who move behind the diaphanous veils are ironic aes­ thetes, mystical realists, Ariels who know the value of Calibans, Prosperos who have no illusions about Gin Alley. I have invented a thousand magnificent curtains for my Eye, but I see through them all. Between the Practical Man and the Poet there is a difference in the tools used—that is all. The Poet 52

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invents, dramatizes and moulds in ink the crimes that the Practical Man actually commits. Both seek to externalize their dreams. The poet dare not do what the Practical Man does, and the Practical Man dare not think what the Poet thinks. One retreats before action; the other retreats before thought—both cowards. We act for the pleasure of the Dead. To grasp this thought—ah! more than thought!—one must go through to the core of the metaphysical imagination, and then beyond. The Absolute, the Neant and the Eternal being co-nothings, all the dramas enacted in this, and I know not what other dimensions, are a kaleidoscopic play of color and motion before the eyes of the dead—those eyes that are the coffins of all consciousness, those eyes that are the countless stars in the Heaven of Quiescence.

Is the philosophic mind the last evolution of ances­ tral laziness? Comets and Moons

Into the mind of a Montaigne, a Balzac, a Nietzsche, an Idea stalks. It splits into a thousand particles, and each particle becomes a nucleus for other ideas, conjuring up a thousand opposed and irrelevant connotations, ending in a carnival, a mad charivari, a Mardi Gras procession. The Idea of the active, practical man retains its unity from first to last, and often passes directly into action—travels, at least, toward its definite, predestined end. The first minds have the glory of a comet about them; the second are as sure and as methodical as moons. It is the difference between the mind that has become infini53

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tized and the mind that has become finitized—Hamlet and Sancho Panza. The Last Phase

The evolution of literature from the troubadour to the exquisite decadent: First, feelings that grope for thoughts and speech; then thoughts alone that grope for words (the intellectual phase) ; then words that seek for thoughts and feelings, like undecomposed and warm corpses crying for souls. The Grotesques

The fantastic and the grotesque stand on the border­ land of mental creation. It is the most subtle and dangerous refinement of genius. It is the fine marge between sanity and insanity. The fantastic story, the fantastic picture, the fantastic piece of music is composed of the distilled essences of a hundred jux­ taposed clashing images and a thousand unlike ele­ ments bound into a coherent whole by the supreme consciousness of the artist. The unification of op­ posites without destroying, but rather accentuating, their polarities—that is the rarest of work of the rarest of spirits. Poe, Baudelaire, Odilon Redon, Guillaume Apolli­ naire, Materlinck (of the misty dramas), “A Mid­ summer Night’s Dream,” some of Hamlet’s speeches, the fairy stories of De Banville, Goya, Meredith’s “The Shaving of Shagpat,” some little things by Mallarme, the stupendous grotesquerie of Rabelais, some things of Liszt—this is all a world by itself, an Arcadia within an Arcadia, a Tenth Muse, the very fairyland of aesthetic adventure. The fantastic and 54

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the grotesque present Reality upside down. It is the other side of the Moon. The Fencers

It is sometimes difficult to take the sting out of my superiority when in the presence of some normal, reasonable person. At times this person possesses a shrewdness and a natural irony that discomfit me. At other times I desire to exercise my mercy toward him—it is another way of insulting him and yet re­ taining my superiority. Then, sometimes I wonder whether the normal man ever fears the superior man; whether, on the contrary----- . Reality and the Mask

There is a natural perfection and a moral perfection. That is, there is the natural law inherent in each liv­ ing thing—and this comprises the “inorganic”—to develop and reach the ultimate of its destiny. This is the supreme “immoralism” of the laws of matter and the perpetual lightning flash of impulse and in­ stinct in man. Each thing aims to fulfil itself. This is natural perfection. It is the law of the oak, of the savage, of the child, of the strong man. There is over against this the law of moral perfec­ tion, or the straining of the natural man after an imaginary self or state. He aims to fulfil himself in something foreign, or quasi-foreign, to himself. It is the law of the ultra-civilized, of idealists, of the being in a state of society. The eternal antagonism between these two “perfections” is the cause of all the movement known as “social evolution.” It is the very thing called conscious life itself. Natural per­ 55

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fection versus moral perfection—a universal formula as great as any. Banners and, Swords

The intellect and the body may be cosmopolitan; but there is no such thing as emotional cosmopolitanism. The brain may rove everywhere and have as many mistresses as it pleases, or none at all; but the emo­ tions—the instincts—are local, rooted, chauvinistic. To be alone with your wound; to suck it to the core; and to find that the filthy issue had turned to honey and wine in your throat—that is the final humiliation and triumph of your pride.

The dead alone have achieved every paradox. They are far from us, and yet very near to us; they live, and yet do not; they are both Here and There; they are with the Thing-in-Itself, and yet are not; they are dynamic and static simultaneously. Extinction is the Fourth Dimension. The antics of a coquette before her mirror: such is human thought—so many pretty poses of the Willto Live before the mirror of consciousness.

One thing that must remain ever hidden from the immortal and always dominant plebs—that the. “Holy Spirit” is a sportsman.

“Nos illusions croissent avec nos connaissances.” This aphorism of Anatole France is the greatest and profoundest utterance since Seneca said, “Not to de­ sire and to have are the same thing.” Our illusions grow with our knowledge! A vision of enchantment 56

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hovering over an abysm without bottom. All Hindu metaphysics and all of nihilistic pessimism and mysti­ cal nihilism are enkernelled in that aphorism. The Enchanted Garden of Lies. The road that rises to­ ward its own beginning. The broad smile of Anatole France—with a pinch of dynamite at both lip corners.

I think so little of the starry universe at this minute that I might wear Mars and Saturn for earrings and not esteem myself on the level with the ant. But there are other minutes when the mystery of Space alone is almost sufficient to shatter my reason and drown my imagination like an ant in an ocean. Moods have their perfections and values.

I am always Elsewhere. I have lost myself. Each one of us is always Elsewhere; but only a few of us know it. And it is all very simple: no one can live in the Now, for the Now is the Absolute. Hence the vivid sense of perpetually being Elsewhere is noth­ ing but a sharp and continuous sensation of the fuga­ city of Time and the limitlessness of Space. In the seventh heaven of my subliminal self there dwells a Spirit of which I—my identified I—am only a ghost. In a world of illusions anything may truly be called the truth.

Each thought is an addition that subtracts. Each new state of consciousness adds to my wisdom, but subtracts from my desire for life.

The eyes of the human soul watch for one fact eter­ nally—a miracle. 57

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Hope is a savings bank run by swindlers. “The Eternal Return”

Destroy all that man has created of the beautiful— all the books, pictures, musical scores, sculptures and temples—and he will create them over again—prov­ ing his limitations and his necessarily imitative mind. His art and his thought would mirror “the eternal return,” just as the Creative Spirit of life does. That is why when I open the great bibles of India I seem to be reading something that I myself had written, and I have no doubt that I myself did write them, as I shall write them again in some future time. Am I not writing my bible here and now? Am I not put­ ting down the legend of my return? Of late years the miraculous seems (to me) common­ place. To find myself alive after “death” in some other dimension would not startle me very much. 1 might even feel displeased at being robbed of a Long Night’s rest. The “miraculous”!—what a word to use! The “eternal return,” “Platonic reminiscence,” “repeti­ tion”!—jargon! Here I sit, lately unconscious, now conscious, writing about things felt and thought— could there be anything more commonplace and miraculous than that? To Be, that is the everlastingmiraculous commonplace. The How, Whither and the Whence are of no consequence. Darwin, Genesis and Pythagoras are equally boresome. That I can write those three names is the astounding Fact—a miraculous, banal fact. Light the Liar

Sunlight is a great enemy of thought. The brain, 58

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psychic intuition, has a light of its own. This light will not fuse with sunlight. One tends to kill the other when they touch. The sunlight gives us happy dreams, but the daring thought is hatched in the shadow or the dark, like a murderous impulse. That Satan loves the dark is a psychological truth, if not an actual one, for nowhere else can the arch-enemy of sham and optimism find the proper atmosphere for his ironies, his satires and his sacred mountebankery. It is only in the sunlight that we cannot see. Light was the first veil thrown over the Implacable Truth. Banners and Swords

Christ has a Christmas once a year; Satan has a Christmas each day. Hence the greater popularity of the latter.

In negativing life I affirm something. Another ne­ gation? Most likely, for the history of each one is a history of a series of affirmations about things that he afterward negatives and destroys. Novelty is confounded with progress and reiteration with im­ mortality. Nature sneers at Society’s vengeance on the criminal. For every one put to death in the electric chair Na­ ture invents two criminals to take his place.

We can think with one another’s thoughts and in terms of one another’s thoughts, but we cannot think with one another’s feelings, and all thought is a mode of feeling—hence the infinite number of points of view and the myriad antagonisms. A universal point of view being thus impossible of attainment, all uni­ versal movements end dismally. This is even true 59

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of mathematics—the ‘‘universal truth”—for while all agree that two and two make four no two persons can agree about the application of this truth to life. That is, no two people feel the same about mathematical truths. In the domain of the emotions mathematical truths lose their validity. Astronomical mathematics are jargon to me; my feeling about them is my truth. If each could think in the feelings of each, psychic variation would disappear. Praver *

There was all of infinite space with its billion billion starry resting places; so how came I to inhabit this particular nook in this unimaginable extension? Why this nook and no other? Why the wrong nook? Why was I not born in the Sun? Or in some planet beyond the ken of the most powerful telescope where the stupendous dreams and aspirations of my nature could find a vent and a body and a theatre? What jesting god picked out a parlor flower-pot in which to hide the seed of a metaphysical anarch of Prome­ thean stature? I have the rage of the eagle locked up in a canary bird’s cage. Futile, mysterious Uni­ verse! Tactless, awesome, taciturn, ineffable Uni­ verse! There is a sublimity in thy very seeming stupidity and a grandeur beyond words in thy savagery and mute scorn! 2 Vie Auto-Mirage

To feel, to think, to live sub specie eternitatus, is that the final ascension or the final degeneracy of the psychic organism? Those who live in the eternal, the infinite—Christ, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Flau60

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bert, Thomas a Kempis—have the stigmata of fatigue on their souls. Is the savage the highest product of life and the genius the lowest? The Eternist is al­ ways a pessimist, except when he invents—as in the cases of Emerson and Spinoza—a beyond-fiction, Oversoul or God. Is genius the end of the road, the blossomy grave of vital force and the Will-to-Live? Perhaps Nordau is right; genius is a disease of the Life Force and those who live under the “aspect of Eternity” really do not live at all. They float in an auto-mirage. Banners and Swords

The sense of suffering and the sense of sin: the dif­ ference betwen Pagan and Christian. The mystic sees through the top of his head; the average man sees through his mouth—his tongue is his vision.

The Ideal—I must always return to the Ideal as the key of Mobility and the seed of Change—is a velvet casing for a poisoned poignard. I will elaborate this thesis Elsewhere—in Sleep, in Eternity, in I know not what dimension of sentiency. Courage

The Will-to-Live is like a great granite wall, on the other side of which is the Absolute-Neant-Potential. After twenty-five years of blasting, drilling and fire­ damp sickness there remains of this wall in me only a thin outer section. On the other side I hear the 61

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profound and peaceful breathing of those in Proser ­ pina’s keep. Immortality

Immortality—personal survival—at a certain stage in the evolution of the highly cultured and curious brain seems a veritable stupidity; yet, on second thought, it is no more stupid than life itself; no more miraculous, fantastic or absurd. That I should sur­ vive after death is no more miraculous than the fact that I was not before my birth; of the two, it seems the lesser miracle. That I am conscious at all is the stupendous, mirific fact, not that I should continue so having once started. Or that I should go on as spirit is no more absurd or unreasonable than that I should have a body. No one has ever defined matter, so what is there im­ probable about the existence of the immaterial? We —some of us—laugh and sneer at the idea of a per­ sonal immortality; but I laugh and sneer at life, but here it is, solid, substantial and brutal! Where were space and time before the brain was born? The one insuperable barrier: we know life; but do not know death. Fancy is, after all, our empire. Banners and Swords

Begotten in Chaos, born at the latter end of Time— in this enormous period of gestation what secrets I learned from my Mother! Wherever Man walks a colossal liar precedes him 62

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and a spider weaves a web behind him.

There exists a “general good.” It provides for the comfort and well-being of the greatest number of idiots at the expense of brains, culture and character. It is the beautiful dreams of humanity that have brought all the evil into the world. All evil began in a beautiful dream. The first person that turned away from reality was either persecuted or began to persecute. The religious instinct, the metaphysical dream, has made of man a sort of god—divine, cruel, beautiful. Belief of any kind is impossible without some degree of intolerance.

Science never destroyed a myth because knowledge is subordinate to the imagination. So long as we pre­ fer images to facts myths are safe. A myth can never be wholly analyzed. We may as well analyze the azure. Every veil that Science takes off of Mystery falls over its own eyes. It is the penalty: it adds to its blindness for every secret it attempts to violate.

If the four Apostles had only put their gospels into music instead of words paganism would have found its reflorescent soil and Christ would today be wor­ shipped as a sort of male Aphrodite. From the moment we are born Death begins its ironic preservation of life—embalms us, as it were, in breath and fattens us for—the return.

When a peasant dies nothing happens. When a great poet dies a universe melts away. 63

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The Poisoned Pond

Nothing breeds like Spite. Art is a kind of etheric spite, a subtle physiological transformation of the will-to-plunder into the will-to-beauty. All impo­ tence, all cowardice before life, all shyness, timidity, immediately becomes dynamic. Socialism, Anarch­ ism are forms of spite. Sensibility without will be­ comes murder or self-sacrifice, becomes auto-sadism or art. The evolution of religions, races and the sex­ war may be traced fundamentally to spite. Irony is the highest form of spite. What a library might be written on the Pastimes of the Caged Beast! The first being that encountered an obstacle to his will began auto-chemically to manu­ facture spite in the cells of his muscles and brain and tongue. As the forms of life became more compli­ cated, more complex, as the individual became less and less and the tribe, the state, the social structure more and more, spite—or the retributive justice of the weak and strangled individual—became more and more the very life of the Fish-Man, until today the tank he swims in—his civilization—is nothing but a vast poisoned pond. Banners and Swords

Women and music should remain forever misunder­ stood. Reason is the last refuge of a poet. A beautiful epigram is a bit of the Infinite worked in the turning-lathe of the brain.

When they excavate they will find my teeth buried in my heart. 64

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All the great books of the world—fiction, essays, philosophy or poetry, it matters not—are merely mirrors of myself. I live in a private house where the floors, walls, ceilings, steps and cellars are mirrors. The artist should describe nothing except his own imagination. Two Immortals

Two immortals: the strumpet and the priest. One is the mother of men; the other the father of God. They are primordial, elemental—the two units of the race. The sex-instinct and the religious instinct were one in that far-away time when the race was begin­ ning to grope for consciousness, precision and defi­ niteness of instinct. The Priest and the Moll are thus hermaphroditic in origin; and a perfect subterranean entente exists between them. No harlotry, no priest­ hood; no priesthood, no harlotry. This profound psychological law is written in most cosmologies and modern religions. Gods and sav­ iors are very apt to be born of village Molls. This is beautifully illustrated in Anatole France’s “The Isle of Penguins.” The last two beings to breathe on the planet will be a priest and a Moll—the founders of all civilizations and the destroyers of all civilizations. Hand in hand, standing at the edge of the world, they will disappear with the planet. Idealism and Reality; Subject and Object—the Priest and Old Moll—hail and farewell! Banners and Swords

I am my mood. 65

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Hope and wisdom are contradictory terms.

We are like those boys in the tropics who risk sharks to dive for pennies. To prevent the head from falling toward the ground in despair wear the high collar of irony.

Truth is the highest form of satire—the fourth dimen­ sion of the Lie. The Hidden Euclid

To reduce the death rate is to reduce the birth rate. Nature keeps her secret—and her law of balances. Let man conquer one disease; Nature will invent an­ other. All his pure food acts, his sanitary codes, his ingenious attempts to “preserve the babies” are of no avail against the Euclid of the Unknown Dimensions —Nature. This Moloch demands so many victims diurnally so that she can replenish her mysterious storehouse of forces. Metchnikoffs with their theor­ ies of longevity are her supreme joke. They are her satiric fantasies. China and India and the rest of Asia have lived in filth for ages, and it is there the birth rate is highest and men and women live the longest. All the health boards and street cleaners of the planet are climbing Jacob’s ladders to heavens that do not exist. Nature has the brain and heart of a Shy­ lock. Each day she claims her tons of flesh. And the puppet on a shrinking sun-flake called the Earth tries to circumvent her with pure food acts and streetsweepers ! Idolatry, thy other name is Hope! 66

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Hanners and Swords

To stand on the tail of a pet cat and watch the cat feign pleasure—that has been the history of woman.

Memories! Memories! to paint pictures on your own shadow with the worn-out brush of your hopes. How rare it is to find a man whose tongue thinks! At the Summit

I shall never recover from the astonishment of being alive; yet I have never confounded awe and rever­ ence. The primitive religious instinct—and few evolve beyond the primitive manner of faith—curi­ ously associates fear and thanksgiving, astonishment and sacrifice. At the summit of religious evolution there is complete dissociation—the satanic-mystical stage is attained. Astonishment and irony, amaze­ ment and irreverence go hand in hand. The Genius of Ruin

Emile Verhaeren, in “Les Moines,” sees in the monks of Belgium “the last remnants of a great departed beauty.” Is it not in this sense of departure that all great beauty flows? The beauty that does not give the feeling of departure, ruin, decay, evanescence— is it really great beauty ? In all that is exquisitely beautiful there lurks the genius of Ruin. The morn­ ing draws its greatest beauty from the ruins of the night. 67

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The Time-Spirit

What are my feelings toward “the time I live in”? What time do I live in? There are very ancient things around me, and very modern things, and many things that are eternal, and many things that are transitory. Was it not so always? The special characteristics of “the time I live in” are haste, mod­ ernity and superficiality. And I believe they have been the characteristics of all times—but we lack the documents to prove it. I would have been a nihilist­ ironist in the Garden of Eden. Banners and Swords

Admiration is the brain of Love. The tonic joy: to watch the decay of Chimeras. The Splendid Moment—the revocation of a great human Hope by Chance. The burden of the gods is their laughter.

Ideas are the glowing avatars of obliterated gods— the ghosts of pre-planetary super-beings who reap­ pear as conscious tendency. Men are thus but the baggage of the gods as they travel from incarnation to incarnation. I have always had the feeling of being locked out of life and locked in Eternity. The history of human thought is a history of brains that slyly try to take a squint at God. 68

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To supernaturalize life—man has no higher mission.

Their knowledge! Their knowledge! Kabalistic tattooage on the brain by the invisible needle of the Master Spirit Ironic. Perpetual tragedy of a few: to be at large in one’s own skull. Where Parallels Meet

To pray or to blaspheme brings the same relief. Hatred of God and the love of God have the same psychologic basis. The point at which they both meet is the ego—for to say “God be praised!” pas­ sionately or “God be cursed!” bitterly arises from an instinct of self-preservation and self-love. There is in essence no difference between the author of the Psalms and the Baudelaire of the satanic litanies. The Time-Lie

From the primordial gas of the first nebulae to the highest reaches of the human imagination—is that an evolution or a single vibration? The idea of Change seems to crumble under the conception—and more especially the feeling—of Time. The idea of evolu­ tion crawls when it is dependent, in our conscious­ ness, on time. But the moment we abolish time we rise on the powerful pinions of the eagle, and between the first atom or gas-spark in the profoundest reaches of space (itself a myth) to the highest dream of man there is nothing but a single beat of light, timeless in duration, or at least housed in a single palpitant second. 69

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Manana

Spain is like a beautiful bark lulled to death by the insistent beat of a gentle south-wind against her hull: Manana. The fragrant, spicy, lureful south-wind Manana! Spain is wise beyond all nations, for she has chosen To-morrow as her goal and as her jail—a jail without walls or bars. She has made of procras­ tination a philosophy, a religion, an asylum for the spirit—a philosophy and a religion that all sensibili­ ties can embrace. An eternal postponement, a per­ petual reticence about today, a smiling atheism in regard to the God of the Moment—that constitutes the beauty of Spain and of all tropic countries. And is not this the very soul of Nature’s method? Is there aught lazier than Nature? Does she ever do today what she can do tomorrow—and do her to­ morrows ever come? What a pleasure never to get anything done! Play­ ing with duty, playing hookey with life, playing the Enfant Terrible before the Inevitable!—as though there were such a thing as the Inevitable except in the brains of the unimaginative and the smug! “Ah,” some one will say, “the feeling of power in having accomplished this day what I set out to do this day!” The triumph of little souls, my little sir. Have you ever felt the feeling of power that comes from tell­ ing Life, Duty, Today and all the other ogres to go to hell? It is a rare sport for rare souls. So greetings to Spain for its superb Manana before the Ogre “Thou Shalt!” Today, I bow thee down the years to a grave in Eternity! From my throne, half-asleep, like a king drunken on heady wine, I pro­ rogue each day my Parliament of Stupidities. It is only when Death comes that I can no longer say Manana, for Death is Manana in person. (Written before Spain went “modern.”) 70

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Banners and Swords

Hope is like a beautiful, waveless sea: all things are mirrored there and all things are drowned there. Treacherous loveliness! The brain has the same passion for physical repro­ duction as the emotional nature. It is a great sport to create embryos of one’s self, a number of living echoes of one’s personality. Day by day to instill into an imitative, caressing and admiring mind epigrams, attitudes, sectors of the sensibility, and watch the process. In time one is flattered and amused to see, hear and feel himself in the guise of another—not one’s whole self, of course, but embryonic bits, ves­ tiges, parodies, homeopathic doses that my Horatios swallow like caviar.

Unless you can turn a fact into a beautiful lie it does not interest me. Not only is fiction stranger than “truth,” it is also of more importance to me. Ficti­ tious facts are the only facts that last. Homer will outlive Euclid and the stories of Boccaccio will out­ last any book on astronomy. The butterfly is a beautiful thing forever and ever; but the “facts” about it are susceptible of change. Poetry is the Rock of Ages. Science is a shifting­ sand.

The wind of my Will most often blows my beautiful thoughts hither and thither. Red roses, white roses, jonquils and poppies lie scattered along the mead of my consciousness. But sometimes in the empty vase of my skull there suddenly rises a magnificent ready­ made bouquet tied together—in what miraculous gar­ den and by what fairy or goblin hands? 71

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The air of superiority loses its force when it is sin­ cere. It should only be worn as a mask in the pres­ ence of mediocrity, and should never be dropped ex­ cept in the presence of—superiority. A thing is only real and vital when it contains the error of the personal equation. What is “generally true” is of as much value as it is “generally said.” It is the errors of perception and the errors of feeling that invent the drama and the comedy of our souls. Prejudice is the beginning of art, joy and pain. The Valid Contradictions

The multiplicity of visions—contradictory, sublime, idiotic—concerning “a future state,” God and the post-mortem destiny of man no more invalidate the existence of a “future state,” God, “spiritual essence,” etc., than the multiple and contradictory views con­ cerning the world we live in invalidate the existence of something corresponding to reality. No two hu­ man beings hold the same views about life. Still, life is real. Man is not one whit wiser about life than he is about what comes after it. Lightning and Molasses

thought travels with the rapidity of light. How can I hold speech with those whose thoughts travel like molasses over a flat, horizontal surface? The People

Sunday—a hot summer day. Everywhere the Peo72

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pie with children. Copulation and disease. Listless­ ness, poverty and stupidity. The people!—Neces­ sity’s billion billion brats. The faces on the shoul­ ders of the anonymous trillions! They are like little blasted moons hanging to the skirts of fatigued planets that were once the arcanums of Hope, but are now only dead conundrums of the air—these faces, pitiful, pathetic, dreadful, ugly faces that make me sick at the stomach, these faces of the People. The very poetry of misery. These faces are like dirty doorknobs on old backhouses. Here among the Anonymous I read the legend, “We are Life for Death’s sake. Pity us! We are daily litter of Elohim. Pity us! We are stagnant bayous of the Great Gleaming Sea that we have never beheld. Pity us!” The People! Their souls cannot creep, walk, or fly. They are sedentary souls. Their minds have no sky­ lights—only drains. They suffer, but they have not the air of martyrs. They are, but they cannot Be. They never revolt; they only squabble. The bed is their Nirvana. Theirs is the eternal search for the vacuum called happiness, and the light from that illu­ sive democracy laps and laves their faces. Their re­ ligion is the worship of the bones or the image of some louse-harried, cataleptic saint. O Sun, who art midwife to all life, what wilt thou do with the People when thou art become the crematory of the sidereal spaces? Hast thou fire and flame enough for so much rubbish? Canst thou shape in thy furnaces a lachrimatory large enough for all their tears? Banners and Swords

The swift hurry of my passions beat like a murderous 73

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wind against the writhing, gnawing stems of thought and scatter the flowered images into the stagnant pool of listlessness. But it is wiser to desire than to have.

Melancholy breeds a vital strength. It is often the black helmet of power. When the man with the poetic sensibility—all image, flame and revolt—is compelled through force of cir­ cumstances (poverty and instability of will generally) to turn stoic to preserve himself, the pain is an ex­ cruciating torture, the spectacle is ghastly. It is like an eagle that has taken refuge from his pursuers in the heart of a giant iceberg. The berg closes all about him in time, and he lives there till death, engraving his dreams and his hate in the ice with his great beak, sharpened like a sword and venomed with the poison in his heart.

At the end of every hunt there is a carcass. The easiest way to become a fool is to be born. The hardest but the most lasting way is to invent a philo­ sophy. At twenty we climb the flowering tree of our sensi­ bilities and sit, happy, in the leaves, the light and the wind. At fifty we are glad to sit on the stump of the tree and study the ant-hill at our feet.

Christ said only the pure in heart should see God. I have been pure in heart all my life and I have only seen the Devil. It is half past eleven by my clock. But what does that mean? Nothing. What time is it in Time? 74

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What time is it really? What time is it by the hands that measure the suffering of the world? What time is it in Eternity? What time is it by the clock that the Great Spirit uses? What time is it Everywhere?

Humor is the silver shell that encloses the sea-sob of the heart. I have too profound a faith in the ineradicable hypo­ crisy of human nature to believe that the human race will ever be honest. God is both the Homer and the Beethoven of the Stars—blind and deaf. Three Stages of Fate

First stage: to conceive Fate as our enemy, as some­ thing immanently hostile to our dreams, aspirations and acts, as a tragic-murderous force working against our consciousness. Second stage: “Thy will be done.” Indifference, resignation, acquiescence, melancholia, Fate identified with destiny; necessity identified with will. Medusa in the first stage becomes the God of St. Francis and of Tolstoy in the second. Third (and final, highest and rarest) stage: Fate raised to the dignity of a sportsman, a jester, a farceur, a fumiste, an inventor of grotesque ironies and humorous para­ doxes in which our consciousness not only partici­ pates and identifies itself but which we applaud and admire, and which we never more heartily applaud and more profoundly admire than we conceive our­ selves to be Fate’s supreme joke. Myself the butt of a splendid paradox or joke, my life a masterpiece of contradictions and comic absurdities—and to laugh 75

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impersonally with the Great Impresario—O Pain, where is thy sting? O Fate, where is thy victory? U nconquered

Under the radio, the wireless, the airplane and the cable the Earth has shrivelled to a mere spark; but the brain with its infinite spaces and the heart with its eternal mvsteries remain. Sentinels of Time

At certain moments—“sacramental” moments—I am no longer an individual but the race—its past, its present and its future. I feel in me the pain of all its pains and the despair of all its despairs and the utter hopelessness of all its hopes. This is the extension of my profound Pantheism into the domain of con­ sciousness. From my identity with God I pass to an identity with man and all the forms of pain he has undergone. And how well I understand—at such moments—the saying of Buddha and Christ, “That thou art!” “These be my people.” Verily, we poets and mystics are the Sentinels of Time and the con­ fessionals of Pain. Banners and Swords

We are an infinite number of atoms that drift in the endlessness of space toward an infinite number of points throughout an eternity of time.

The brain is only a knapsack; Passion is the sword. 76

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The Unconscious is blind; but it has hearing.

No woman has ever said anything worth listening to; but when women act they are Furies, courtesans, Valkyries—and Joans of Arc.

Nonsense is the ironic backside of commonsense; a looking glass wherein Reason sees the reverse of its own prim patterns; a fantastic Bagdad of which Reality is only the mirage.

Laughter is the original and eternal democrat.

Know Not Thyself!

To find the self would be to find the Absolute. A soul not divided against itself cannot stand. I wish to find my selves—the more the better. In the var­ iety of my moods lies my highest pleasure. The stiff reed of the I I slit and reslit, divide and re-divide until I am thousand-fold, million-fold. That there is a unifying mood, a root-mood, I have no doubt, but it shall serve me only as a springboard, as a point d’appui, a starting point, a returning point, a land­ mark. There is no final harmony, but only an infinite series of motifs, magnificent melodies, scherzos and paeans. The individual who has found himself utterly is in Nirvana—that is, nowhere. He is through with con­ trast, has died to light-and-shadow, action and re­ action. He is no longer at war with himself; hence has become the perfect pacifist—serene, seraphic, equilibrated, an eternally motionless body in an in­ finite vacuum. 77

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Banners and Swords

The hallucinant mirage of metaphysics reflects the fantastic and impossible cities that rise at the touch of Hope in the desert spaces of the heart—a shadow of a shadow.

Whatever is perfect is in a museum. Perfect contentment is like a full purse in a desert.

There is no adventure like finding yourself continu­ ally wrong in your judgments.

Every great poet should have a beggar’s license. I wove a steel network of irony to protect my heart from slings and arrows; but as the years wore on it became curiously like a spider’s web.

At the very bottom of your weakness lies your strength.

Men are only brave to hide their instinctive cowardice. The Lie-Dissolver

I—the unexpungable, reiterant, bellicose I—have here in this book the thoughts that have thought all thoughts away. I am the thinker who has crucified all thinking. Properly, I am not a thinker, but a crucible, a spectro­ scope, a dissolvent. 78

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All logic is specious because it is not true or beauti­ ful. If I tried to prove this the reasoning would be specious. Yet I am a thinker, as Death is a creator. I wish to be known as an end, not as a beginning— and yet the Puck of Things will trip me up on that. Thou playful, all-wise, anti-human One! The Smiling Sphinx

There are three kinds of thinkers—those who make facts fit into their theories, those who make their theories fit into facts, and those who care nothing about facts or theories, but who merely record the flux of their private visions and the vibratory play of their sensibilities. Plato, Aristotle and Montaigne: The first two are, and must always be, solved in the third. In Montaigne, Amiel, Anatole France, Remy de Gourmont we are at the glittering and chaotic point whence all systems, notions, dogmas and nihil­ ism radiate, and the point to which they return in their orbits. Banners and Swords

The average human being has to answer only one Sphinx. The poetic genius has to answer a thousand Sphinxes a day.

That exquisite creation, a poetic genius, takes in thoughts, impressions and sounds—and ideas— through every pore in his body. He absorbs ideas through his hair. He knows through his navel. He apprehends through channels unknown to other men. There is an eye in his arm-pit. 79

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I assume the critical attitude toward everything and anything except one thing—Beauty and any of its manifestations, which destroys my critical attitude, for where is there not Beauty? There are dead gods, but no dead demons. There is only one seeress—the harlot. She can pre­ dict with unerring accuracy what mankind and womankind will be doing ten thousand years from now. It is her knowledge only that can be ranked with that of the astronomer’s.

Those who dare not think affirm life. There is noth­ ing more pathetic than the titles of certain publica­ tions—“Good Cheer,” “A Journal of Affirmation,” “Optimos,” etc., etc. The pathos of their “good tidings”! The humor of those faces set toward the “light”! On the last day of the world it is only the humorous pessimist who can truly say, “I told you so!” Illusion

“Every supernatural vision is an illusion,” says Renan. What are natural visions? Are they less illusions than the supernatural ones? Natural visions —or “things seen with the eye”—are illusions which for the welfare of the race and in the cause of sanity we all agree not to be illusions—just as we all act on the assumption that the will is free and that the sun will rise to-morrow. An illusion about an illusion. Discomfiting

The Aztec and Jewish patriarchs who could only 80

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understand God in terms of blood and butchery were much nearer a truth than those who understand God in terms of love. Munchausen and Gradgrind

Swedenborg will never supplant Jesus for the same reason that the scientific myth-maker will never sup­ plant the poetic mythmaker. Swedenborg describes Heaven and the angels as dry facts. Jesus describes his great psychic adventures as fluxing, evanescingmysteries. Jesus was the poet of the Beyond; Swedenborg was only a carpenter of the Beyond. As between a spiritual Munchausen and a spiritual Grad­ grind the human race knows who’s who. The Infinity Trick

God, or the curious trick of infinitizing the ego. Im­ mortality, or the curious trick of infinitizing desire. Only man has the gift of infinitizing the limited and the temporal. The Infinite—is it as attribute of the imagination or is the imagination an attribute of the Infinite? An Aristotelian would say the former is true; a Platonist, the latter. But my innate sanity leads me to cast my ballot here for the mighty Stagirite; though it does not—my belief—negative the Platonist view, that the infinitizing quality of the human imagination may be but the shadow of some­ thing eternal, noumenal. It all comes in the end to Emerson’s immortal and profound aphorism—uttered with that superb non­ chalance that was always his signet—that “Every Platonist is an Aristotelian and every Aristotelian is a Platonist.” 81

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Banners and Swords

It is curious that one cannot think of Death, Nothing, Extinction, Eternal Sleep without giving these con­ cepts ( ?) attributes. They all exist to me as states of pleasure and adventure. The disembodied negative does not exist. Swedenborg: a logician with hallucinations. That which does not intoxicate is evil. Judgment is the logic of guesswork.

Hell begins where the will ends. In literature, immorality consists in having a person­ ality, and putting it into print. Morality and imita­ tion, in art, are the same thing.

In my seventeenth year I knew the history of life on every star, for I had already, at that early hour, dis­ covered the psycho-chemical constituents of hope and had dissected on the marble slab of my intellect the Old Man of the Winds. The Tragic Imp

If curiosity is religious, then I am the most religious of men. If seriousness is religious, I am the most blasphemous of men. The juggler is, to me, the greatest symbol of life. I have even been that most dangerous and diabolical of all jugglers—the juggler of emotions, sensations and instincts. For am I not the Imp of the Perverse, that most tragic of jugglers —one who delights to torture himself and do himself harm for the sake of experience? 82

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The Spectre

“Each man is in his Spectre’s power,” a profound and suggestive line of William Blake’s. The Ideal as Spec­ tre. The Perverse as Spectre. An imaged and con­ scious Instinct as Spectre. It travels with us night and day—this Spectre of ourself. It is the least ex­ plored of all the phenomena of the mind of Genius— and of “born criminals.” This Other is found in its greatest power and potency at the bottom and top of intelligence. The Spectre controls the born thief and the genius, the murderer to the manner born and the great poet and prophet. Zenith

Can we have a consciousness of Nothing? Can we wipe the slate clean, stand before the Mirror and will away our own image, rub, in one muscular drive, the fragile pastels off the background of the mind? Why have I always thought of Nothing as the Supreme Reality and form and substance as shadows? What is the metaphysical instinct to pure negation? Here paradox erects itself on paradox, a perfect Tower of Babel of paradoxes—at the top of which sits the Holy Ghost of Unreason, the Supreme Nothing, which is the ghastly, the last, the Supreme Affirmation. Banners and Swords

The heart is a great octopus forever reaching out with its monstrous tentacles for the brain, that beau­ tiful trireme of vision and naked thought.

Sublime moment, ecstatic thrill of thrills, unnamable 83

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exaltation and aesthetic frenzy—that moment when I open my eyes on another star, see the light of an­ other sun, feel the vibration of colors that no dream can forge here! I wish to travel—but only from star to star, with Memory and Hope as my companions— Intellectual Memory and Intellectual Hope. Physical cowardice has killed hundreds of great satir­ ists. To satirize the race and the Earth properly one should have his fortress in the Moon, whence to hurl his poisoned shafts at a defenceless humanity and its gods. The Supreme Tragedy

To be a bird of fabulous beauty with wings that hum with marvellous dreams of the azure and sparkle with the beams of ante-natal suns—and to lack a heaven in which to fly! Banners and Stvords

The ethereal part of a being, crystallized, becomes will. The problem in poets and artists of a certain sensibility is to transmute a sufficient amount of the ether in their psyche into iron. It is the chemistry of heroism.

It is said that Lucifer fell, fell, fell from Heaven, but as space is infinite in all directions, he was, even un­ known to himself, rising. This paradox is so profound that it is even beyond the comprehension of the Being who evicted Lucifer. The incarnation of a god—the incarnation of God! 84

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Mirific, awesome thought! But it seems to be a ne­ cessity of the human soul. And since there have been many incarnations recorded, I may take my pick. So it pleases me to believe that I am a god incarnated. When I am deep in trance, when I sit a long time near flowing waters in June or lie under a tree and eject myself into the songbird above me, it is then I realize that death is nothing but the loss of one of my facul­ ties—memory. The Newest Lie

Socialism, based on pity, will destroy pity. All safety tends to destroy the sympathetic instincts. All safety results in egomania. It is in struggle that the finest feelings are born and maintained. Nothing so evokes pity as battlefields. Sympathy aliments itself where blood runs. We are supersensitive today—almost morbidly so—because the struggle for existence is so intense. Pity is born of battle. Brutality is born of ease and safety. Destroy the fear of life and you destroy pity. You kill it at the root. Is Socialism the new diabol­ ism? Behind all the gorgeous scenarios of theory manufactured in the brains of the master-dreamers there lurks the eternal Ironist with his graven sneer. Socialism comes from the heart. It will end with the knout and the rack. Poets and Philosophers

Admire all the philosophers—for they are all the bril­ liant parts, the scintillant links, of a whole that does not exist. 85

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The poet creates truth; the philosopher merely seeks it. A great poem is definitive. No one can “argue” over “The Hound of Heaven” from the standpoint of “fact.” A philosophic system, on the contrary, is brittle, and may become ancient overnight. That is because facts swim, but beauty is static, eternal, in­ capable of perfectibility or decay. Poetry celebrates Beauty; philosophy celebrates Truth. The poet lives in the existent; the philosopher in the chimerical. Philosophy is only legitimate as a branch of aesthet­ ics. Banners and Swords

There are, as Count Gobineau says, some rare spirits who are composed of the selected atoms of their an­ cestors. It is a world-aristocracy, mute and unknown, except in rare instances. They are islands, unap­ proachable, inaccessible, surrounded by an ocean uni­ fied, flat, fishless. Loneliness is an attribute of place; solitude is an at­ tribute of being. The Ghost-Walk t

The living are ghosts of the dead. That this is liter­ ally, physically, psychologically and mechanically true few can realize, few are gifted with the powers to realize. Nor is there required a special faculty to know this. The dullest of beings sometimes in his matter-of-fact existence is aware of this for a second. It is as if he fell into a walking vertigo or rose to a super-psychical eerie for the infinitesimal part of a

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second. Then he collapses into normality again. But there are some beings in which this truth—that the living are ghosts of the dead—is completely realized, subjectively and objectively, at every moment in their existence. Banners and Swords

The brain is a living, sensitive epidermis on which in­ stinct and desire tattoo their needs from the inside. All thought is nothing but brain-tattooing.

To invert the senses; that is Art.

All centres are immoral; all circumferences are classi­ cal, moral, safe. Nocturnal Glimmer

There is no light in the world—no light whatever. What we call light is nocturnal glimmer and flash— will-o’-the-wisps, fireflies, shooting stars, heat light­ ning, refraction from frosty spaces, and, once in a while, a tremendous conflagration in the soul of a pessimist-ironist. We live and journey by these flashes, conflagrations and refractions. Banners and Swords

The lives of certain types of imaginative beings are one long crisis. They buy their heavens with their blood and flesh.

Create your own illusions: be your own God. Be the 87

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eternal Maya to your own eternal Brahm.

Truth is finite; Error infinite. Hence we may speak of Error as singular, but Truth should always be plural—truths. “Utility”

Darwin would have called the cosmologies of Wil­ liam Blake the product of a mad man. Blake would probably have ignored the existence of Darwin and his “Origin of Species” as completely as if he and it had never really existed. But the “Prophetic Books” of Blake will outlive the “Origin of Species” because the merely beautiful outlives the merely logical. If you were cast away on a desert island and there were only two books left in the world (Homer’s “Iliad” and Euclid’s propositions), and you had both, and had to feed one to the island goat, which of the two books would you keep? Banners and Swords

My light is born from an excess of darkness; my darkness from an excess of light.

I wish to be the splendid epicure that they call God— to immerse myself in all forms, to taste of all pleas­ ures and all pains, to saturate myself with my own manifestations, to know myself through experience, to watch myself unfold in newer and newer cycles, to be the Dilettante of Eternity. The work of procreation, procuring wealth and the love of murder are carried on in this world under the 88

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mask of beautiful ideals. How to hide the Fact—that is the work of moralists and idealists. The Exploited

The practical man is one who capitalizes the dreams of poets and visions of mystics. The priest capital­ izes the instinct for God and another life. The states­ man capitalizes the animal in man and evokes a war. The State capitalizes the sex-instinct and demands legal unions—for a fee. The demagogue and the eco­ nomic “redeemer” capitalize the revolutionary in­ stinct. Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens capitalized pity—and made fortunes out of it. Everything is capitalized; every great man is capitalized and turned into a joint-stock company after his death. Death itself is capitalized by the insurance companies and the God-brokers. We are capitalized from the cradle to the grave. Not one of you shall escape. Banners and Swords

Bite off your sobs with the teeth of your irony.

There are many who believe themselves wise who are merely ill. The average consciousness related to my conscious­ ness is as my consciousness related to God’s consci­ ousness.

Dynamic stupidity, or reason without imagination; observation without insight; movement without wings: this is historic progress. 89

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My Horeb

Moses came down from Horeb with a light on his face. I came back from the Peaks of Renunciation and the Himalayas of Pure Intelligence with a leer on my face—a leer and a menace, and a sword in my hand—a red sword, a poisoned sword, a sword tem­ pered in lightnings and blessed with my blasphemies. Banners and Swords

The eyes of woman are the showcases of her soul; the ‘‘silent salesmen” of her heart.

Sometimes the nostrils of my mind catch the odors from the cemeteries in my blood—those cemeteries where the dead are not quite dead, although most all of them are rotten. The Imagination—the squirrel of space that bounds from star to star. Hope enters the heart like a marvellous butterfly. Anon it dies and is pinned against the gray walls of the brain with the black pin of despair.

All “progress” is toward the absurd. Every day on arising empty a goblet of ice over your heart and put a red rose in your brain. bA

I am a Thought-Petal blown around in the wintry garden of this world seeking the stalk of the Great Identity. The heart is a miracle-machine. 90

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My eyes are always looking at my thoughts, even when looking at the most commonplace object in the street. It is impossible for the eye to see anything else except what lies behind it.

The truth is always the ugly side of some magnifi­ cent and winged lie. The living are the posthumous desires of the dead. There can, therefore, be no rest while the dead live.

If every person were to be absolutely sincere every person would be a genius. Genius is merely sincerity. The only reward of great, obscure genius: he lives his immortality secretly.

It is the unconscious in us that is reincarnated; the consciousness dies—that is, becomes at the moment of death unconsciousness—and is reborn blind and unknowing.

There is a grief so profound that it can only be ex­ pressed in laughter.

Success is the art of being polite to people you hate. Tour d’Ivoire.

I am like a man who lives alone in a magnificently furnished and illuminated chateau without windows or doors, but who gets his glimpses of Reality from a tower of jasper and porphyry, and who spends all his days seeking for a secret passage, an alleyway or a forgotten door through which he may escape into the real world. 91

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The Great Vaudeville

History can only be understood by him who shall ransack, excavate and understand to its uttermost that word amusement. Whatever is is amusing. The rise and fall of empires, the migration of races, revo­ lutions and social evolution are departments of sport. The universe is a Game, the invention of the ineradi­ cable instinct of some superabundant Animality. Pain, which is the great fact in all human history, was invented as a foil, as a contrast, as a background, as an abysmal shadow against which this superabundant Animality plays out its vaudeville. And this instinct-for-amusement is the soul of all our own activities—we the players in the Game. We must be amused—that is, not bored. The fantasies of the bored run to cruelties and auto-sadistic experiments. Pain is itself a form of amusement. We invent at the behest of the superabundant Animality wars, jugger­ nauts and the enormous stupidities of our daily lives. The universe is fleeing from Ennui; and all history is merely the record of this flight. In this we imitate the gods. Banners and Swords

The grave is a universe. The eyes of the dead are its stars. The brain of genius is a sun that thinks.

Necessity is the method of Fatality. Fatality is the father, Necessity the son, and Indifference is the holy ghost. I am become like a shoreless sea in which all of man92

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kind are the waves; and the anguish of mute and un­ remembered trillions, whose very bones are now sub­ limated to air and sunlight, lives in my being as a perpetual wail. One Night

z

That point in space where even a star can no longer exist, where light can no longer vibrate, where gravi­ tation ceases, where there is nothing but darkness— a darkness so intense, so opaque, that what we call night in this sidereal system compared to that dark­ ness is as sleep compared to annihilation—I have been at that point. Banners and Swords

Five hundred millions of years on the planet Earth have become matter for a single proverb in the Book of Mystery that is kept Elsewhere. Tears are the stalactites on the roof of the Mammoth Cave of Despair. The brain is the sieve of the gods; and again, the mysterious and intricate monogram of Satan.

If some god were to blow out the candlelight of the stars the sockets of the Creative Will would still re­ main untouched. Meditation

Death ? It is merely to follow the fading light of dark­ 93

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ened suns, last year’s roses, Shakespeare, Buddha, Beethoven and the rivers that never weary of union with the seas; to participate in the fate of Saturn, Orion, Spinoza, Victor Hugo and millions of babies; to re-evolve with the seasons and the clouds. Banners and Swords

Literature is the Eternal and the Inevitable trans­ lated into words. In mind the star and the planet rise to thought. This is the eternal and perpetual transubstantiation. Logic is the bones of the mind; dreams are its flesh and blood, its face and feet.

Every thought has its real side and its ideal side; the metaphysical side is the third half of the thought. My “rights” are conditioned on the power of my ima­ gination only. The Magician

The great artist is a sublime inversion of Reality. He substitutes images for things. He pours into the con­ crete vases and basins of matter the deep flame and the ether of his imagination. Banners and Swords

To-Day has many masks and disguises. Sometimes it dresses as an old man and calls itself Yesterday; 94

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sometimes it dresses as a young girl and calls itself To-morrow. When it is just itself it is a lean and homely vision.

Reason is the frost in the Garden of Dreams. God is the centre of gravity—an immaterial centre of gravity localized everywhere.

If you want “to get something over” on the race, or any segment of it, give them gods, full stomachs and pack their to-morrow with dazzling promises. Socialism is the Heaven of unimaginative minds.

“Business honor” is an imaginary but very definite agreement that preserves the entente between my instinct-to-steal and yours. Vale !

All literature at last dribbles down to word-witchery and style-necromancy. Everything having been said, the last stage of any art is to bury the pulseless heart of Life in rare-wrought shrouds and to place on its head a tiara of glittering shadows. A Fable

Nietzsche and the mob: a Chicken wandered out of its coop one morning and, looking up—something rare for a Chicken of this special breed—saw a great Eagle circling in the dawn, circling toward the rising sun with passionate eye and dithyrambic gyrations. “What a crazy Chick,” murmured the barnyard sage 95

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as it began its daily task of pecking the Dunghill. Personal

He lacked imagination; therefore he pronounced the book obscure—like a man who should try to see New York by riding in the subway. Misfits

My soul does not fit into my body; it is only half on, like a new shoe that has got “stuck.” My conscious­ ness has never warped into my muscles, blood and motor centres. It is like a great golden cloud that hovers on the edge of its planet. A Hospital God

It is only the very poor, the very wretched, the en­ tirely hopeless who understand Christ. His glory can only be seen from the dung-heap and his majesty from the hospital bed. He is the aura that floats around Giant Despair, the fulgurant, mystic corona of eclipsed beings; the mirage that empty stomachs and lack-lustre eyes build in the empyrean of mysti­ cal spaces. Banners and Swords

Vengeance is shorthand for Justice.

Every skull has its joss-house; every heart has its Temple of Paphos. 96

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The immortal gods of our destinies reign in the cor­ puscles of the blood—those sinister and impregnable Olympuses.

Talent creates on experience; genius, like God, re­ quires only its inner consciousness, its apprehension, its insight.

There is a magician who lives in the heart of the grape that no builder of worlds has yet matched for pure fantasy of conception and vibrancy of color. The silences of woman are menacing abysses where the strangled lightning bolts of her will turn to venom. The love-sweat on the bosom of Christ turned to icicles when Judas kissed him. The human heart stood revealed. He was kissed by the Truth. The Reckoning

And the Lord asked of Satan: “What do men downthere, on Earth, think of me?” And Satan replied, “Some praise you day and night; some are indiffer­ ent toward you; some do not believe in you; some disdain you; but there is one who is marching through millions of incarnations to meet you and to demand of you an accounting in the name of the unimagin­ able myriad of dead. He is a Warrior of Grief, a Rebel to Creation, and he speaks of a duel that must be fought between you and him in the Absolute.” The Textless Book

Each of us is a beautiful page of a variorum edition 97

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of a great Classic—but the notes and. commentaries of our ancestors have left nothing of the original text on the page except a single line, obscure and mean­ ingless, standing alone. I

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The maxims of the angels are written on the brows of the obedient and the humble; the maxims of the demons are written on the brains and hearts of the anarchs and ironists.

Fear is in the knees; cowardice is in the heart. For that reason a man may run away from danger who is not a coward and another may lead, “heroically,” his men into battle who is.

If the atom could have a sense of the infinite, it would probably be based on the distances between it and the surrounding atoms, just as man’s sense of the infinite is based on the distances between his con­ sciousness of things here and those things that lie over there—which may or may not exist. History is a record of the capitalization and incor­ poration of the credulities of man by a comparatively small number of promoters.

Suppose that for one hour the Fates and the Destinies and the Furies were to rescind their decrees, their laws and their penalties, making of man a miraculous free agent? He would descend below the beast. The great poets are angels whose wings have become frozen in a cloud. Alive but powerless, they can never reach heaven or earth, and they die in the air, lashed 98

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by rains and incinerated by sun-heat. There are two kinds of thinkers—those that make you think and those that make you comfortable. If you write for the crowd your fortune is made; if you write for yourself—that is, sincerely—go out and buy a cross and a crown of thorns. Fate is movement; Destiny is direction. The mystery of “progress”—strike them down with a truth and raise them up with a lie. Life by Proxy

The glory and the terror of the soul that can sub­ stitute mind for matter, feeling about things for the things themselves, images for physical realities! It lives by proxy. It draws its own body up with its brain. It furls reality around the golden staff of con­ sciousness. It literally feeds on matter. Among adepts of the inner life, bonzes of the imaginative world, this phantasmic life becomes the real life and the physical life the phantom life. The Receiving Station

Genius is like a gaunt wireless tower, catching and vibrating with messages from all over the universe, visible and invisible. A delicate instrument that trembles with the secrets of others—and suffers for them. The rest of humanity are like underground wires, insulated, mono-vibrant. 99

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Banners and Swords

When a woman leaves the door of her heart ajar and finds no one in the hall she rushes to her hand-mirror. Time is the great vacuum cleaner; everything comes to dust under its suction. Women’s faces are of three kinds: single bed, double bed, and adjoining-room faces. A cynic is a man who yawns in epigrams.

If women knew their own natures as well as men they would all be cynics in the Nth degree.

Talent is an infinite capacity for imitating genius. The Horla

Man completes himself in humanity. Is Humanity the fourth dimension of me? Genius, the universal mind, is an approach to this fourth dimension. It sees, feels and hears other than mere self. The cos­ mic consciousness was Shakespeare, Schopenhauer. The social consciousness was Christ, Buddha. Will the future man, the fourth dimensional man, be a composite of Shakespeare and Christ? Or is this in­ carnation impossible here? Must it be worked out in a physical fourth dimension? If all mankind is the whole of my ego, and my indi­ viduality is only a fraction of the super-I, then I must complete myself not as a man, but as Men; that is, as a god, in whom will move, like infusoria in a sea, the whole race. 100

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Banners and Swords

All wars are made legitimate by posterity because posterity needs legends, and legends are more im­ portant to the race than the physical calamities of war. The race must have “stories,” and it is willing to die in order to manufacture them. The old superstition that kings and diplomats invent wars would make a boy laugh. Watch the latter’s eyes glow as you tell him the story of the “Iliad” or he hears the word “Napoleon.” In those eyes you will see the genesis of all wars—the imagination— and the nothingness of kings and diplomats. No tradesman is ever in favor of war; he prefers pilfering to pillage; swindling to looting.

The instinct-to-property and the instinct-to-war are co-eternal instincts. As well seek to abolish sex as these two primal laws.

The Eternal Twins

Those who curse God curse him for the same reason as those who pray to him; those who disbelieve in him with frenzy disbelieve in him for the same rea­ sons as those who believe in him fanatically. The psychological reactions in both cases are the same; it is a difference in sensibility, not a difference in be­ lief, that divides atheist from believer. If Voltaire and Saint Theresa came face to face outside of the finite—or, say, Charles Bradlaugh and Cardinal New­ man—they would be astounded to find that they were psychological and spiritual twins. 101

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The Escape

The profoundest thought is related to its hidden fac­ tors, its potencies and possibilities, as I to the in­ finite. Hence, whatever we think about anything is erroneous. All the “puzzle” of life comes from the implicit faith we have in consciousness, observation and reasoning. The moment we come to believe firmly in Chance, Fate, Destiny, the Unknown, all the “puzzles” vanish. The tragic paradox gives way to the comic paradox, or at least to the humorous paradox. Curiosity takes the place of astonishment and we take ourselves cum grano salis. Banners and Swords

Chance is the spontaneous imagination of Destiny. One may culminate in a development where Desire itself is atavistic. Pure contemplation is the begin­ ning of this journey.

The “love of God” is fear of some kind of hell. The visible does not exist. The human eye itself sees only the fleeting symbols of invisibles. Sees? Does it even see? An Aside

Life, to me, is of secondary importance. It is only a tabulated verification of my literary, artistic, meta­ physical and psychological prejudices. Life is only —for me—a footnote to literature; a monstrous pal­ ette on which to lay the colors of my dreams, sen­ 102

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sations, loves and antipathies. “Living” is, to me, a vacation, a diversion, a reaction from the exhaustive work of the inner life. If Life is not like some great book, some great picture, it has no value. I mingle among people, take my bath of “reality,” for the same reason that the crowd goes to the movies—as an “aside,” a reaction from the pursuit of the beautiful in literature, art and thought. Banners and Swords

Every word is a tiny cinematograph. Reason is the punctuation of the emotions.

Every fact today has one foot in the grave and the other in the Fourth Dimension. The brain of the herd must be vaccinated early with moral, religious and sociologic beliefs so that it will not contract thought, fortunately never epidemic. Local Color

When we look calmly at the history of Europe since the advent of Christ until this present year we find that there cannot be any stable criterion of sanity. But—and thanks to whatever gods may be!—Chris­ tianity has given the world more “direct action” than any other form of madness which has been epidemic on the planet. The Two Liars

If we could follow out to the end the consequences of 103

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every act we would see that every act makes ulti­ mately for evil and pain in what is really the best of all possible worlds, for whatever is at any moment is the sum of the possible. At this point both optimist and pessimist may find standing room. Whether we view human acts from the standpoint of astronomy, geology, metaphysics, dynamics, sociology, history or religion, the result will be antithetical to the dream and purpose which is the dynamo in each act. So the pessimist’s “What will it profit us?” is founded in the depth of experience and intuition. There is no reason to believe that this is not the best of all possible worlds, for as astronomical truths may be applied to the farthest worlds in the farthest con­ stellations, so may we apply our physical and psy­ chological truths. This is the best of all possible worlds because a better cannot be conceived as an actuality without violating the fundamental princi­ ples of physiology, psychology and evolution, just as it is inconceivable that our Sun should whirl around Mercury instead of vice versa. Hence the optimist is sure-footed when he affirms that “whatever happens happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” As both pessimist and optimist are purely dramatic inventions of the great Archimage, they are both right and both wrong. In eternal time experi­ ence is as great a myth as dreams. Banners and Swords

Gods: infinite simultaneity. sion.

Man: infinite succes­

The Ideal is the sky-line of Hell. The Eternal Mind (presupposing such) cannot know 104

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the finite mind, just as the ocean is not cognizant of the individual life of each drop of water, or the brain of man is not conscious of the individual life of each cell.

Christianity made an art of suffering; Stoicism made of it a science. Nothing profounder than the instinct to atone. Con­ trariety, balance, equilibrium, Nemesis, consciousness itself are involved in the roots of this impulse. Atone­ ment is the law of life.

Geniuses are insane angels who chant in the iron cells of Reality. The universe is a visible point moving toward an in­ visible end.

The pathos of irony: the human race, generation after generation, hanging the horseshoe of hope on the door of the House of Implacable Destinies. The Millstones

To-day the world is caught between the lowbrow atheist whose poor little brain chokes itself blue try­ ing to swallow Nietzsche and Darwin and the high­ brow social and religious reformer in whose heart smoulders the flames from the bonfires lighted by Torquemada. Banners and Swords

At the Feast of the Furies the human heart is the 105

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piece de resistance.

The ironic grin at the heart of success leaves the con­ queror somewhat a-gape. He feels like an eagle that has just made a meal of the rainbow.

Lucifer in his maniacal rage at the dull philistinism of the Overworld struck the walls of the heavens with his mighty fist in his flight downwards; the walls did not move, but the blow gave birth to a thousand thousand stars which spurted through space. This was the manner of the birth of the great poets. To see life as a tragedy—that is commonplace enough; but to see life as a comedy—that is the real tragedy. Art is a substitute for crime.

To live through Art and Intellect is to kiss Life through veils.

There are cleansing and hygienic orgies that keep our lives balanced. In the summits of the cypress trees of our sorrows live an eagle, Irony, and a nightingale, Imagination. Nearly all Jews are proud they are Jews, but no Jew is proud that he looks like one. Consciousness is a metaphysical organism. Its digestive apparatus is the material universe, includ­ ing the brain of man; its own brain is its ultimate form (unknowable to us); it has no heart, hence no emotional apparatus. 106

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One cannot feel the supreme delight—the joy un­ tainted by purpose—of intellectual pleasures until he abandons seriousness and roves through the master­ pieces as a dilettante, like a new Sultan, young and vigorous, who takes a new beauty from his harem each day and never seeks for an ideal of beauty or an impossible pleasure.

Is the grave an Elba, a St. Helena or a Waterloo—a returning, a prison or annihilation? Life is like a great pen with a broken point trying to write something intelligible on an eternal flux of forces. f

A poet who started on a ramble over the rainbow came face to face on a narrow skein of prismatic glories with his two oldest acquaintances, Circula­ tion and Advertising. Now, I wonder, who gave way? The Glass-Picker

Imagine a pane of glass of unimaginable width and length that had fallen to the earth and had broken into octillions upon octillions of bits, and imagine a man trying to piece the bits together so as to make a whole pane again. This is what the human race is trying to do with its ideals, its plans, its dreams, its acts. And few there are who see the vast humor of it. Banners and Swords

The universe is a great Epic of which we know neither the writer nor the hero. 107

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The Great Adventure—analyzing and classifying the errors that the world believes to be certainties; elect­ ing one’s self taxidermist of human illusions.

There is a murderous epigram buried in the heart of every woman. All her life she seeks to utter it, but lacks either the power of expression or the courage. Memory is the eye in the back of the head. One must choose between happiness and wisdom— one cannot have both. The human race at any given moment in its history is engaged—unknown to itself—in working out and consummating the ruin of the next generation.

In the best of all possible worlds Genius has one shirt, while Cunning has one for each day. Efficiency tends to automatism. Careless, irrespon­ sible spontaneity is life in its most efficient form.

Life is a giant cash-register, whereof each one thinks he is the salesman, but in reality he is only the figure O. God is never worth anything more than the worlds he created are worth.

We never blaspheme against God, but only against certain of his attributes. The very fact that religion is compelled to create a good God to redeem a bad world is the most pitiless judgment that could be passed on the good God and the bad world. 108

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Absolutist: How can I serve God? Pragmatist: How can God serve me? In this conversation lies the kernel and cause of all the evil in the world.

Study the timbre of his laugh to get the tragedy in his soul. The first superwoman will be she who tells the photographer, “Photograph me just as I am.”

Life is an eternal series of lightning flashes in the eternal night-time of death—illuminating Nothing.

The truth can only be made plausible by making it look like a lie. Vanity is the imagination of woman; and coquetry is her irony.

All idealism ends in pessimism; all pessimism ends in indifference, and indifference is the mother of super­ men. There are only two kinds of men who are ashamed to admit they are sentimental—the sentimentalists and the cynics. Life has two kinds of mortals—those who sneer at everything and those who love everything. The first leads to stupidity; the second to a maudlin eunucharianism. The decadent is an artist who has a beautiful word and seeks to put it in an idea—a magnificent suit of clothes for which he seeks a body to hang it on. 109

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Humiliation is an emotion caused by the knowledge that we have suddenly shrivelled up to our normal dimensions. The embarrassment we experience before an impe­ cunious acquaintance is caused by the knowledge that he has discovered our own weakness for saving. Take your daily bath in the Infinite; but rub your­ self down afterward with the coarse towel of Things.

The sense of proportion is the geometries of humor; the absurd is the infoliate square root of common sense. Time is a tapeworm that lives on our dreams.

What is the Earth but the whispering gallery of the dead?

There will always be churches; but will there always be sciences? The thing that makes man great—that raises him above all the organic world—is the sure knowledge of his ultimate ignorance. He who says “I know” may be mistaken; but he who says “I do not know” cannot be mistaken. His confession of ignorance is a mode of truth—the ultimate mode Here. It is miraculous enough that a being should be abroad in the sun who can prove or disprove his own being.

A man who has nothing of the cosmic clown in him shall never peep behind the veil of Isis; he who has not laughed at God shall never look upon his face. no

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Whena woman who hides her intellect meets a man who conceals his emotions there begins a comedy that will end in a tragedy.

When you conquer the devils in a genius you destroy his genius. “Humanly speaking, there is nothing eternal,” says a French writer. And, eternally speaking, there is nothing human.

Fatality is patience prolonged to the infinite.

Only the invisible can see the invisible. When I am happy for an hour I have a strange home­ sickness for hell. Nietzsche lived in a desert peopled with ecstasies and roofed with stupendous mirages thrown off from his own brain, and he slaked his thirst with his own sweat. Reading should be a form of copulation. The beautiful thing about Christianity is that it has created sins that never existed before, it has intro­ duced us to vices and luxuries of the emotions that earth-born paganism never dreamed of.

When the cross of our sufferings has burned down to the last ember we begin to draw women’s faces in the ashes. It takes a woman to pull the cork of reason from the wine-bottle of men’s emotions. ill

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Thought is a mole that burrows through the walls of stupidity; Time is a moth that eats up thought; and Eternity is a museum for both moles and moths. The Will-to-Power is a bridge on which Humility and Pride collide and fuse. The Cronies

Nietzsche, the great saint of the intellect, went danc­ ing up the Via Dolorosa with the pandean flute to his lips and a crown of grapes on his head, and at the Cross he tore the body of his Friend from its wooden Caucasus and smote the air three times, out of which rose Pegasus. Banners and Swords

All ecstasy is a form of truth. Wisdom is the last resort of unachieved folly. In every cynic’s life there is one woman exempt from his arrows; just as every Magdalen exempts one man while repenting.

Cut the grape-vine of a woman’s emotions and she’ll bleed poison. Even woman’s tears are tiny hand-mirrors.

To a woman love at twenty is a valley; at thirty, a jungle; at forty, the Andes. The world was not a bad place at all until the poets 112

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and seers came and told us it was.

We glorify great bandits because they incarnate our policed instincts. Through them there is a kind of redemption of the natural in us. The Immeasurable

The ecliptics of the stars have been measured; but who has measured the ecliptics of our wishes, our thoughts, our dreams? And because there is no measure, can be no measure, to the latter no one can affirm that this is “good” and that is “bad.” For our thoughts, dreams and wishes begin in the infinite and end in the infinite. Banners and Swords

“If each one could only understand the other’s point of view there would be peace and happiness in the world.” But the world would not exist. Whatever is is born through clash, misunderstanding, prejudice, egomania. The three things that make life valuable: Chance, Illusion, Death.

The recreations of the gods are the tragedies of Man. The universe is a vast wheel of which the hub is—the human skull.

Satan has given the world two heady brews—War and Love. 113

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An author should read only himself—this above all when he reads others.

The socialist—or the State-pimp.

I have two faces—the one you see and an eternal face, which you do not see.

Irony is the windshield of refined sensibilities. A clean conscience is most often a bib that men wear so that they may slobber their virtues over every­ thing around.

Get drunk on the spiritual when the flesh gives out and hang on to the lamppost of the Higher Life. To Schopenhauer, life was the syphilis of the Creator. To be efficient is human; to be careless is divine.

When a man becomes a hermit he becomes something of a god; when a woman becomes a hermit she be­ comes a witch—and a bitch. Women suck their scratches; men bathe them in brandy. Whoever heard two women swear to one another on their “sacred honor”? No truth is acceptable to the human race until it gets into a uniform and hires a band. The senses of some women are interchangeable— their ears see, their lips listen, and their eyes taste. 114

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The rarest thing in the world is a woman who will fight for something that she can’t use.

With a woman nothing that exists is trivial except the idea of justice. The “complexity of woman” is an invention of the stupidity of man.

When you meet a taciturn woman who is about to marry a garrulous man you stand at the Armaged­ don of sex. Nothing makes us want to live so much as the con­ tinuous thought of death—the exhilaration of a run­ ning fight with an eternal enemy.

When those who see walk among the blind they should pretend they are blind, too. The orbit of my consciousness is so stupendous that I often cross the ecliptic of my coming Self. The Dangers of Tolerance

The more tolerant we become the weaker becomes our will. Intolerance is the mother of movement in the social sphere. “A decent respect for the opinions of mankind” never got any nation anywhere, al­ though the phrase has its Tartuffian value. Phases of Consciousness

There are two kinds of minds—the bi-conscious and the uni-conscious. The bi-conscious mind is divided 115

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against itself; the uni-conscious mind has no con­ sciousness of self. To be conscious of our conscious­ ness—that is to be a god in hell! Banners and Swords

“He is not human” means, most often, he is not a sentimental bum-rubber.

Commonplace things are things that no genius has yet looked at. The humorous is the sudden perception that between what one has done and what one ought to have done there is no ultimate difference. We must study Buddha, Napoleon, Nietzsche, Spin­ oza, Shakespeare, Blake and Goethe as we study light —prism by prism.

Christ is a woman’s god; Jehovah a man’s god. In the well of scientific truth one sees only the shadow of one’s wish. Laughter is the synthesis of our fears. A prophet is a man with an abnormal memory.

The farther I recede into my heaven the more inter­ esting becomes the Drama of Man. The deepest passion of humanity is not the passion for “happiness,” but the passion for surprise. This passion creates a “happiness” out of new and curious pains. 116

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Are we astral residuum or aspiring dung?

All life aspires to fiction. Humor is an attribute of space.

As Pegasus flew toward the stars he was compelled to dung — and the Crowd was born. A woman’s No is often only the cork in the cham­ pagne bottle of her Yes.

Civility is the powder-puff of social intercourse.

Some minds are like trunks — packed tight with knowledge, no air, and plenty of moths. Whatever I can imagine is real. Whatever I can feel, see or touch may be an illusion.

Life is like a flying landscape seen through the win­ dows of a runaway auto-hearse. The brain is only the typewriter of the soul.

Hope is the bill-of-fare from Belshazzar’s feast donated to Lazarus. Tell a woman you understand her and she may love you; but if she discovers that you really do under­ stand her she will hate you. One of our greatest pleasures is the consciousness of the power that we could, if we wished, break all our “solemn promises.” 117

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Utopia

There is no form of government that can free the human race; mankind will never be free until love is regarded as an organic necessity; until work becomes a pleasure, and until pleasure becomes a religion. Banners and Swords

Remorse is the vomit of our undigested sins.

We are suddenly awakened out of the sleep of the un­ conscious, and all of life is taken up with rubbing our eyes into sight. Imagination is the sap of the brain; reason is only the bark.

When the train of a woman’s reasoning jumps the rails she is again a real woman. Life is like a cigarette, and it may be enjoyed in two ways—smoke it slowly to the end and scour your memories with the ashes; or inhale it and die young.

Mankind is a blind man who mistakes his visions for sight. Love is an instinct; marriage is an institution; and all instincts and institutions are in eternal conflict.

To watch the puzzled mind of a normal person before a great genius who has no peculiarities I Wisdom is the Olympus of failure. UK

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Life has no years; it is as young as first love, and is never any older.

The epigrams of cynics are walls of cactus that they rear to keep sentimentalists out of their rose-gardens. Patience is the art of waiting for the inevitable.

Every “gentleman” dreams of some day becoming a blackguard. Only a fiend could have invented the idea of immor­ tality.

Humor is the consciousness of the nothingness of anything. Fiction repeats itself—in fact; and fact repeats itself —in fiction. The deadliest weapon in the world is the goodnatured smile.

That which all agree is true is of no interest. Orpheus

Nietzsche with bleeding, flesh-broken knuckles beat out a delirious hymn of joy on the battered old Erard of human experience. He is a Jove whose flying light­ nings will rend and consume all the barns, chicken­ houses and hencoops of thought and morality; a Dionysus whose wild pipings and wine-soaked dithy­ rambs will ’whelm and annihilate the squeaky parlor music from the victrola-jewsharp-mouth-organ souls that dominate the world. He is the Galilean become 119

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Orpheus. He sits on a glittering peak of the Hima­ layas of the spirit smiting upon the Harp of the Winds. Banners and Swords

My Soul is a sea that has washed the Splendid Isles and splashed the face of God.

The leader of men is one who creates an illusion; a thinker is one who destroys it.

Each to-morrow brings us nearer to yesterday. Life is a choice of hells.

Socialism is the rule of Everybody over nobodies. Every lie has two sides—the logical side is called the truth.

A pessimist is a person who has finished the dessert before the other guests are on the soup. The problem: Shall the will dominate the image or the image dominate the will ? Strength is in the first; hell lies in the second. Last Men

Those rare prose writers and poets who mix—who make interchangeable—religious and erotic figures, who fuse sex with God, copulation and Heaven, Phal­ lus and the Host: they have arrived at the ultimates of style and the borderland of literature. 120

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Mystical Vengeance

The poor shall have their revenge: this is the essence of all religions, of all justice, of all economic systems. Vengeance is thus mystical, juridical and reasonable. All movement involves some form of vengeance. Vengeance is a form of atonement; atonement is auto­ vengeance. Banners and Swords

To see life, to understand life as I see it and under­ stand it, one must see it from the catafalques of dead suns, and be dead himself—as an eternal ghost stand­ ing on the summit of a rotted Sirius. Irony is the cactus plant that sprouts over the tomb of our dead illusions.

Why I am absurd: I have always done the thing I did not plan to do and what I have planned to do I have not done. Only one person has any rational ground for being optimistic in regard to his own future—that is, the pessimist.

All government springs npt from the consent of the governed but from an organic need of the weak. The Crown olf Cactus

The man who is ill and poor but optimistic; the well man, favorite of fortune, who is a pessimist; the former a hater of the ironic; the latter who sees in 121

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the optimist the last word in stupidity: this is the crowning triumph of the Ironic Spirit. Banners and Swords

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author. I have given as much to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Whitman as I ever took from them. That they are dead and cannot receive my gifts in exchange for theirs is their loss.

He who follows me will lose himself. What will it profit you to gain my point of view and lose your own? If you are my disciple you are lost. All government must, in the last analysis, be opposed to the interests of the governed. The motive for each human being in whatever he does is his own indi­ vidual good, while the motive of the actions of the governing body is the “common good.” A “common good’ aims at the destruction of the individual.

Anarchism is a belief; therefore it will evolve a church. It is a “common” idea; therefore it will be ultimately antagonistic to individualism. The Lie of Paths

All paths end in a Nowhere. There are some moun­ tain paths that go straight up toward the summit and end, literally, in the air. There are paths in the woods that end in underbrush and bog. It is so with all forms of psychological analysis—they end at last in the endless. They are paths that vanish in space or in shadowy thickets. All systems of analytical 122

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thought from Aristotle to Nietzsche—what are they? Arabesques pencilled on a Veil; deft incisions made in a Cloud. They have unveiled the origins of morals, of the beautiful; but those origins are themselves veils. Banners and Swords

“The grapes are sour!” exclaimed the fox; and there­ upon the first philosopher was born.

Every Hamlet should have an Horatio—a flexible, silent, youthful, sycophantic soul who shall mirror the former’s occasional aspirations to mediocrity and who shall be the eternal reminder of his own super­ iority. Failure, on its death-bed, is always visited by the comfortable thought of the “good I have done in my lifetime.” It is the final apology of Miss-Fire, the last holy vestment of Hypocrisy.

There is the imagination that inflates the future to infinite proportions and the imagination that annihi­ lates the future with its infinite proportions and promises. These two kinds of imagination we have in Madame Bovary and Bazaroff—both slain by the same enemy with two masks. . As a person about to be led to the gallows is per­ mitted to indulge himself in one last pleasure, so the bankrupt in mind and body of this world take to religion. The Lie Compensatory

The genius condemned to some deadly daily routine 123

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consoles himself with the thought of Spinoza grind­ ing lenses, Epictetus in slavery, Thoreau fabricating pencils; and suddenly his destiny and his ugly task become transfigured. With this mustard the “worthy obscure” make palatable the worst meal. Banners and Swords

No greater blessing can befall us than to be the vic­ tim of ennui, for ennui, says a great authority, is the father of all follies.

As the miserable are accustomed to their pains, why seek to “alleviate” them by thrusting on them another and greater misfortune—ennui, which they will never grow accustomed to? All belief of whatsoever kind is heresy because it ex­ cludes some other belief. Ecstatic Curiosity

The religious need is the profoundest of all needs next to food and sex and shelter. The atheist, the sceptic, the philosopher are the final props of these needs. For religion has nothing to do with beliefs or creeds; it is the peculiar attitude of a certain tempera­ ment before the mystery of life. It is the ecstasy of Curiosity; the passionate hunt for Reality. Banners and Swords

When God said “Let there be light” he became an artist; when he said “Let there be motion” he became 124

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an idealist; when he said “Let there be brains” he became a cynic; when he said “Let there be death” he became a comedian. Our dearest memories are those that have the glint of some splendid transgression. No man can be completely disillusioned. Schopen­ hauer’s illusion was—Schopenhauer; Flaubert’s illu­ sion was—Flaubert.

All belief in progress is a defect of the understand­ ing. Ignorance is always dynamic; understanding tends to become static. Ignorance is the mother of variation; understanding tends to absorptive unity. The Great Eye-Opener

Satan was the first reformer, for he led men from romanticism to reality. He lifts man from the caves of idealism, mysticism and complacent godliness to the mountain-tops, where he purges the eye of mist and sleepweb. He should be worshipped for his in­ corrigible sanity. Banners and Swords

If you live in a big hotel hide your precious stones from bell-boys and chambermaids. The seer who is compelled to go among the herd will understand this. r -nr’-h' 1 . '

Poverty is my greatest asset; from it has come my venom—my beautiful venom.

Unless thought destroys it is not thought; it is be­ lief. 125

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Egotism seeks the stage and mouths before the groundlings; individualism seeks a mirror and mouths before itself.

Scorn is laughter with a fishbone in its throat. The poor who revolt commit suicide or become in­ dividualists. When the larder is empty one makes a meal of his pride. The Infinite is a landscape without horizon. Time is a landscape with infinite horizons. Human belief is a landscape in a jail-yard.

When we speak of women we are either satyrs or asses. Holy Phantoms

Only phantoms are immortal. Facts change, are as mutable as time, passing aspects in a passing uni­ verse. But phantoms, chimeras, transcendental lies are as immortal as Life itself. Without them the will-to-live itself would disappear. The goblin Hope and the goblin God, the phantom Future and the floating wraith of Another World—who slays them slays himself. They are the immortal lying truths, the eternal phantoms with the diabolistic smiles. Banners and Swords

Analysis is retribution: it is the vengeance of the dis­ illusioned. It is a mirror wherein even Maya, in her million million guises, dare not peep. 126

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Civilization is the art of perverting simplicity; of sub­ stituting for the A B C of nature and instinct a sys­ tem of obscurantism. But simplicity! What is it? The thing is unthinkable. There has always been civilization; cannibals, ants and savages have civili­ zations as perfect as ours. It is, then, only a differ­ ence of detail. Whatever does not bore me is good. There is no other ethic. My pleasure consists not necessarily in the pleasurable, but in the novel, in the exhilaration of nerve-vibration, in getting rid of a tiresome state of consciousness and substituting for it a new one— even a painful one. Death is a good because it is the point where ennui ceases, though hell may begin. Life at Any Price

I will live at any price—even at the price of murder, theft and pillage. This is the real epical instinct, the logical outcome of the will-to-grandeur. And it is great in so far as this will is not blurred or halted by an ideal. And the will to die for another—that, too, is sublime ; there, too, we get a glimpse of the will-tograndeur. But at bottom both instincts are identical. Christ and Napoleon differed as to means. Their aims were the same—the glorification of the ego, the will to perpetuate themselves at any price. Banners and Swords

The Ideal—the innocent-enough looking Trojan horse wherein there is secreted a savage, starving horde.

My altruism: to live in the thought of others that I 127

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may do them good or evil; not to live for them, but to live on them, through them and with them; to be one with them as the perfume is one with the flower; to be deep in their hearts, even as a poisoned poignard if I cannot be there otherwise. The anarchy that reigns today in literature, art and life produces anything but a discordance in the ear of mental voluptuaries. It is a titanic symphony writ­ ten in a trance by a Paul Whiteman with genius. Transubstantiation

The “malady of the century”—that has given me my health. I have grown fat off the griefs of the intellec­ tual lords of the age, and of their tears I have brewed a heady wine. I have fortified myself on the beautiful disorders of others. Their miasmatic dreams have, in me, become ozone and oxygen. Phantom-Thr ill

The great work of art should tell us nothing; it should appeal for interpretation, like the visible uni­ verse; and, if like the visible universe, we can never resolve its meaning into anything definite it is be­ cause it has the stamp of the eternal Mystery on its face. Like the marvellous smile on the face of Mona Lisa, whose mystery haunts my brain through life, it ought to inundate us with rhapsody and yet remain mute, undecipherable, tantalizing. Banners and Swords

He who utters his wisdom is no longer wise. 128

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Man’s gravity before the absurd—touch him not! touch him not! Laughter—sudden, explosive, rend­ ing, revealing laughter—is more dangerous than an earthquake. To awake to a world of dragons—that may be endured; but to awake to a world of chuckles —insanity lies that way, unless you are born half­ mad. Only geniuses and madmen are exempt from the ravages of Truth. Awaken not the solemn somnambulist! The Prosperean Touch

There are no great experiences in life; there are no romances, no heroes, nothing extraordinary. There are only the commonplaces, the trivial, the banal, the vulgar, the real. But there is literature, which is to events what music is to the emotions. In literature anything is possible. In life only the dull reigns. Na­ poleon’s life was one of routine, so was Attila’s and Beau Brummel’s, and Cellini never was anything but a hoodlum until he began to write his memoirs. Both Rousseau and Stendhal would have been little more than sentimental idealist and boudoir lapdog had they not possessed the ability to spin a saga out of their escapades. The French Revolution was an affair of street mobs and ruffians until Michelet and Carlyle put their dreams into it and anointed with the chrism of their imaginations the ranters, demagogues and pikemen of the sewer cafes. Hugo and Flaubert found the supreme remedy for the dullness of life: Literature. They are the real supermen. Banners and Swords

I looked again, and saw that the Lord, having been 129

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born without eyelids, was totally blind, the dust raised over the question of his existence having filled his eye-sockets. Time is an aberration of the Infinite—and the In­ finite itself is an aberration of Something Else. We live in an aberrant universe, in a universe that has its centre everywhere and its axis nowhere. Disequil­ ibrium, madness, is the only possible condition on which anything can exist.

Great art is an aarons-rod—a flowering branch with a serpent twined about it.

O People! O Philistia! The Lord thy God is an abdominal God. For thee the Infinite stretches from the udder to the genitals. Poetry is the expression of the hunger for Elsewhere.

Without pain life would be unendurable. A life stuffed with joy would be a hopeless life, a life with­ out horizon or perspective. Pain has its fascinations and its witcheries. The worst of all possible worlds would be the most interesting, for there sensation would reach its maximum of force. In the heart lie all regrets; in the intellect all lethes. In the heart lie all crimes; in the intellect all absolu­ tions. But there are lethes that do not expunge and absolutions that do not absolve. The “guides” and “saviors” of humanity are those who first put out the human’s eyesight; then, in order to prove their beneficence (and to satiate their pride), they hand the blind one a gold-headed cane called an Ideal with which to grope through life. 130

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Knowledge, who carried in his hand the edelweiss, met Hope, who carried in his hand the lotus leaf. They exchanged plants and ate of them. Knowl­ edge digested and evacuated the leaf normally. Hope died on the way, poisoned by insight. Conventional morality, conventional ideals are of the greatest use to us sappers and miners, to us Satanic lurkers. It masks our real work; it is the con­ venient rose-bower, the prettily trellised summer house which shelters us while we accouch the im­ palpable and deadly influences that we have been carrying in the belly of our insurrectionary instincts. Children, I teach you to impoverish others, for the poor are brought at last to Christ. The sins of the rich are thus wiped away. It is they who, by their covetousness, insure the Kingdom of Heaven to the starving. Divine, inscrutable law of final compen­ sation! Forward, Comrades!

Long live the moralists! For they create for me, the Eternal Spectator, new and always more diverting spectacles. Without them my Perception would never smile. By their eternal antics they assure for­ ever the continuance of the ageless Humbug. Viva the Cosmic Harlequins! Banners and Swords

All great men address themselves in the third per­ son; think of themselves in the third person; some can even die in the third person, like Socrates and 131

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Goethe. What the average mind mistakes for egot­ ism is impersonality; the placid Spectator in the mind commenting on the vicissitudes of the bundle of phenomena made up of body, passions and dreams.

What is more accommodating, politer, than Life? Man owes his survival on the planet up to this time to the fact that Life has readily adapted itself to his immeasurable stupidity and constantly fluctuating absurdities. It enters with a sly deference and jovial ardor into all of his impostures. Life! That urbane valet who stands there for us holding the hair-cloth we have ordered or the cap and bells we have chosen to wear.

The difference between God and woman is this: that God sees everything at once and desires nothing, while woman desires everything at once and sees nothing.

Memory is the egotism of Time. Government symbolizes and realizes the courage of weaklings. It is the master criminal. It is a covenant of cruelty. Still, there is nothing more necessary than the police.

The thing we call Life is merely the insomnia of the Unconscious, Death become a sleep-walker. A thing may be so simple as to appear improbable— as, for instance, the existence of a Devil-God.

Victor Hugo says Genius wears all crowns. It wears the crown of thorns as well as the crown of ice. It wears the crown of dominion in this world and the crown of dominion in the next—for a special heaven 132

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is reserved for genius, a Valhalla of supermen. It wears the crown of myrtle and the crown of upas and hellebore. It wears a crown of stars and a crown of asps. And the rest of mankind in the presence of Genius is entitled to but one crown—the duncecap. In the Cathedral of Ice

Logic, which is the Messiah of third-rate minds, is reduced to the position of jester in the halls where King Irony holds his court. Irony is a third eye. In Swift irony was the cold, white shroud that he wrapped around his baffled ambitions; the irony of Heine was like the frozen tears that hang like icicles from the eyelashes of an exiled god; the irony of La­ forgue was a blanket of ice under which he committed his romantic obscenities; Flaubert lived in a mau­ soleum set in the mountains of the moon; Anatole France manufactured crucifixes made of frost and isinglass which chill only the lips of those who kiss them; the irony of Thomas Hardy is the irony of a Prospero who has been Prometheus; the irony of Joseph Proudhon is the irony of the man who hurls a cobblestone through your parlor window and then peers in through the broken glass. Banners and Swords

Preserve your dignity in defeat—it is the one unattachable asset of all bankrupts. It is the last stick on the dying fire. Hope is the digitalis of failure; it keeps the dead alive. It is a kind of second heart. 133

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I peered into the face of the Creator of all things and I saw therein indifference, over which there had come the patina of irony. And I peered into the face of Satan and I saw therein irony, over which had come the patina of ennui.

When the whips of the Furies have lashed us to shreds Pride protrudes through the bloody strips. The Cure for the Imagination

Every vice, evil and perverse tendency that presents itself in the realm of the imagination should be realized, if only to prove that the idea of the “for­ bidden,” being more pleasurable than that which is permitted, is as purely illusory and fails as completely to carry out its promise of satisfaction as any other dream of the mind. There is no cure for the maladies of the imagination like realization. Banners and Swords

The superior man uses his vices to cauterize the wounds which the Christian and conventional vir­ tues have imposed on him. God is a crazy barber who jests while he runs a razor over your throat.

Good nature is Spite grown fat; it is a kind of obese Envy. Posing and Clowning

Cows, mules and swine never pose. It can be only 134

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said of mediocrity that “it is always itself.” The pose of genius is a mask it wears to protect its tender skin from the bowel-epigrams of flies. To the crowd the antics of a genius are amusing, and it is by amus­ ing them that the superior mind keeps them at bay and does his work unmolested, as a photographer jingles a bell for a child to keep it amused while he manipulates the slides of the machine. Lie-Morality

Every lie is moral because it is always dictated by the instinct of self-preservation. From the supreme lie of the ages—Christianity—to the prettiest lies of a shoe clerk, there is an immortal sanction, self-pre­ servation. For a lie is an embryonic ideal, the raw material from which nations, races and individuals manufacture masks. The so-called “moral sense” is itself the arch-lie preservative. It is the satanic illu­ sion invented by the unguessable god to insure the continuance of the Puppet-Play throughout an eternity. No lie, no “moral life;” no “moral life,” no sanction for life at all; no sanction for life at all, uni­ versal inertia and suicide. Thus the Lie—the doc­ trine of ends, the belief that we are “here for a Pur­ pose”, and all the rest of the age-eaten jargon—is it not eminently moral, seeing that it lies at the very root of action, is the holy oil that anoints the shep­ herds of our souls, the religious leaders and moral philosophers; is, indeed, our only excuse for this Crusade called life, a Crusade that ends at a tomb, as do all Crusades? The Big Bass-Drums

In that stupendous epic of which Man is the hero 135

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moral principles play the same role as do the drums in every battle—they drive out thought and analysis. They are the hollow Oughts beaten into the brain and blood of the warrior to make him forget the hor­ ror of the deadly reality, the unspeakable dastardli­ ness and inequality of the combat. Beat the great tambours—Platonism, Christianity, Kantism, Deism —and beatify the carnage! Banners and Swords

If you abolish the crowd, you take away my cuspidor into which I spit my venom. In a society of criminals the greatest criminal would be the most esteemed in the land, just as in presentday society, which is organized hypocrisy, the great­ est hypocrite is the one who is most esteemed and honored.

I fashioned my life according to my dream, only to find that the dream was the reality and the reality was a dream.

It was the dullness, the philistinism, the mob-pres­ sure of Heaven that gave birth to Lucifer. The in­ dividualists must have a background. Let stupidity live and propagate. From its dregs lions and eagles and serpents are born. Kill not the fecund mother of us! The Waking Within a Waking

There is a moment after waking when we, with wideopen eyes, review our dreams. We saw ourselves in 136

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that drama of sleep other than we are, and, lying motionless in our beds, fully awake, we smile at what we did there in that spectral world of images. And when one has become the spectator of his own exist­ ence, has become the aesthetic contemplator of the drama of all existence, it is exactly that which he feels—the release from an absurd dream; an escape from Necessity itself, it almost seems. Banners and Swords

Satanism in morals is bourgeois, It is the satanic intelligence that the world fears, Iago led a fairly respectable life; so did Nietzsche. Lucifer is always depicted as a dreamer, never as an actor; the Chris­ tian Devil is an instigator; he seldom participates. The greatest friendship will always be found between two people who understand and respect each other’s dishonesty.

No friendship can be lasting or admirable without a splendid lie. Friendship, like love, feeds on illusions or a community of predatory instincts.

Every genius should have within reach two or three bores on whom he can void his venom. There are no latrines on Olympus. One must come down to the highroads occasionally for organic reasons. The people—the Philistine—will not tolerate the “in­ decent” if it is beautiful. It must always be on a level with the obscenities they delight to etch while sitting in their privies—the real Pantheon of the people. 137

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Death is the return of the Actual to the Possible. Of my breath there shall come a hundred elfin lives; of my body and brain there shall be born the Messiah of Insurrections. To hate one’s illusions is like trying to kill the doctor who has come to cure you of an illness. All health is based on illusion. It is truth that slays all peace. Honor is the treaty made among thieves that each may the better ply his trade.

Nature, Dionysian, riantly satanic, has been turned into a dull, sad Christ by the invention of society. Bacchus with a crown of thorns; a Satan with ingrown wings that flap drowsily in his brain, fanning into life sickly dreams instead of being spread in space —such are we civilized ones. God is an infinite spirit exploring matter. He hollows the reeds called men and women and fills them with mud, ashes, quicklime (which we call our passions) and sticks a few lighted matches in our brains. F'rom these we get just enough light to behold our own ignorance. It is a memorable adventure—for God.

Would Adam and Eve ever have been driven from Paradise if Eve had had the wit to invite the Lord to partake of her? Her descendant Mary was a wiser courtesan. Cain was branded not because he killed Abel, but be­ cause he stood apart and thought. The highest form of mental activity is to set the seal of the absurd on the commonsense of the world. 138

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Every motion that a man makes is a kind of highly subtilized phallic worship. Every motion that a woman makes follows, obscurely and ambiguously it may be, the motions of the body in the act of coition. Poverty is one of the many excuses for spirituality.

There is no greater joy for the super-intelligent man than that of analyzing his perfections in order to dis­ cover the core of vice in them. In doing this he drinks himself to the dregs. Demos-God

All private belief of whatsoever kind should be im­ posed by popular vote. Until this step is taken, democracy cannot be said to have triumphed. The voice of the people will never become in fact the voice of God until opinion and belief are made com­ pulsory by majority rule. The Reward of Hercules

A great genius has three trifles to combat—the spirit of the times (the reigning intrenched stupidity); the prejudices of the race (aura and phosphor of its bad digestion); and mediocrity which has “arrived.” If within sixty years he has made a slight impression on any one of these three obstacles, the public may subscribe for a mattress on which he may die and after the demise it may subscribe for a wagon-load of roses to cover up the filth of the mattress. 139

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Banners and Swords

God, filling all space and all matter, cannot know movement. Thus, as Wisdom in all ages has sus­ pected, he is the Spirit of Spontaneous Inertia. God must exist, else how came evil into the world?

There will soon come a time when the individualist will be an atavist and will be expunged by the State like the pyromaniac. If final justice is done, it is the evil ones—the crimi­ nals—who should sit on the right hand of God, for who have relieved our boredom, both in reality and romance, like the great “sinners”? Who have done so much to divert us from the stupid daily round? Whom have we aureoled if not Cain, Napoleon, Bor­ gia and Nero? If the world is a stage, the ultimate prizes should go to the greatest actors and not to the supernumeraries. On the right hand of God there shall sit Cain and on the left Messalina. God being perfect, and perfection being beyond criti­ cism, all vices are permitted him.

When a harlot has been worn out by the embraces of a thousand men and can no longer experience delight in the male’s arms, she still has one great delight to come—union with the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. She seeks conversion; she becomes a mystical strumpet. To double the pleasure one gets from indulging one’s vices, study them. This is safer than combatting them; besides, it adds the ecstasy of mental analysis to the ecstacy of indulgence. 140

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Doubt is the sacred sickness. The Beethoven of Infamies

Evil is profoundly harmonic. Rhythm and melody and assonance are there no less than in the “good.” Evil being eternal, its sweep is infinite. There is a Beethoven of infamies hidden in the heart of Life. The Ninth Symphony—hymn to pure Evil—of this mystical Master is being written. We humans are the notes in that supreme masterpiece. Woman and God

That the “love of God” in woman is a secondary sexual characteristic is proven by the fact that women (even of a deeply religious nature) fall off in their devotions after marriage and continue to fall away from God-thoughts and Christ-thoughts as their lovers or children (or both) increase in number. At sixty, in such women, God-worship and church­ going may survive, but as an atavistic trait only. Banners and Swords

If you wish to kill a friend with the most subtle and maddening of all poisons always wear a contented, smiling air in the face of his disappointments. This will torture him to the point of murder; and you can here study the transmutation of honey into venom. Nothing is so unscrupulous as Conscience. Being en­ tirely concerned with self, it sacrifices everything in its path. 141

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Mediocrity finds only pleasure in vice; genius alone sees the immortal beauty of its face.

Women should never be allowed in a church, for the Holy Ghost itself is not safe from their secret desire veiled under their prayers and tears. As stupidity is universal and immortal, what every­ body believes must be a lie. Nothing is therefore so ridiculous as common sense. To abolish common sense would ensure chaos. The preposterous has, therefore, its logical raison d’etre; in fact, logic is the instrument with which we justify the absurd.

Everyday truths, our common sense, are life-presevers for some, dead weights for others; for the cosmic swimmer they are certain death.

Success is a pagan. Failure is a Christian. Conscience is a bridle that transforms a wild Arabian stallion into a cab horse. The truth lies between two extremes, says an old Latin proverb; which is to say that truth does not exist at all, but that safety lies in compromising be­ tween two lies.

If we could see every side of life at once we should see the justification for every absurdity, for every stupidity; a justification that would glorify absurdity and stupidity, but which could never rationalize it. To divinize our desires, that is the explanation of criminal and saint. And both are right. Instinct is the only righteous god. Follow your god if he lead you to the gallows. Set the nimbus of social martyr­ 142

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dom on your “original sin.” Follow the drum-beat in the arteries. Conscience

If a giant boulder which in the rush and sweep of an avalanche has crushed the hut of a peasant and brought about the death of those living within should drag itself to one side and weep with remorse, we should be inclined to laugh at the absurdity of the spectacle and at the same time pity its ignorance. A bad conscience in a human being is as absurd. Banners and Swords

In the Individual’s daily duel with Circumstance Satan makes a better second than God. Above Olympus were wind-riven clouds and the eter­ nal blue; at the top of the Christian cathedrals there are only bad breaths. Not only each thought but each element or particle of a thought is capable of so many modifying rela­ tions that, properly speaking, we cannot have an opinion about anything. The Neo-Pagans who tell us of the glories of Greece by hurling at our heads names—Plato, Phidias, Praxiteles, Sophocles, Heraclitus—know really noth­ ing of life in that time, daily work-a-day life. Plato and Phidias no more give us the key to life in Greece than Rodin, Swinburne, Shelley, Manet, Leconte de Lisle, Victor Hugo or Meredith will give posterity any idea of life in the Christian world today. Ennui 143

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and misery were the master-lords then as they are today, and will ever be.

Moralists are the doctors of imaginary men. Let Go!

One is not free until one gives up the search for God, the search for Truth (the free-thinker’s fetich) and Hope. The fever leaves the brain and the sight clears. All life rises as a spectacle when we no longer search, when all finality is seen to be a snare. We step from the stage and sit in the audience. Gods, moralities, cosmologies—we turn them into playthings. We vagabond across the ages. Horeb and Olympus are both our homes and we are equal friend to Christ and Aphrodite, and in the houses of St. Anthony and Dionysus we stay for a little while, and listen and ramble on toward the sunset of each dream, Spin­ oza’s or Napoleon’s, believing in each for a minute, believing in no dream for an hour. And at the end we thank the eternal god of destruction that no one belief lasted a single day, that God, Hope and Truth were not. Banners and Swords

I dream; therefore I am. I lie; therefore I persist. Happiness; that is, conscious oblivion.

Poetry is a substitute for the Impossible. Irony is intelligent laughter; often it is laughter be­ come penitent. 144

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I act, therefore I feel; I feel, therefore I act; I act and feel, therefore I think, which latter is the acid that destroys all antecedent therefores. The mental world is the Horla that absorbs and reduces to nonentity all other worlds. What a bloody shambles is the Ivory Tower to those of us with the satanic vision who live there! Shelves with acids and chloroforms, dissecting tables full of victims we have “rubbed elbows with” in our forag­ ing trips into life. And our own blood-clots with the rest—we the impeccable vivisectors of life! The comic is inherent in character, not in events. Society

Society being the attempt of man to flee the satanism, the brutality of nature, it should follow that civiliza­ tion—organized society—should tend to what is generally held to be the opposite of the satanic—the divine. As a matter of fact, all civilization, all anti­ naturalism, all society, tends to the absurd. Thus the divine is the absurd. Nature—war, instinct, satanism—is the only reality. The regulative prin­ ciple everywhere muddles. Society is the corrupter of the Devil—originally a god, now a business man.

Indifference: Witches’ Broth

Quiescence is the melting-pot of indignation, whence, in time, the pot growing cold, shall issue a swarm of wasps—the wasps of irony. 145

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The Great Panel Game

Children, one thing is needful: hypocrisy. I mean, of course, a beneficent hypocrisy—the hypocrisy that preserves the conventions outwardly but leaves a fair margin for the secret and subterranean expression of your instincts, which, children, always are pleasantly vicious. This hypocrisy is beneficent because, on one side, it will not bring you into open conflict with your environment, and, on the other, it allows a degree of expansion to your own sinful nature. Banners and Swords

From the sublime to the ridiculous is a step down­ ward, but from the sublime to the ironic is one step upward—from the dazzling peaks of Mont Blanc to the tragi-comic councils of Olympus. A man may shrink, may become so small that he be­ comes an object of curiosity. It is in this way that humility reaches the limelight.

Nietzsche’s doctrine of “the Eternal Return” was best illustrated in himself, for he preached the ideal of sacrifice and a living for a “Beyond.” He was the last great Christian. The will to create the superman, the Beyond-Man, orders one even to sacrifice one’s friends, says Nietzsche in one of his aphorisms. Is not this the ecclesiastical furor par excellence? Can you not see the cowled fanatic in that? Can you not smell the fagots and the pitch-pile? Can not we nihilists and mockers see the psychologic germ of the new Torquemada in that sacrificial admonition? The Eternal Return! Indeed, thou wert a Return, O thou dancing, Dionysian forerunner of an Inquisition! 146

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Jesus and Spinoza

Through love alone we can never reach comprehen­ sion; but through comprehension and understanding we may reach love. This explains why Spinoza was superior to Christ. The latter was a heart-creature, a type the very opposite of intellectual, the antithesis of sceptical, something of a fanatic—a great lover and a great hater. Spinoza, who lived more truly in the “Universal Spirit” than Christ did, was the Lord of Understanding. The world to him was a spectacle; he would never have been guilty of driving the money-changers from the Temple—he neither loved nor hated money-changers; he understood them. Not to love or to hate a thing is in the end to love it. Christ was handicapped by his passionate sympa­ thies; he localized his love. He was an alms-giver, a helping hand, and was just a bit ridiculous in his in­ tolerance of the rich. Spinoza could have explained Christ, but Christ could never have explained Spinoza. Banners and Swords

God is the greatest of sportsmen, the first gentleman sportsman. For he exists for “the sake of the game” alone. Sport abolishes all metaphysics, all teleologi­ cal principles. It moves to no far-off divine event. It exists for the glory of the minute. It acts, it smiles and passes. And God spinning his worlds, inventing Waterloos and Marnes—is he not the patron saint of all sportsmen? To comprehend is to possess.

When we confer a body on our dreams we have 147

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changed Apollo into Quasimodo.

To see part of a thing fires the imagination; to see all of a thing extinguishes the imagination. So long as God dodges us and reveals himself in bits and frac­ tions he will have worshippers and haters; but as soon as we know him in his entirety, he will become commonplace and a bore to lovers and haters. The “garment of dreams” has its lining; and it is there one must look for the moths.

Insanity is the highest form of humor. Many escape the wrath of God; but who has escaped the crushing irony of his goodness? Yes, Lucifer weeps; the brain has its tears; but they are never seen because they fall into the Infinite.

What Voltaire said of God—that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him—is as true for the thinker as for the masses. For the latter he is a moral necessity; for the former he is necessary to per­ fect his marksmanship. The egotism that peeps through its own legs; some men are prouder of the black eye they have received in a brawl than of any which they have ever given to an opponent.

If each feeling dared think, society would crumble to chaos. There are two ends—“social ends” (in the jargon of socialists, anarchists and ameliorists), which are fan­ tastic, romantic “ends,” which do not, cannot exist, 148

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and my “ends,” which are real and involve my own destiny, the expression of my own character. Hence, society is always my enemy, as it seeks to impose on me a false self, with false (to me) ends, and sup­ presses my real destiny for a fictitious destiny. In some men thought tickles feeling into life; their humanity comes through their brain, their love is born of their scepticism. Nothing attracts more attention than to be generous anonymously. And the anonymous giver is often killed by the rooted sorrow that his compulsory modesty has brought upon himself. To rescue a drowning person and then to slip away in the crowd unknown—what a lordly torment to inflict on one’s self!

Wherever there is a law there will be an anarchist. Whatever is legal is anti-natural. What we destroy is immediately immortalized by passing into and becoming a part of us. This is the sinister revenge of the things we hate. That which I push out of my path in front of me incorporates it­ self into my shadow projected behind.

Pride is a lightning-rod that courts the anger of the elements; vanity is a windmill that responds to every gutter breeze.

All unity of character and thought has the stamp of death. Clouds and moods never repeat themselves. All wise sayings are epitaphs.

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