Darconville's Cat (94 page)

  “Hate is old wrath, fire built to correct the
inclemency of air, a monodeism of total aversion coupled with
hopelessly settled detestation —and the luxury of knowing
whom
or
what
one hates is to experience one of
the greatest feelings of elation on earth. It is, in fact, a faith,
an intuitive certainty beyond the plane of discourse enforcing an
experimental right, one which cannot be extended to the common run
of mortals without danger, that seeks to renounce in fury what was
once expected from others in kindness and locating entirely what,
delivered of, alone is cleansed. One hates in order to rob from
another a life stolen from himself, for hate not only hates what it
lacks, but lacks what it loved, and in its grip—an oxbrake in which
you’re completely shod of mercy by the very creature you’d swiftly
gore to pieces if but freed—the only possible pleasure attains to
its secret illusions and intentions of
vengeance
. The
formula of rupture takes place. Every former excellence of your
victim becomes every conceivable fault, every promise an
impervestigable lie, and every memory of her a viper eating through
the bowels of your benefits, all to set in motion such a fell and
deadly hate that through a sea of sins you’d wade to your revenge
to drive a rivet in her sconce and hang her up for a sign, reading:
‘
Obit anus, abit onus
!’

  “Hate, like jetsam, sinks. It is proposition, not
proposal. It lurks below the rounds of habit wherethrough in any
age men canvass and toil, and yet while everywhere the average man
when finished will reckon up results, the hater, if no closer to
his retribution for his work, feels nothing accomplished, still
labors in mind, and with implacable consistency refuses to
acknowledge of process completed what is nullified in thought not.
How little is achieved by him though other problems be solved!
Nothingness is immanent in hatred. Its horrors defy the words of
mouth or pen to set it down. Your craw bugles. You become a
thermidor of pure pain. Your feet turn to roots, your heart to
lead, and yet, while the imagination sprouts more goblins to molest
it than the witchlight of night itself, the creative evil at the
fountainhead of hate is a lonely and terrible thing, a passion of
the individual soul living low and solitary as a bucket in a well,
for whereas the lover endeavors to obtain something which he does
not have, the man who hates paradoxically tries to
recover
by an act of supreme alienation and anger that which has been taken
from him—and which, constantly fleering, mowing, and ridiculing by
the very nature of its existence, mocks the mind to murder! Haters
vote in the rain.

  “The smoldering aspect of hatred, often, is in
direct proportion to the degree in which the person’s right to
exist as a human being has been taken away. And more. It is
impossible for a human being to give up his freedom, or be robbed
of it, without something coming in to restore the inner
balance—something arising from inner freedom when outer freedom has
been denied. Now, in conventional circles, in the eyes of the
benign, self-contented, ever-poised, well-adjusted bourgeoisie, one
is not supposed to admit one’s hatred, just as, for instance, for
decades past even the admission of one’s sexual impulses was
considered unseemly. But a few men there are who must remain true
to a single extreme character, and for such men, disgusted to
insult at the thought of a stinking and cowed
swallowing
of resentment or any like repression, there abides a paramount
truth at the core of all hatred— the re-establishing of one’s
freedom! A man isn’t rich unless he’s making money while he sleeps.
The profoundest urge of mankind is to fly.

  “Hatred is that extreme fixation—not, like love, an
emotion from those rude and simple times when tall bonnets were in
fashion but one predating Cain in the blackness it shares with
original chaos—which liquidates the reality of both victim and
executioner, for in an absurd irony of contagion the negative
qualities it effects in the self become proof positive of the
cause; to make your victim undergo the sort of thing which troubles
and overwhelms your existence so cruelly is to have to sustain your
own hurt.
Respirit domino pro tempore
: the prosecutor
becomes star witness for the defense!

  “Hate wakens to the actual. You may be accepted for
what you are only until what you are is what you shouldn’t be,
becoming then, in what you shouldn’t, what the
lover-as-hanging-judge tells you you can’t. Provocation—who will
deny it?—creates what it provokes! The Law of Talion cries out to
its cognate, ‘Retaliate!’ Enslaved from the start, however, by his
very own laws—the pawn of their very enactment—the hater will
always be the first among its casualties unless he finds release,
and since the only way of ridding himself of the passion can no
longer consist in verifying, in experiencing once again, its
intolerable character, in spite of the affective presence of what
is physically absent, it falls to the purest and most ancient
compensation therefore to rectify the wrong, for, as in exorcism,
one can never cast out anything but what was first cast in. The
best—the
only
—way is to hate.

  “Hate! Say the word: how the mouth, shaped to
sarcasm, fakes in an adventitious bark what, exhaled, becomes a
râle of shuddering repugnance swiftly cut in two by the rapiered T
that snaps the entire face shut without one movement of the lips.
It blasphemes in a single brief gasp, a respiration incessant and
increasing. It is the best verbal equivalent of human ache,
thrippling just too high in the throat for a scream and becoming
almost a stutter in awe of what can’t be spoken, bleaching the
heart, darkening the shafts of the sun, and removing the fragrance
from flowers.

  “The man who hates has lost in the extreme the whole
concept of the ideal—or, to put it another way, he has not so much
lost an ideal as he has transferred the whole concept of one ideal
to the furthest extreme of another—and yet, in either case,
exalting, as he must, the necessity of injustice existing in a
brutal God, he proceeds to write in his own bitter soul not just a
complaint but an entire destructive theology! No man loves, says
Aristotle, but he that is first delighted with comeliness and
beauty. Now, forbear and listen. As this fair object varies, so
does love. There’s of course no determining law to love what is
beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself to humans with
any imperative to respond to it. Beauty, however, appeals—and yet
all forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the aesthetic
function, are at bottom attempts on his part to realize the
ideal
! Now, follow whither my finger points: beauty is
created by love. It will not and will never have any meaning for
you other than the meaning you give to it, a pretext for the
expansion of consciousness to beguile the despair you have without
it. Sleep is only the bogus we use for dreams, with repose our
intention, Eleutheropolis our goal. Man struggles to realize his
own ideal, to sound out the highest possible self. Who doubts it?
He projects his ideal of an absolute worship-worthy existence—the
ideal that he is unable to isolate within himself—and with it
crowns another human being, the loss of whom, if and when it
happens, becomes of necessity the loss of the ideal, but there is
your aspiration as long as there is your ideal and the struggle for
it counts for nothing. Mecca is situated in the midst of barren and
stony country.

  “The ideal! Doesn’t it write itself into our weak
and insufficient hearts in the wittiest of fictions? Who can say
what imp ghosts it, what telchin is its genius?
Quisquis amat
ranam, ranam putat esse Dianam
: the blindness of love is
precisely the vision of the ideal! O pretty, pretty, pretty but
how, you ask, for there grunts Parmeno’s sow! The huge hairy
smellfungus named Polyphemus won the admiration and love of
beautiful Galatea, whiter than the white withy-wind! Venus herself
pursued Vulcan, fascinated in the limp of the filthy smith. I could
cite the Egyptian salinaries who couched with cadavers, draw
parables in the lust for decaying cheese, the poverty of misers,
and the gods who are worshipped in silly glyphs. And, tell me then,
what strange algebra lurks in the proud father’s mind who flashes
for approval that snapshot of, what—a vegetable? a wombat? a
puffpile of insipid dough?—no, rather his own two-week-old baby, a
little puckfisted nobblyblat with forty assorted leaks, soiled
buns, and a face like a stump pudding! Love, unlike hate, makes all
distinctions void. Every book is about its own author. Beauty,
simply, is an emanation of the requirements of love, and hate
refuses them. I would give you a wealth of italics here.

  “Then the ideal—what does it matter how?—disappears,
the provocation to hate we spoke of. So enter hate. (Isn’t it odd
that this sharpest response to someone occurs just when it isn’t
asked for?) We once wanted to have what we now abhor—so what we
love always tells us what we aren’t—but as what we loved wanted us
to be what we couldn’t be
when
we loved, the haste of
departure following the huff of dissatisfaction, it proves by the
law of subtraction, if my mathematics is better than your judgment,
not only that love wasn’t sufficient but that the object of it was
nothing but a disastrous splodge not worth the tmesis of what value
soever in the first place! Orals, I’m afraid, imply but do not
posit aurais. Hate, having entered, now puts its feet up. It
becomes a boarder! Then you understand one of the first lessons of
hate, that we know each other best, not by strength, but by
weakness, not as surpassing but as
lacking
such and such
of the ideal —know each other, I say, but do I say more? For
example, do I say that weakness makes people kin, creates accord,
fosters alliance? The answer is yes when you speak of love. But
when you speak of hate? Christ, man, when you speak of hate you
speak of hell!
Prevention
becomes the heart of the policy!
Swiftly, we do not wish to appear good so as not to be pitied, so,
not to be pitied, wicked—why, even as
satisfied
as
possible, so that our satisfaction may be truly hateful, the more
quickly to ulcerate the soul not only of our occasional or
permanent enemy, my friend, but of God himself! Yes,
God
!
Have you understood me to say that the hater is an average man?

  “Are you then like all the other fools and
pseudo-podiospores who’d have indifference the antonym of love?
Indifference
disgusts
me! I am what I know and, to prove
it, hate what I am—which at least gives me life. Indifference does
not prompt us, sir, to unkind actions! You want hatred here.
Hatred—if nothing else—is meant to be a provocation to an absent
God, a thrust, you see, as though scandalous, frenzied, inexpiable,
raging, and unutterable provocations were a way of forcing that God
who’s let a love be lost to witness his will, with the hater
thinking: if there were a God who possessed power, would he allow
that virtue which supposedly honors him (even if by means of the
shameless and pathetic proxy of it invested in another human being)
to be sacrificed to such exotic uncompromising vice? The greater
the punishment he feels merited by his action, the greater the
value which the hater attributes to his crime! The extreme hater is
always a dualist, polymath to ways both good and evil. But which is
Sybaris? Which Crotona? Ha! Ha! Ha! No one
knows
, my
friend, neither theologian nor thinker nor thrip, for just as once
passionate sinners are claimed—according to biographical cliché—to
make the greatest saints, the hater’s conscience is always
activated by the remorse of what otherwise might have been; indeed,
the remorse actually provides the energy for the crimes he dreams.
He is afraid of discovering that the world is well-contrived and
yet constructs the revolution of his abhorrence upon the reason of
it, for since he is forced to accept the fact that love, lost, is
evil the alternative of hate, found, must perforce be the only good
at hand to address it—and so the breach actually becomes the
observance in a desperate attempt to settle a matter of
contradiction by means of conflicting evidence! There is no better
poacher than an ex-gamekeeper. The ultimate profanity is the Black
Mass
.

  “It was William Blake who wrote,

          Mutual
in one another’s love and wrath

        all renewing

          We
live as One Man.

  “To detest! To abhor, abominate, execrate! To hate!
This
becomes religion: an answer to the pansophistical
lie, as rendered in the Gospels, that one must love, for the hater
who unsuccessfully has tried now sees successfully he shouldn’t
have. The astonished reason—if it wishes to articulate the dogma in
action which also conveys its sense of scandal—is obliged to
substitute the material of
hatred
for the revealed matter
of God who in all matters, permissive, if not actually directive,
is involved, face it! In that way it gives an exact expression to
the impression made by the mystery on a reasoning faculty which has
been abandoned, both naturally and supernaturally, to its own
resources. All the ills with which God afflicts him can thus be
considered as the ransom God—the Ontological Scold—exacts before he
allows man the right to inflict suffering on others and to be
unlimitedly vicious. To the extent that God, the arch-layer of
plots, can be viewed as the original guilty party who attacked man
before man could attack him, to that extent man has acquired the
right and the strength, even as blind misosopht, to attack his
neighbor: ‘I am pleased by the evil I do to others as God is
pleased by the evil he has done to me.’ I mean, if knowledge ends
by becoming a crime, what is called crime must therefore in some
sense contain the key to knowledge! As a result, it is only by
extending the sphere of crime further and further, even to its most
inelastic limit—the disposition for someone’s utter
annihilation—that the mind, reaching to these extraordinary crimes,
will recover not only what has heretofore been prohibited
knowledge, that knowledge infinitely greater than that which now we
have, but also recover from a long servitude-of-revenge that any
Supreme Being worth the candle must be forced thereafter to
consider as a simple matter of
res inter alios acta alteri
nocere non debet
, the evidence of which in earthly courts—as
it then must be in celestial—is inadmissible.
In-ad-missible
! I am with you, impenitent! I spit upon the
injustice of the universe!