The Great Weaver From Kashmir (19 page)

When I was seventeen years old I took part in Spanish and French
nighttime debauchery in which naked women, painted from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, performed fancy lesbian dances in between running to giant Negroes tied down to couches, while the audience lay in each other's arms on the floor. The gratification of sexual demands is man's highest pleasure, and justifiable only when it is gratified in such a way that no new individuals are born. Homosexuality is the highest level of sexual satisfaction. Of all the paths of gratification, that one is lowest and most brutish, most blind and imperfect, which leads to such a fatal consequence as the birth of new people. The goal of man is to destroy man. The goal of culture is to destroy man. The goal of wisdom is to destroy man.
“Der Mensch ist Etwas das überwunden werden muß.” “Satan conduit le bal!”
³⁹
Homosexuality, drug addiction, and suicide are the joyful extirpation of the final and highest beings on Earth. The deepest desire of lovers is to be reminded of death in their embraces. Only death gratifies love.

Behold! These ideals point to end times.

I do not think; have never thought. I know. It is my fate and misfortune to have always known without having thought or learned. He who needs to think and learn is endowed with the talent of never knowing anything. And that is a great grace. The noblest creature on Earth is the ass, because Christ rode one into Jerusalem.

A man's aptitude is a product of time and patience, says Balzac.
But my power is revealed in impatient coruscations. The deepest perceptions charge through my soul like crashes of thunder. The history of the Earth, the history of the solar system, the experience of mankind – all of it streams through my being in galvanic revelations. I am the mirror image of the development of mankind, of its grandeur and its pettiness, its distress, its wisdom, and its error. I am creation itself in the terrifying night gleam of sleepless self-consciousness. I cannot sleep; I cannot dream; I cannot forget. I stay awake, see, see through everything; I am clairvoyant; nothing can be concealed from me; I am everything, the universe my prison; the ends of the world slumber in my breast; I am alone; nothing exists but me, a feeble ephemera; I am suffering itself, dread, panic itself; death, it is I.

People suffer; all around me are people suffering. They suffer from freedom and oppression, from penury and opulence, from ignorance and knowledge, from love and hate, from God and Satan, from what they are and also what they are not. I met a little girl on the street this morning with a milk jug in one hand and bread in the other; she was walking slowly and carefully, so as not to slip on the ice, and the bread was almost as big as she was – she too was on the road to Golgotha. I felt so much pity for her, this poor little thing who walked so carefully for fear of breaking her jug, that I started sobbing when I came home.

What power do great men have? All that they accomplish is to rob the people of their ability to bear their fate. They drive the people out into the most desolate wilderness in the hope of the Promised Land, and in the wilderness the people collapse and die. At its best the Promised Land, the dreamland, proved to be seven times more
accursed than the old one. It requires a great deal of childishness to fight for an ideal or solve a puzzle, because in the morning the ideal becomes soiled underwear that has gone from harlot to harlot, and the puzzle a Masonic symbol. Mankind has struggled and fought under the banners of its great men for a million years only to confirm the fact that nowhere is there a land of bliss, only various forms of suffering. There is a lichen called manna growing on rocks, and a rainbow in the sky, faith, the covenant with the Lord, but no one has ever reached its end, because it is only a mirage in man's eye – and those who eat manna get sick to their stomachs. Primitive man makes holes in the ground, and the holes gape like wounds over his suffering while he lives, and fall together over his remains when he dies, like a scab over a wound. We cannot go any further. No one has ever reached a fairer dreamland than a three-ell-long grave. After a few years the worms promenade over my rotted head.

I find myself compelled to consider the three greatest giants of the last generation: Tolstoy, Strindberg, and Nietzsche.

Tolstoy wanted to help the world with wisdom and philanthropy, and died a martyr of despair. I know of few pilgrimages more dismal than the flight of the old man from Yasnaya Polyana a few days before he died. He almost runs, as if trying to convince himself that he is young and immortal, and then disappears and dies. No one became wiser or better; in Paris a few fanatics founded a club, that is all.

Nietzsche wanted to overcome man with the superman, and when he saw that all things came to naught he wrote to Rome and requested an audience with the pope. What a lamentable recourse to descry finally his last refuge under the protective wing of the Christian delusion! And he went insane in Torino two days after he
wrote the letter, then lived for eleven years like a beast, imagining that he was Christ on the cross!

Strindberg wanted to save mankind from its misery using all of the medicines that have been tried on it since the start of the history of mankind. And yet this titanic, universal homeopath lived his whole life as a wretched target for the persecutions of Jesus Christ, until he himself surrendered to this cross-madness on his deathbed, and now one may read the inscription on the wooden cross over his grave in Stockholm, worded according to his own instructions:
“O crux, ave, spes unica!”
⁴⁰

Even the most perfect man is nothing but a plaything of derision. Man is nothing but vanity.

What will is it that conjures up spirits from the mysterious depths of unconsciousness and makes them dance a whole lifetime by its hypnotic power, curse their provenance, and fear the way to dust?
“Gieb, ja ergieb, grausamster Feind, mir – dich!”
⁴²
shouts Nietzsche.

Once I was up north in Kaldidalur, in the Icelandic wilderness, where the path leads over dapple gray boulders destitute and dead, and in the distance tower the glaciers like unsculpted images of saints, those holy and soulless gods of the wastelands. But in the middle of Kaldidalur there grows a little plant. I don't know its
name, but I saw it after I'd been traveling for half a day. It was growing alone there in the endless boulder-strewn tracts of land. And it bowed down when it saw me, because that was the first time since it was born that it had seen a living thing. I tore it out of the ground because it was exactly long enough and soft enough for me to use to clean my pipe.

I ask, why does the wave of life try to break forth from the mysterious depths? What is the goal of this blind struggle against triumphant death? Life is on the wrong path! It has no home in the material world; it dies! Poor being, you arise from eternal silence in order to die.

Everything that lives perishes, families as well as individuals; the sun burns out and the solar system dies of cold and starvation like little children. Ancient prophecies proclaim that the God of Judgment will come in fire. But this is false prophecy: the God of Judgment will come in ice. The sun has changed noticeably in the last ten months, says Soupault:

I stand at my window, look out at the fog, and ask, where will I be when the sun burns out – I, this perceiving speck of the universe, this questioning lump of earth, this trembling grain of dust, this husk of helplessness – where will I be then?

Heaven and Earth, have pity on my paltriness, for I am so weak
and small, so ridiculous in my desire for the Almighty, such an atrocious symbol of death in my hope for immortality! The jackal howls in the wilderness until it drops down dead. And vultures pick the flesh from its bones, and the sand polishes them white. Far out in the desert there rises up from the sand a five-thousand-year-old monument to an ancient king. Written upon it are these words: “Tremble, pitiful man, for I am the King of Kings; all the nations of the Earth quake in fear!” All that is left of this powerful king's realm is this monument. His bones have long been lost in the sand that now covers his ancient kingdom.

Tremble, pitiful man!

Where am I able to satisfy my soul? I search in the innermost recesses of my heart; I search up and down and every which way, overturn everything, like a man who has lost his collar button beneath some furniture. And I find nothing at all that could possibly satisfy my soul.

Excelsior – higher? No, it's just a name on hotels and laundry soap.

Eternal development, higher and higher, without beginning or end, eternity after eternity, where there is no boundary – what would that be? A vicious circle!

The other idea, development over the course of several eternities, until I am sucked into divinity, into a nirvana of motionless,
complete perfection – what would that be? Nothing but utter lack and death.

Do I desire the Heavenly Kingdom and eternal bliss? No, dear God, I cannot even bear to hear these things named. It is as if someone were offering me eternal drunkenness. I would take a jazz band over angels' harps. I would rather go to the Tivoli or Luna Park than to Paradise. I get squeamish when I think about the elect: pure simpletons,
bonhommes,
peasants who have not even read Anatole France, Gabriele d'Annunzio, or Marcel Proust, not to mention knowing nothing about the most recent movements in literature and philosophy, such as surrealism or relativity theory! The last thing I want to do is spend all eternity in the company of patriarchs from the Old Testament, captious scholastic philosophers from the centuries before printing, fanatical martyrs, hysterical maidens who turned their backs on their sexuality, entered convents and “beheld visions,” or wealthy bourgeois from Jerusalem or Reykjavík. What dainty company that would be! No – on to Valhalla, then, to fight with the fallen warriors!

Perhaps there is no paradise on either this side or the other more desirable than the Icelandic dales.

One spring day I will pack my belongings and set out for the dales. I will build myself a shack, even up the cobbles with a hammer and cut pieces of turf with a scythe, stack them in layers and put rafters on top. Though a man might have only two goats and a withy-roofed cottage, it's better than a prayer. In the summer I will rise with the birds of the moor and start to cut the grass; blessed aroma of the earth, say I, blessed mountains! And when winter arrives the lambs will eat out of the palms of my hands and the cow will stare at me
with huge, blunt, tender eyes, and low when I pass by. And the dog will close its brown, faithful eyes and sleep at the footboard of its master.

There my heart is directed, there and no further.

There where holy mountains tower

Toward northern winds so sparkling pure

Where Iceland thrives in winter's power

Where you, my soul, in bliss endure;

On peaks and passes desert fowl

Flit through frost without complaint

And glaciers in their vastness growl

Awful as unsculpted saints

Where Urðhæð, Einbúi
⁴⁴
watch by night

And white volcanoes scrape the air

And ancient clefts proclaim their might

At last, my nymph, I spy you there!

Upon your lips felicity naps

And from your eyesight vigilance glows,

While soft about you maidenhood wraps

Its linen frosts of tender snows.

Here is all that I love; here is my church; here will I wake and sleep, live and die. The natural beauty of the Icelandic mountains is my lover and my wife – let me die in her arms; let my soul be joined to her in death!

In Skerpla
⁴⁵
the mountain hall is polished and beautified, everything hums with the purl of the brooks and birdsong on the eternal
days of spring. And in Sólmánuður
⁴⁶
my mountains are woven with dignity and tranquility, cloaked in mirage and dream, the nights grow darker, the songs of swans resound from moorland lakes, and from my hot springs ascend lazy bright fogs that slink back and forth throughout my dale. What mythic nobility!

It is my innermost desire to be able to walk here again, to be able to roam like a peculiar bird over the Icelandic mountains on quiet midsummer nights after I am dead.

On a cold, clear day in Þorri, 1924, the
Gullfoss
churns into the harbor. A small group of people waits at the quayside, folk who are expecting friends on the ship. The north wind is cold and bitter at the harbor: men thrust their fur hats farther down onto their heads; women hide their powdered red faces in the turned-up collars of their fur coats.