Un Homme Et Un Chien Dans Une Gare Isolée

"Man loves the dog, but how much more ought he to love it if he considered, in the inflexible harmony of the laws of nature, the sole exception; which is that love of a being that succeeds in piercing, in order to draw closer to us, the partitions, everywhere else impermeable, that separate the species! We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us."
- Maurice Maeterlinck, Our Friend the Dog

One Lajdak Doesn't Make A Poland

An ethico-mathematical question: how many lajdaks make a Poland? Dmitri Karamazov says of a Pole he has insulted, "If I call him a scoundrel, it doesn't mean I'm calling all of Poland a scoundrel. One lajdak doesn't make a Poland." But do two, three, a million? To put it another way, how many Americans must be fat before we can call the United States a fat country? How many Philistines must be philistines before it becomes a general insult? Or to cite a historiographical controversy, how many Germans must support the Nazis before it can be called a nation of "willing executioners"?

Maybe God can do the math. On behalf of Sodom, Abraham pleads to the Lord, "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?" God replies, "If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake." However as it eventually emerges that there are not even ten righteous Sodomites, the city is destroyed.

Aside from Sodom, there are usually more than ten exceptions. Take the 100,000 Jews who served in the German army in the First World War. Hitler subscribed to the stab-in-the-back theory, which held unpatriotic Jews responsible for Germany's loss. Imagine Abraham speaking to Hitler, on behalf of his people this time and not the Sodomites, "Suppose there are 88,000 proven patriotic Jews (12,000 perished in battle) in Germany. Will you then sweep away the Jews and not spare them for the 88,000 proven patriots?" Hitler, having transcended Judeo-Christian (the prefix is what killed it for him) morality, replies, "No, I will not." The God of the Bible is wrathful, but unlike the psychopathic god, He recognizes exceptions.

Long before Hitler, many Europeans used "bigoted language" in conversation, but it was taken for granted that both listener and speaker were civilized enough to recognize the exceptions. That "One lajdak doesn't make a Poland" was a general given. Yet like so much else, Hitler ruined racism. It is human nature to judge a group by prevalent characteristics. It is human decency not to take that judgment to irrational extremes, the most irrational extreme being genocide.

It was once said of German Jews that they combined Prussian charm with Jewish modesty. Nowadays such a sentiment would be thought but not said. Is this such a great evolution? It is a sign of a civilization unmoored when such comments can be taken as "hate speech" instead of valves for dissipating hatred into a common recognition of collective foibles. Yet the "progressive" political correctionists are symptoms of this unmooring, not the cause. Their excesses are a perhaps inevitable reaction to the much greater historical excesses of scientific racism. "Reactionary" racism, of the kind muttered by a Gentile out-bargained by a Jew, is different than the uniquely modern skull-measuring racism that also calls itself "progressive." Reactionary racism tends to express itself in ethnic slurs that may lead to a fist-fight; progressive racism tends to express itself in ideologies that may lead to mass murder.

The story of Sodom's destruction is not a lesson against the evils of stereotyping. Rather it is a lesson against the annihilationism of brutal consistency. Brutal consistency is not making off-colour racist jokes; it is believing in their literal truth and more importantly, acting on them. Brutal consistency is the sign of a mirthless and rigid mindset as common on the left as on the right. It is the inability to recognize exceptions.

Laws that target speech do not recognize the nuances of speech. Laws that target groups of people do not recognize the nuances among groups of people. Let us remember Dmitri Karamazov's statement that calling one Pole a scoundrel is not calling all of Poland a scoundrel before we call him a bigot; and let us remember Abraham's admonition not to sweep away the righteous before we call all of Poland a scoundrel. And that if there is one thing that can unite race or creed without exception, it is that we all have our lajdaks.

Roma Eterna: Plus Ca Change . . .

Art by Thomas Couture, 1847; Advertisement by Dolce & Gabbana, 2006

"Juvenal is ridden by nostalgia; he is an ideologist for rural simplicity and antique toughness. . . . what, he asks rhetorically, what would the sturdy farmers, the brave soldiers who died at Cannae have said to Imperial corruption, the influx of Orientals, perfumed perverts, insolent modish women?"
- Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism

The Forbidden Fist

In Slate magazine Thomas Lacquer makes the bold assertion that fist fucking is the only sexual practice invented in modern times. Is this true? More likely we think we invented it because we're the only ones shameless enough to record it. When it comes to sex and violence, our ancestors have surely tried everything. How many times can you rape and pillage before you start trying new things out of boredom? It's atomic bomb logic, the lullaby of Faustian man - if it's possible, try it! Or as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy once sang, "If I could fuck a mountain, then I would fuck a mountain." If God forbid every sexual practice from the Garden of Eden but fist fucking, how long would it take before Adam fist fucked Eve? Or in Greco-Roman terms, before Prometheus slipped his fingers into Pandora's box? Given the boredom of immortality and the persuasiveness of the serpent, it's inevitable. We as finite beings only have so many parts, and if they don't seem to fit, we'll make them fit. Mother nature be warned.

Secret Song Of The Day

"There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully, they will die, peacefully, they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find only death. But we will keep the secret, and for their own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward. For even if there were anything in the next world, it would not of course, be for such as they."
- The Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

*

"There are no 'bigger secrets,' because the moment a secret is revealed, it seems little. There is only an empty secret. A secret that keeps slipping through your fingers. . . . The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel. Let us imagine an infinite onion, which has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Initiation travels an endless Möbius strip. The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him."
- The Grand Cabalist in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum

Comsat Angels - Our Secret

Every boy and every girl
All round the world
Lives in hope
One world at one time
One world only
That's the secret

They will never give it up

It's a secret but
It's not holy
It's in the blood
It's in the atmosphere
One world at one time
One world only
That's the secret

We will never give it up

Short Answer Question

Religion: can it save us? No.

One True Cross Or Two

Too often, and rather ironically given the faiths of those involved, Israeli and Palestinian supporters argue over which side is most Christ-like. Whoever can lay claim to a greater amount of suffering is morally in the right. André Glucksmann has observed that for leftists the Palestinian "replaces the proletarian from the recent past as a symbol of all the oppressed on the planet, spearhead of the struggle against imperialism, capitalism, globalisation . . ." It may be added that for Muslims the Palestinian is a symbol of humiliation by the West. For many Israeli supporters, on the other hand, Israel is a symbol of Western civilization under siege or the lonely Jew against the persecuting world. The word "Nazi" gets thrown around by both sides, because it denotes the ultimate crucifier. These loaded symbolics are why the world pays rapt attention to one national struggle while ignoring so many others (e.g. Morocco's occupation, complete with dividing wall, of Western Sahara). They are also why many have the idea of one or the other side at heart far more than the actual people.

Let's imagine that Iran gets the nuclear bomb and then detonates it over Jerusalem. In addition to the Israelis, all the Palestinians are eradicated as well. Now, will there be dancing on the streets throughout Muslim capitals regardless? I sadly think this to be the case. Would there be dancing on the streets if a Palestinian state was declared in the West Bank and Gaza? It is doubtful, because the recovery of the land to the House of Islam would be incomplete. The welfare of Palestinians as flesh-and-blood people matters less to death's dancers than the Palestinian as symbol of Muslim humiliation. If this humiliation is avenged, the Palestinians lose their symbolic identity and become just as content-devoid a construct as "Jordanians"; a purely geographic marker of no great interest to any cause. In the famous biblical tale, Solomon decrees that a baby should be cut in two and split between the mothers with competing claims. One gets the sense that many of the Palestinian supporters would be quite willing to cut the baby in two for the other side not to get it.

There are also Israelis and Israeli supporters for whom symbols matter more than reality. These are the kinds of people who call the West Bank "Judea and Samaria" and believe that with enough settlements its non-Jewish inhabitants will magically go away. Fortunately most Israelis despise these people, who in large part tend to be Americans. Hannah Arendt spoke to their mindset when she commented that "It is as if under the pressure of persecution the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world . . . has simply disappeared." The world hasn't disappeared, however, and willed blindness is no protection against a kick in the eye. Jane's Addiction have a song called "No One's Leaving" that is profound in its simplicity. The Arabs aren't leaving, they're multiplying, so Israelis need to reach an accord with those of them who are not insane. The Israelis aren't leaving because they have nowhere else to go, so Arabs need to stop more or less openly advocating their wholesale slaughter. There's room for two on the cross.

Praying At The Callipygian Shrine Of The Orient

Zhang Ziyi topless bikini picture courtesy of Egotastic!

"Buttock worship is ultimately anonymous and ritualistic, subordinating the fatiguingly overstressed Western cult of personality to larger cosmic rhythms . . ."
- Camille Paglia

State Of The Universe Address

Black holes 'preceded galaxies' - and will outlast them too.

Unholy Matricide

I was struck by the headline Boy guilty of shooting his mother. There are few things shocking in this world anymore, but matricide is one of them. It still retains the metaphysical shudder that regicide once did. Albert Camus discusses this in the context of the execution of King Louis XVI in L'Homme révolté. Camus remarks how for Saint-Just and his revolutionary coterie, monarchy was "not a crime, but crime itself . . . in other words, absolute profanation. . . . a sin against the ultimate nature of things." The absolute heresy of this notion can be properly situated if we consider kings as once equivalent to how we still see mothers: the necessity of their role was an unspoken assumption. Their legitimacy was beyond the bounds of questioning; the divine right of kings meant that kingship was sacred, even if individual kings were of greater or lesser worth. Although many of us now claim to be beyond sacred and profane, to paraphrase Nietzsche, most of us still have fealty to what we could call the divine right of mothers.

It may seem more natural to draw a parallel between patricide and regicide rather than matricide and regicide, due to a shared paternal role and the tradition of "a man's house is his castle." Yet I would argue sacrality matters more than gender in ultimate significance. The murder of a father by a son is of course an abomination in the eyes of most, but it can more easily be mitigated than murder of a mother. If the father is abusive and incestuous, we can understand if not openly applaud his murder; who would not have some sympathy for the murder by his daughter of that horrible rapist in Austria? Yet even though mothers may be equally abusive and even incestuous, there is still a greater distance that prevents us from accepting the murder of what is quite literally one's point of origin. If we can kill the person who bore us in her womb for nine months, to whom we owe our existence, what are we not capable of doing? Who are we not capable of killing?

After murdering Duncan, Macbeth states: "From this instant there's nothing serious in mortality. All is but toys; renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn." It is part of the unspoken compact of society that we take some essential things seriously, that we hold some essential matters of renown and grace sacred. To kill one's mother is not to just to kill a physical being, a "mere woman": it is to demonstrate one's lack of fealty to the katechon of civilization that holds back the destruction of every value. If one is not bound by loyalty to one's mother, at least bound enough not to kill her, what sort of loyalty is possible? The French revolutionaries established the general will of the people as sacred arbiter in place of the king. Yet the act of matricide seems to suggest an end to all sacred arbiters, as it is the most universal of taboos and shocking even to the most irony-infested and jaded. It is not just a blow against something inviolable; it is a blow against inviolability.

Even criminals in jail discriminate between lesser and greater degrees of criminality. Self-respecting murderers will treat child-rapists as abominable, because they still hold to some standard even if they violate others. Similarly, I would challenge all those who claim to be beyond morality to justify matricide. If this is not a crime, there can be no crime; and if there can be no crime, there can be no law and thus life becomes war of all against all. Come all ye anarchists, relativists, idol-smashers: gaze into the void! Can you be as strong as Louis XVI was on the scaffold and declare, "I shall drink the cup to the last dregs"? If you find something wrong with killing your mother, you are still on the side of society; and if you find something wrong with killing your mother, what of killing other mothers, and fathers and children? The question is no longer one of applying a standard, but the degree to which the standard is applied. And for those who still deny it? The guillotine.

Reducto Ad Absurdism: Truths Of The Punchline

The foolishness of God is wiser than men . . .
- 1 Corinthians 1:25

Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World‎

There are things so serious that you can only joke about them.
- Niels Bohr

In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a super-second of super-lucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence.
- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.
- Art Buchwald

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
- Miguel de Cervantes

Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man.
- G.K. Chesteron, All Things Considered

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.
- G. K. Chesterton, "On the Comic Spirit"

When one has emerged from the circle of errors and illusions within which actions are performed, taking a position is virtually an impossibility. A minimum of silliness is essential for everything, for affirming and even for denying.
- E.M. Cioran

We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.
- E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

"Lord, just think how much faith, how much energy of all kinds man has spent on this dream, and for so many thousands of years! Who could be laughing at man like that? Ivan? For the last time, definitely: is there a God or not? It's the last time I'll ask."
"For the last time - no."
"Then who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?"
"Must be the devil," Ivan smirked.
"And is there a devil?"
"No, there is no devil, either."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Given the choice between folly and sacrament one should always choose folly. Sacrament will not bring you closer to god, but folly just might.
- Erasmus

Being confirmed by others frees me from being responsible for the absurdity of my belief.
- Theodor Geiger

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
- Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
- Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficulties vanish.
- Søren Kierkegaard, The Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
- D.H. Lawrence

It seems absurd, yet is precisely true, that since all reality is nought, illusions are, in this world, the only true and substantial things.
- Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.
- Jack London, White Fang

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
- Archibald MacLeish, Riders on the Earth

Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
- H.L. Mencken

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
- Malcolm Muggeridge

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us.
- Ernest Renan

Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
- George Santayana

The more absurd life is, the more unsupportable death is.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words

To the fool-king belongs the world.
- Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans‎

Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.
- Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail, it has the characteristics of a comedy.
- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Suppose the world was only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke, instead of a bad one?
- George Bernard Shaw

Mockery does not succeed the refutation of the orthodox tenets, but is itself the refutation.
- Leo Strauss, "Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion"

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
- Mark Twain

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.
- Miguel de Unamuno, "Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr"

I always find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source; I must laugh at myself, and if the laugh is 'bitter,' I must laugh at the laugh. The ritual of feeling demands burlesque and, whether the burlesque is successful or not, a laugh.
- Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell

Man trakht un got lakht. [Man thinks and God laughs.]
- Yiddish proverb