Op. 31
A SELFISH MAN
Short Prose
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
1. A Selfish Man
2. Sex in the Head
3. Visual Experiences
4. Class Distinctions
5. Worlds within Worlds
6. Spiritual Leaders
7. Two Kinds of Strength
8. Between Two Extremes
9. Relativity
10. Revolutionary Revelations
11. Polar Attractions
12. Understanding Bureaucracy
13. A Thinker at Large
14. Relative Distinctions
15. Doing It Alone
16. Twelve Thinkers
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A SELFISH MAN
I am a
selfish man and proud of it! People are
apt to say to me: "You ought to think more of others sometimes,
Jonathan. Happiness comes from being of
help to others." Old Mrs Murphy is
the person most inclined to take this line with me, and she treats it as the
height of wisdom! Apparently, she has
been of service to others all her life and, not altogether surprisingly, is
keen to let people like me know of the fact.
I used, in my then-relative ignorance of moral issues, to be
half-impressed, wondering whether such wisdom oughtn't to play a greater role
in my life, too. But now I would turn a
deaf ear to her admonitions and not feel particularly ashamed of myself for
being selfish. I would react no less
negatively to any similar admonition received, in letter form, from my aunt,
who has also specialized in a life of service to others, and tends, on
occasion, to offer me what she considers to be 'good advice'. I am free to accept or reject it. I would now choose to reject it, having given
the matter, in my capacity of self-styled philosopher, some considerable
thought!
Of course, I'm not completely selfish. No man is, unfortunately! But I do regard myself as being predominantly
selfish, which is no mean achievement in this world, even these days. There are still, alas, quite a number of
relatively selfless people around, and some of them rub-up against one on
occasion, threatening one's spiritual integrity and perhaps even detracting
from it, if only on a temporary basis.
Nevertheless I remain quite proud of my record to-date, which is the
consequence, in no small measure, of a principled stance in relation to
selfishness. People like my aunt and Mrs
Murphy would not understand this, because they tend to pride themselves on
quite opposite behaviour than myself.
Should I attempt to explain it to them?
No, I think not! They are too old
and, besides, I would only succeed in hurting their feelings.... Not that such
a prospect greatly worries me. But one
has to consider oneself as well, and thus avoid, if possible, giving others an
opportunity to tarnish one's peace of mind.
If it came to the crunch, I would probably turn the other cheek -
assuming they hadn't made that too difficult.
Unfortunately, Mrs Murphy has a lethal faculty for obliging her
opponents to come to grips with her. It
is almost as if she were a masochist!
But turning the other cheek is a policy I
often adopt with my neighbours when they are making rather a lot of noise. I could respond, as I used to do several
years ago, by making some noise myself, giving them a taste of their own
medicine, so to speak. But I prefer not to
engage in noise combat with them because it distracts me from my reading or
writing or thinking or contemplating, as the case may be, and disturbs my peace
of mind even more than their respective noises.
I prefer, when possible, to plug-up with wax earplugs and carry-on with
whatever I happen to be doing at the time.
Naturally, I may get sore ears in the process. I may even go deaf eventually. But I always put the intellect, and thus by
implication my peace of mind, above the senses these days. I would take that risk. As also the risk of being taken for a fool by
my neighbours because I don't fight back but prefer to remain silent and endure
what, from their point of view, must seem like unreasonably putting-up with
noise. I am quite resigned to such a
risk because I know it would be ill-founded on their part, a reflection, so to
speak, of their own limitations as dualists, which is to say, as semi-pagans
for whom the doctrine of 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' remains
valid even in this late-Christian or, as some would say, early-transcendental
age. Christ, of course, taught 'turning
the other cheek'. Someone else, of Old
Testament provenance, preferred to teach the former doctrine. Christians have never been entirely clear as
to which teachings to adopt, because the Bible is comprised of both Old and New
Testaments. Along with Christ's
moderately transcendental teachings we find the mundane, quasi-pagan teachings
of the ancient Hebrews - of people like Moses and King David. No wonder Christians have been so ambivalent
over which teachings to adopt! As dualists
they have acted now one way, now another, depending on their mood and/or the
gravity of the violence being directed against them. They are indisposed to maintaining a
peaceful, and therefore heavenly, state-of-mind all the time. That would require a post-dualistic mentality
in an unequivocally transcendental age.
They are prepared to plunge into violence and, by implication, a hellish
state-of-mind when circumstances would seem to necessitate.
Thus if I were more of a dualistic
Christian, or let us rather say less of a post-dualistic transcendentalist, I
wouldn't hesitate, on occasion, to plunge into vengeful activity against my
neighbours by repaying them in kind with as much noise as I considered
appropriate to the circumstances. But
precisely because I'm a predominantly selfish man of transcendental bias, I
prefer, like Christ, to 'turn the other cheek' and carry on, as best I can,
with my intellectual commitments ... which are, after all, what I'm really
interested in and consider to be of paramount importance. I wouldn't want to play records too often -
as would surely be the case if I made a habit of responding to my neighbours'
noises by repaying them in kind - because, frankly, music only appeals to me in
small doses and when I wish to hear it, being, so far as I'm concerned, a
lesser commitment than philosophy or literature or contemplating salvation in
any ultimate sense. My selfishness
compels me to steer as determined an intellectual course through life as
possible, and, on the whole, I nobly succeed in sticking to my bent. Not everyone, however, would understand my
reasons for doing so, least of all those who are less partial to a heavenly
bias in their adherence to dualistic, and thus partly hellish, criteria. A people accustomed to a dualistic tradition
will be more disposed to behaving in a relative manner. A people acquainted, on the other hand, with
some form of transcendentalism will be in a better position to understand
Christ's advice about turning the other cheek.
They won't be far off the mark if someone like Gandhi should come along
and advise them to offer but passive resistance to oppression. Resistance of any kind is of course less than
heavenly, but passive resistance is a good deal better than the active
variety! It, too, pertains to the
post-dualistic.
All this may seem a long way from
selfishness but, in reality, it is a manifestation of the selfish, as signified
by intellectual or, preferably, spiritual preoccupations. I'm not thinking about sensual selfishness,
which is an entirely different matter - as I hope to demonstrate in a
moment. In fact, to make absolutely
certain that no-one misunderstands me, I am going to distinguish not only
between spiritual selfishness and its sensual counterpart, but also between spiritual
selflessness and its sensual counterpart ... in the unequivocally
diabolic. By which I mean the stars.
This isn't something that either my aunt or
Mrs Murphy would care to hear, so I shall confine myself to paper for the
benefit of posterity or, maybe if I'm fortunate enough, some intelligent, not
to say sympathetic, readership in the years ahead. I am going to begin by defining the diabolic
principle as 'doing for others', a necessarily selfless and (certainly in the
case of stars) unconscious principle - one not apparent, in other words, to the
doer as such. Our sun, for instance,
isn't conscious of the fact that it sustains a solar system, let alone a planet
on which human and other life forms are to be found. And yet, considered objectively from the
vantage-point of a human mind taking account of the fact that without the sun
there would be no solar system, it does in fact sustain one and makes life on
earth possible, to boot. The sun doesn't
exist for itself but for others, namely planets and life forms, and it is
precisely in this 'doing for others' that its existence becomes justified and
that it is intelligible to us as a sun.
So must it be with the millions of other stars in the Galaxy, as indeed
the billions of stars in the Universe as a whole, and this regardless of
whether the stars in question be major or minor, central governing stars or
peripheral revolving ones, like our sun.
When a star is deprived of a raison d'être, in the context of
any particular galaxy, it becomes a shooting star, an outsider and loner, as we
would say of the human equivalents to such stars, who have come apart from
society, which is the microcosmic reflection of the galactic macrocosm while
nature predominates over the supernatural, as it will do for a considerable
period of earthly time. Fortunately
shooting stars, like tramps and outsiders, are the exception to the rule! Most stars continue, in spite of themselves,
to exist for others, to burn and transmit energy throughout vast areas of
space. Our sun has been doing so for
billions of years. It shows no signs of
abandoning its natural inclinations at present.
So much, then, for the diabolic principle!
Now let us turn our attention to the divine
principle, the principle antithetical to 'doing for others' which is 'being for
self' - the most selfish and self-conscious principle conceivable. It exists only for itself in the most
complete self-absorption of transcendent spirit. This will be the case whether such
transcendent spirit is one of many spiritual globes converging, in space,
towards ultimate unity or whether it is the definitive spiritual globe itself -
at the climax, so to speak, of supernatural evolution. Wherever transcendence has occurred, on
whichever level, the principle of 'being for self' will prevail, and to such an
extent that the ensuing spiritual globe won't be conscious of anything else,
least of all planets or stars, because the ultimate introversion. A star, by contrast, isn't conscious of
anything inside itself, because the ultimate
extroversion. Yet such extroversion is
beneath consciousness and therefore devoid of reference to the external.
Here, then, are the two extremes of
evolution, beginning naturally in the 'doing for others' of the stars and
culminating supernaturally in the 'being for self' of transcendent spirit. Human life falls somewhere in-between, and
the degree to which either tendency prevails will to some extent depend on
one's sex and also to some extent on the phase of evolution existing at any
particular time. The lower the phase ...
the more will 'doing for others' predominate.
Conversely, the higher the phase ... the more will 'being for self'
predominate. The former will be
predominantly sensual, the latter, by contrast, predominantly spiritual. At neither extreme, however, will there be an
approximation to the absolute, whether diabolic or divine, because man is but a
stage of evolution combining both alpha and omega in himself, a stage which
stems, on the one hand, from the pre-human life forms and which aspires, on the
other hand, towards post-human life forms (as loosely defined in terms of
brain- and new-brain collectivizations), each of
which will be more extreme than himself - the former directly stemming from the
Diabolic Alpha, the latter directly aspiring towards the Divine Omega. The totality of stages would run something
like this: major stars, minor stars, planets, plants, animals, men (in
pre-atomic, atomic, and post-atomic phases), supermen, superbeings,
planetary spiritual globes, galactic spiritual globes, universal spiritual
globe. Everything from minor stars up to
men (including atomic-phase men) stems from the Diabolic Alpha in natural
evolution. Everything from men
(including atomic-phase men) up to galactic spiritual globes aspires towards
the Divine Omega in supernatural evolution.
Prior to this evolutionary divide, 'doing for others' predominates. Subsequent to it, 'being for self' plays an
increasingly important role.
Let us look a little more closely at the
human stage and add to those antithetical tendencies already mentioned what
could be called the compromise tendencies of ... 'being for others' and 'doing
for self', each of which also plays a significant role in life. What is the distinction, you may wonder,
between 'doing for others' and 'being for others'? For there is one, and quite important
it is too, even though both tendencies appertain to the sensual as opposed to
the spiritual realm. Women like Mrs
Murphy are especially good at 'doing for others', as when they prepare a man's
dinner or feed a tiny-tot his soup or take care of the washing-up or help a man
into his coat. Such women are or were -
if I am to insist on the increasingly post-atomic nature of the age, and thus pay
passing tribute to feminist sensibility - more disposed to 'doing for others'
than to 'being for self', a fact which needn't surprise us, since for long
centuries women were more natural than men and thus stemmed from the Diabolic
Alpha, in both appearance and behaviour, to a greater extent than men - ugly,
intellectual, spiritually-striving creatures that they generally are. Isn't this still partly the case today? I shan't apologize to 'libbers' because I am,
after all, a philosopher and must therefore speak honestly, not in terms of
what Schopenhauer would have called 'theological expedience'. The philosopher doesn't expect to be read by
the millions in any case, as I think I intimated a little while ago. His is the voice of truth, and truth isn't
something that everyone can appreciate, least of all at a point in time which
is overly enamoured of strength and beauty!
I certainly wouldn't expect either my aunt or Mrs Murphy to appreciate
it, particularly in view of the fact that it may reflect less than flatteringly
upon them! This world is, after all, a
battleground, and often enough its battles take place between the sexes and the
generations.
To return to my main thesis: most women
have long been more disposed to 'doing for others' than to 'being for self',
partly because men have insisted on their behaving in a certain way, partly
because they have chosen to behave in that way as a consequence of natural
inclination - the extents to which either influence may have predominated
depending on the age and degree of civilization. There is no simple way of regarding this
problem, not, at any rate, from a philosophical standpoint. Even a majority of men were more inclined, at
one time, to 'do for others' than to 'be for self', and they haven't ceased, in
the main, to be capable of the former - as, for example, when making love to a
woman. For making love
to a woman is largely to 'do for others', i.e. to copulate for propagative purposes and/or the woman's greater pleasure,
with a lesser personal pleasure for the male as a reasonable incentive. Such was traditionally the case and, to a
certain extent, such is still the case today; though the pleasure principle has
come, with the progress of humanity towards post-atomic criteria, to dwarf the propagative commitment.
From the woman's viewpoint, however, the
other side of the sensual coin (of 'doing for others') is 'being for others',
and this has applicability not only as regards the man, who undoubtedly takes
pleasure in his relatively selfless activity, but also as regards any offspring
that may result, sooner or later, from the sexual act. Naturally the woman may take considerable
pleasure in the experience; but she is still largely 'being for others', just
as people, regardless of sex, tend to be when they sleep - the subconscious or,
more correctly, unconscious being 'the other' or 'another' in relation to the
self, the dreaming process being a natural activity which this 'other' needs
and which takes over from the conscious mind and subordinates that mind, via
the subconscious, to its interests. We
don't dream in the sense that 'we' applies to the conscious mind, but are
passive spectators, through the subconscious, of the dream process, which obeys
its own laws in defiance of or disregard for conscious preference. Hence we can no more will ourselves not to
dream a nightmare than we can will ourselves only to dream highly pleasurable
dreams. The will, as the upper or superconscious part of the conscious mind, is temporarily
neutralized by sleep, while the imagination, or unconscious mind, becomes free to dream.
In sleep, imagination has full rein to wander where it may, untrammelled
by the will. This is why it occasionally
wanders into regions that we'd rather it didn't, though, if we're not
particularly deep sleepers, we may be able to bring the will to our rescue in
the nick of time and wake ourselves up before the nightmare's grisly
consequences become fully apparent! No
doubt, many nightmares are aborted in this fashion, not endured all the way to
the climax of imaginative terror. Our
ancestors, having been more under unconscious influence than ourselves, would
have fared worse than us in this respect.
Women probably fare worse than men even nowadays. Children fare worse again.
So much, then, for doers and, by
implication, the neutralization of the will in 'being for others'! One is, in this context, a passive receiver
of another's doing to one's self, who is 'the other' from the activist's point
of view. The doer, i.e. the unconscious,
needs to do for 'the other', i.e. the conscious-become-subconscious. The latter has no alternative but to
surrender to the former's activity. This principle applies no less to other
sensual contexts, including sex. Though in the realm of conscious behaviour it becomes subject to
modification as a result of systematic evolutionary progress, as I hope to have
already emphasized. A Mrs Murphy
may biologically need to prepare a man's, say Mr Murphy's, dinner more
consciously than a liberated woman, who, if truly modern, may deny experiencing
any biological need to prepare one at all.
We have now got to the point where we can
take a look at the parallel distinction between 'being for self' and 'doing for
self', both of which tendencies apply to the spiritual realm and constitute
alternative approaches to selfishness.
Because I defined the other parallel tendencies as sensual and stemming
from the Diabolic Alpha, I am going to define these ones as spiritual and
aspiring towards the Divine Omega - the former directly, the latter
indirectly. A man who is 'being for
self' may well be a keen reader of books or listener to music or contemplator
of paintings or viewer of television or devotee of transcendental
meditation. Whatever context he indulges
his penchant for 'being' in, he will indulge it solely for his self, not for
anyone else. He will be feeding his
spirit and thereby aspiring, no matter how crudely, towards the ultimate beingful context of transcendent spirit, which is the goal
of evolutionary striving. A man, or for
that matter a liberated woman (what I tend to call a quasi-superman), who is
'being for self' is selfish in the highest sense throughout the period of his
commitment to this spiritual self-indulgence.
He is living in the most moral context, regardless of which particular
form of being, it is possible for a person to live in. Certainly he is living in a morally superior
context, at such times, to those indulging in either the 'doing-for-others' or
the 'being-for-others' contexts of mainly sensual commitment. He is also, though to a lesser extent, living
in a morally superior context to the man who is 'doing for self' and therefore
only indirectly aspiring towards the Divine Omega.
Who is this man? I, myself, am one such when I put pen to
paper, as at present, and convey my thoughts to a permanent form. Am I writing for anyone else? No, not specifically. I am writing for my own benefit, because this
is what I want to do in order to pass the time in a relatively agreeable
fashion and see how much truth I can get out of my self. If I enjoy doing this work, because I realize
there is a good deal of hitherto unrecorded truth in what I'm writing, then it
is a successful activity for me, a suitably selfish mode of doing. I don't have to ask anyone else for an
opinion of the work since, being the closest person to it,
I am its best judge. Such is the case
for other selfish writers, not to mention painters, musicians, composers,
photographers, film-makers, sculptors, and the like. Selfish artists are the highest kind of
doers, the only kind who are ever going to produce great philosophy or art or
music, as the case may be. Of course,
they live in a world where it's necessary to pay certain bills, feed the
stomach, purchase new clothes, etc., and, realizing this, they will offer examples
of their work to publishers or dealers or whatever for commercial
dissemination. But they don't act on the
'doing for others' principle of the lesser artist, who firstly considers what
other people may want to read or view or listen to and then, like an obedient
slave, sets about producing it as a matter of course. On the contrary, these higher creators, who
are too moral to care for selfless attitudes, are only satisfied if they have
pleased their selves (not to be confounded with themselves, which I interpret
in a largely phenomenal way), and thus produced something which they can
consider of creative worth on its own account rather than in relation to what
others may happen to prefer, irrespective of its moral or cultural value. Whereas the lesser creator is content to
cater for what he regards as a need that the public may have for a particular
type of creation, the greater creator ignores the public in deference to his
self and, as a by-product of his behaviour, may - and indeed sometimes does - establish
a new taste in the public, or certain sections of it, for his particular brand
of work.
Thus whereas the slave creator directly
kow-tows to tradition in what is felt to be a popular demand, the free creator
may indirectly create a new taste in the public for work that he produces to
please his self. He corresponds to a
divinity, self-contained and oblivious of the world around him - a perfection
towards which certain more intelligent sections of the public may draw if they
have any desire to better their minds, but towards whom he remains largely
indifferent. The slave creator, by
contrast, corresponds to the Diabolic Alpha, imposing himself upon the world
around him and obliging the masses, or a significant percentage of common
humanity, to swallow his creations whether or not they asked for them and, more
usually, whether or not they like them.
There is in this selfless creator a tyrant who invariably tyrannizes
over the public, like a petty star. He
'does for others', but in all 'doing for others' there is a tyranny which 'the
others' are obliged to endure, presuming, however, that they aren't wise or
strong enough to turn their back on it and gravitate, through their own
volition, to higher, self-contained things.
The slave creator enslaves those who fall victim to his tyranny within
traditional moulds. The free creator
allows those who approach him of their own volition to perceive a higher way, a
superior mode of being, to anything previously created. And he does this without conscious determination
but, rather, as a by-product of his selfishness. They come to him, but he has not forced
them! He is oblivious of their
approach. He doesn't wish to concern
himself with others. Neither, it goes
without saying, would a globe of transcendent spirit.
But just as one globe of transcendent
spirit will converge towards another such globe, in accordance with the divine
principle of mutual attraction, and thereupon expand into a larger globe
compounded of the two, so the higher strata of humanity will converge towards
the work of the free creator and, through ingesting it, become akin to him in
their spiritual beliefs, so that his truth may be said to have expanded into
other minds and accordingly established a greater degree of spiritual unanimity
and awareness in the world of men than had existed hitherto ... prior to his
doing. What happens on earth in this
respect is but a crude foreshadowing of what will happen, in a far more refined
context, in the future transcendental Beyond.
Just as 'doing for others' and 'being for
others' complement each other as two sides of the same sensual coin, so 'being
for self' and 'doing for self' are likewise complementary as two sides of the
same spiritual coin. The work of the man
who 'does for self' may become the focus of attention for the man 'being for
self'. I write a book which someone else
may choose to read. A free artist will
create a painting or light work which someone else may contemplate. A free musician composes music to which
someone else may listen. We contemplate
paintings not simply for the fun of it but in order to plunge into 'being' and
thereby approximate, no matter how crudely, to Heaven. Art, like literature and music, provides us
with regular opportunities to 'be for self'.
With base or low-quality art, on the other hand, we are obliged, in
contemplating it, to 'be for the other', the doer, who 'did for others' in a
spiritually selfless way. That's to say,
he was not thinking of his spirit, his higher self, when he created the work,
but of what would appeal to others - usually to a majority of others - in a
quasi-sensual way.
This is really the chief distinction
between selflessness and selfishness.
The self is psyche and one can deny it either directly, by indulging in
sensuality, or indirectly, by using it to cater for base ends, as when a writer
thinks predominantly of the public and what can be expected to appeal to
it. This indirect form of selflessness
is doubtless less ignoble than the directly sensual variety but still far from
noble, because the self is being used (or, more correctly, misused) to cater to
vulgar, sensational ends. It is the
selflessness of the half-educated, semi-civilized person who 'does for others'
on relatively high terms but can never bring himself to 'do for self', and thus
develop rather than hinder his spiritual growth. His is a negative attitude to self - the
attitude, fundamentally, of the materialist.
If he can secretly despise those who directly deny their self, like
cooks or dustmen or chambermaids, he is nevertheless obliged to feel inferior
before a free creator, whose work may last for centuries because it is
literally fine rather than crude. What
flows with the self is fine; what goes against it - crude. Crude art denies the self in order to serve
the senses. Fine art, by contrast,
affirms the self in the interests of spiritual development. It is perfectly selfish.
But the selflessness of a person cooking
dinner leaves the self altogether out of account and is therefore the 'doing-for-others'
selflessness of sensual commitment. The
selfishness, on the other hand, of a person reading some book directly affirms
the self and consequently stands in an antithetical relationship to selfless
doing as 'being for self'. The 'being
for others' of the diner, who eats for his body, and the 'doing for self' of
the free writer, who writes for his self, also form an antithesis, though on an
intermediary basis. One could never eat
for one's self, because food is sensual and cannot directly appeal to the
psyche. Thus, although the process of
eating may suggest doing, to eat is to 'be for others' or, more correctly, to
be for 'the other' - namely, the body in general. It is a conscious equivalent of sleep, the
being for dreams. We eat to sustain the
body. We sleep to dream. Our self becomes, at such times, the passive
spectator of the actions our body requires for physical health. It is subordinate to 'the other'. This is the context of indirect selflessness.
I, however, am a man who likes to be
directly and indirectly selfish as much as possible, to 'be for self' and to
'do for self'. I dislike eating and
sleeping, and very seldom do anything that could be described as directly
selfless, such as preparing a meal for someone.
Other people prepare meals for me and get paid for doing so! Occasionally I visit old Mrs Murphy, who
prepares me a meal for free - out of a need to act for others. She would find life terribly boring were
there no-one around for whom to cook.
She cannot understand, when I inform her of my customary behaviour, how
I can spend so much time on my own, either bent over a book or scribbling ideas
onto a notepad. There is, besides a
generation barrier, a sex barrier between us, and, like most people who live
without bothering to acknowledge or recognize such a barrier, she projects her
mind onto me as a matter of course, advising me to become more like her and to
'do for others' more often. But I am a
selfish man and proud of it! I battle
against the world and its chief supporters in the interests of my self, the
development of my spiritual potential, and have succeeded, to-date, in
developing it to a point way beyond Mrs Murphy's philistine comprehension. Naturally, she regards most of what I believe
as nonsense. But, there again, how could
it be otherwise? Her self is nowhere
near on the same level as mine. She has
never systematically cultivated it to any appreciable extent, so we speak a different
mental language - I the language of self, she the language of 'the other'. Her self exists, for the most part, in the
service of the body; mine, by contrast, in the service of itself. We shall never see eye-to-eye!
But that doesn't really bother me. Why should it? I am, after all, a selfish man, so I don't go
out of my way to justify or explain myself to others. I exist primarily for my self, and certain
others will find in me an indirect guide to existing more for their selves as
time goes by. One day everyone, or at
any rate everyone capable of it, will be systematically existing for their self
in a context directly aspiring towards the Divine Omega. And even that day will be but a staging-post,
as it were, on the road to something higher again - namely, a post-human age of
millennial selfishness!
SEX IN THE HEAD
"Jillian
Ryan prides herself on being liberated, but she isn't really so," Gary
Giles stated for the benefit of the dark-complexioned man seated in front of
the steering wheel, as the bright green Citroën in
which they, and their respective girlfriends were travelling, turned a wide
bend and headed along a busy stretch of city road. "She insists on being made love to in a
conventional manner, without my having recourse to certain ... post-atomic
practices - the most obvious, if least distinguished of which, would entail
some discomfiture in her rear."
Gerry Flynn chuckled politely as he briefly
referred his attention to the driving-mirror in order to witness the
embarrassment on the reflected face of the young woman in question, who,
induced by the context of friendship to adopt a good-humoured response to her
lover's unflattering allegation, surreptitiously laid into the latter's ribs
with a hostile forefinger. "Is
there any truth in that?" he wanted to know.
"None
whatsoever!" Jillian had no hesitation in replying. "For I can't understand how being
liberated should entail allowing some depraved man to pervert one!"
"That's only because you're an
incorrigible bourgeois," Gary opined with a modicum of good humour,
"and tend to mistake your partial liberation for a truly radical break
with tradition, when, in actual fact, you insist on being treated like a
woman."
"Don't listen to him!" she
protested.
The young man in the driving seat chuckled
good-naturedly but offered no comment, largely because traffic congestion was
obliging him to keep most of his concentration on the road. But his girlfriend, a blue-eyed blonde in her
mid-twenties, opined that unconventional sexual relationships were feasible,
provided they didn't unduly impinge upon or entirely supplant the conventional
variety! If a man wished to extend his
lust into lesser channels from time to time, that was all
right with her, provided he condomned up and
was still interested in conventional inclinations on a fairly regular, if
intermittent, basis.
"Unlike my subversive lover,"
Jillian declared, referring to the faintly-amused passenger beside her,
"who prefers to impose unconventional inclinations upon one as often as possible."
"Not true!"
"Not as far as I'm concerned!"
Jillian defiantly retorted. "I'm as
liberated as I want to be."
"Yeah, in other words only moderately
liberated," her boyfriend observed, as the car turned down a narrow street
and was brought to a halt by some negative traffic-lights.
"Of course, being liberated in that
sense isn't just something which applies to women," Gerry Flynn
remarked. "Getting free of nature
or natural inclinations is a struggle for men as well as women, though the
latter perhaps find the going tougher or choose not to recognize it. Most people, even in this relatively advanced
age, are more often than not accomplices of nature rather than its transvaluated enemies.
Though that wouldn't apply to your brother,
The blue-eyed blonde next to the driver
conceded, with a brief nod, the relative truth of this statement and, largely
for the benefit of their back-seat passengers, said: "Steve is a deeply
religious man who never has sex with anyone, but exclusively indulges himself
in pornography and sexual fantasies! He
is one of the few people for whom sex is predominantly in the head - a radical
intellectual."
Jillian pulled a wry face and cried:
"I find it difficult to understand how anyone could be satisfied with
that!"
"I'm not surprised,"
"After
all, you're not exactly a deeply religious person yourself."
"Oh, enough of your sarcasm!" she
protested, her wry face suddenly veering towards the grotesque. "You'll be telling me, next, that a
liberated woman should be sexless."
"On
the contrary, I know full-well how impossible that would be for a woman as
beautiful and substantial as you,"
Gerry chuckled aloud as he drove away from
the traffic lights and steered his car down an even narrower street beyond; for
he was only too aware of the fact that Jillian Ryan was by no means beautiful
but, if not exactly ugly, then simply attractive in a petty-bourgeois kind of
way. And he knew, too, that Gary Giles
prided himself on steering clear of genuinely beautiful women, of whom he had a
spiritual distrust. He would never have
taken a fancy, for instance, to Petra, who was quite beautiful, and this in
spite of her being the sister of someone she regarded, rightly or wrongly, as
deeply religious. There was indeed a
commitment, in more than one sense, to post-atomic sexuality by the
short-haired man on the back seat.
Jillian was a suitably plain intellectual who could be depended upon,
sooner or later, to live-up to
"By the way, what do you think about
the campaign currently being waged by some female students at the university to
obtain the right for women to receive SA's rather
than BA's in the event of examination success?"
"You mean Spinster of Arts degrees
instead of Bachelor of Arts degrees for women?" Jillian endeavoured to
establish, preparatory to a confirmatory nod from her fellow-female, an
ironical chuckle from the driver, and a contemptuous grunt from her
boyfriend. "What's so objectionable
about that?" she demanded of the latter.
"It's absurdly ridiculous!" came his denigratory
response. "We live, don't forget,
in an age when women are increasingly being regarded as though they were male
and accordingly treated as men's equals to the extent that, as effective
supermen, they can't be discriminated against simply as women. A Spinster of Arts degree for someone who was
effectively a superman would constitute a flagrant concession to atomic dualism
by discriminating between the sexes! Now
that they live largely in a man's world and behave increasingly like men, with
intent to study academic subjects, they must be regarded as men and duly
accorded Bachelor of Arts or, for that matter, Master of Arts degrees, in
loyalty to the developing post-atomic nature of the times."
"So you don't approve of the sexist
campaign currently being waged at the university,"
"Indeed not!" he confirmed. "Those involved in it are simply
reactionary ignoramuses who'll never succeed in getting their way - at any
rate, not if sense is to prevail!"
"Yes, I guess I'll have to agree with
you," said Jillian by way of affirming her allegiance to post-atomic
criteria. Gary's views, she knew from
experience, were usually correct, since founded on a
solid base of logical argument. Even
what he had said, the day before, about proletarian males generally preferring
short zipper-jackets to overcoats or macks because
they responded to supermasculine criteria under the
artificial influence of urban conditioning, testified to a profound insight
into sartorial distinctions based on class differences. To the extent that an overcoat or a
mackintosh established a kind of skirt around the legs, it was a feminine mode
of clothing, since this skirt-like impression connoted, as in a dress, with the
female sex organ, considered as a tubular depth. Not so the short-length zipper jacket which,
in tightly clinging to the waist, allowed the phallic connotation of a man's
trousers or, more usually these days, jeans ... to assert itself in unashamedly
masculine terms. Clearly, a class that
lived closer to nature, in suburban or rural environments, would be more
disposed to endorse the feminine overcoat than the masculine zipper-jacket in
winter! Gary thought so anyway, and who
could say he was wrong? He might be
accused of over-intellectualizing by some people, but they were more likely to
be the kind of people whose intellectual powers were mediocre, in any case, and
who rarely if ever exercised their intellects at all. He had learnt, over the years, not to allow
himself to become too impressed by such people!
He swam in a deeper, more metaphysical depth.
"Well, I think we're going to be in
time for the start after all," Gerry Flynn observed with a sigh of relief,
as he braked the Citroën to a halt a few yards down
the road from the Climax Cinema. It was
A man in a navy-blue zipper cast them a
glance from his position near the front of the queue, before averting his
attention with embarrassed swiftness. Then he moved inside the foyer to pay his
entrance fee and disappeared from view.
But nothing had been wasted on Gerry, who now burst into a
characteristically ironic chuckle.
"I always thought we'd bump into your brother at one of these
places sooner or later," he declared, for
"Ah well, that's sex in the head for
you!" sighed his girlfriend as she pushed her way onto the pavement. "Steve has evidently come along to have
an affair with one of his spiritual partners."
"Quite a one-sided affair,
too!" Jillian opined while climbing out beside the others, only to
blush darkly when she noticed
VISUAL EXPERIENCES
Television
is all things to all people, and to Matthew Duggan, who was more interested in
reading than in viewing, it suggested a mode of external dreaming which, like
the internal mode, obeyed its own laws in autocratic defiance of the
dreamer. Sometimes television was
pleasant, sometimes tolerable, at other times ghastly - just like dreams. Matthew hated dreams, particularly the
ghastly ones, and he wasn't all that keen on
television either. Nevertheless, he was
capable of watching it, from time to time, and would occasionally express an
opinion as to its moral worth or propaganda value to those of his friends who
had invited him over for the evening, and in whose house or flat was to be
found a television, to which they were almost certain to succumb at some point
in the conversation.
As the guest of regular film-goers, one
evening, he was kind enough to opine that, in spite of his not having visited a
cinema for several years, cinema was morally superior to television, if only to
the extent that one sat as a component of an audience and thereby approximated
more closely to the collectivized spiritual condition of Heaven in the future
Beyond. Television, by contrast, was
mostly an individual affair, like dreams, and could thus be said to stem, in a
manner of speaking, from the Diabolic Alpha.
"Yes, I suppose there may be some
truth in that claim," Dick Kelly murmured, smiling faintly, "though I
must confess to never having considered the moral implications of such media
before, being a person who sees in cinema an opportunity of keeping up-to-date
with the latest films, preferably, of course, the best ones." He smiled afresh, this time quite openly, and
added: "But I dare say you'd put a different interpretation on 'the best'
than myself."
Duggan blushed and gently nodded in
confirmation of that possibility.
"Incidentally, what films did you see
at the cinema in the past?" asked Karen Gill, who was sitting next to her fiancé
in front of the television.
"Oh, not very many," Duggan
evasively replied, having forgotten most of them by now anyway. Unfortunately, personal circumstances had
prevented him from going to the cinema ever since he was a relatively carefree
suburban youth, though he had never been a particularly regular film-goer even
then. His main interest had always
centred on books, especially philosophical, literary, and historical ones, and
he considered this fact a consequence of intellectual sophistication. There was something inherently superior, as
far as he was concerned, about reading to viewing. The latter involved appearances and primarily
appealed to the eyes, whereas the former appealed, in its concern with
essences, to the intellect, and simply harnessed the eyes to this service. Its chief disadvantage resided in the fact
that, ordinarily, one read as an individual in private rather than as a member of
a group in public. Only teachers,
schoolchildren, lecturers, and priests regularly had the privilege of communal
reading, an activity which could be morally associated with communal praying -
not that Matthew Duggan went in for much praying these days, whether communally
or individually! However, he managed to
recall, for Karen's benefit, that Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Death in
"What makes you say that?" a
faintly amused Dick Kelly asked.
"Oh, an acknowledgement of the
tendency, I suppose, for educational and/or propaganda controls to be
tightened-up and systematically enforced with every fresh advance in human
evolution," Duggan calmly replied.
"The 20th century is really a transitional age in between bourgeois
humanism and proletarian transcendentalism, a kind of compromise age of
bourgeois/proletarian transcendental humanism or humanistic transcendentalism -
at any rate, certainly in the West."
"Perhaps you're right," Dick
Kelly conceded. "Right, I mean,
about television. Speaking personally,
I'd have nothing to lose from the introduction of a law which made the
ownership or renting of a television compulsory; though that is no guarantee
that it would be watched, is it?"
Duggan shrugged his shoulders as if to say
'maybe one day things will be different in that respect', then said: "Most
people in possession of a television would be inclined to use it, even if not
throughout the greater part of each evening, every day."
"Yes, that must be so," Karen
agreed in loyalty to female common sense.
"One would have to be insane to have a television and not make use
of it, particularly in view of the licence fee!
We use ours virtually every evening, and this in spite of the fact that
we always go to the cinema at the weekend.
We're visual crazy."
"Which is better, I suppose, than
being audio crazy and thus dependent on the radio or stereo for hours
on-end," Duggan remarked, drawing on his painful experience of years of
exposure to music-crazy neighbours.
"Though some films are quite noisy, I'll concede." As he knew full-well from
the almost equally painful experience of years of exposure to television-crazy
neighbours. "Nevertheless,
films constitute an improvement on theatre to the extent that their actors
aren't tangible presences on a stage but ... intangible absences on a
screen," he resumed thoughtfully.
"One might define cinema as spiritualized theatre, and the same
would of course apply to television when used as a medium for conveying films
of one kind or another. Being more
heterogeneous than cinema, however, television could also be defined as
spiritualized opera at those times when operatic performances were being
transmitted. It could even be defined as
spiritualized sport when transmitting some football or cricket or other sports
competition. It's certainly much more
multifaceted than cinema, which has taken over, in my opinion, from the
theatre. It signifies a kind of
convergence to omega on the level of audio-visual activity, since a
multi-purpose medium."
Dick Kelly smiled in gratification for the
privilege of being the recipient of so much apparently esoteric, albeit highly
speculative, information, and said: "'Omega' presumably being the goal of
evolution in transcendent spirit?"
"That's right," Duggan confirmed,
not without a shade of embarrassment for having been obliged to assert his
well-known authority in matters evolutionary!
"Omega will be the ultimate manifestation of the supra-atomic, the
ultimate transcendence, once all separate
transcendences from whichever parts of the Universe have merged into one
another in their convergence towards total unity. It will be the ultimate absolute, in complete
contrast to the primal absolute ... of the millions of governing or central
stars in the Universe - approximately one to each galaxy."
"Gosh, how
complex!" Karen exclaimed, succumbing to a rosy blush. "I'm always lost when people start
transcending Christian terminology."
"My humble apologies," Duggan
rejoined. "But Christian
terminology would be inadequate for defining such subtleties, because it's
based on a sort of microcosmic/galactic partiality which favours a distinction
between the Creator and the Holy Spirit, not, as would be objectively nearer
the mark, between the plurality of the Alpha Absolutes, i.e. Creators, and the
future unity of the Omega Absolute, i.e. the Holy Spirit. The latter is approximately appropriate, but
the former simply lays stress on one Creator, a
fact which hardly does justice to the millions of other Creators, one to each
galaxy, which are polytheistically and therefore
pluralistically outside the bounds of alpha monotheism and its Judaic
origins.... Not that theology admits of a connection between the figurative and
the literal, or between the central star of any particular galaxy and the deity
- namely the Creator, Jehovah, or whatever - which I believe to have been
extrapolated from it as a psychological content of the unconscious mind. Religion, in that old theological sense, and
science, as applying to the Cosmos, can't be fully reconciled, unlike religion
and science in the futuristic transcendental sense, when artificial means will
be found to support and sustain human brains in the interests of their
spiritual evolution towards transcendence.
For the Christian mind, however, the Creator is no mere abstraction and
unconscious content but a real, live entity out there in space, even if his
Creator, namely the Father, is not quite commensurate with Jehovah, the Judaic
Creator, but, rather, pertains to a less extreme alpha which probably stands to
Jehovah as television to cinema."
Karen Gill conceded to the relative truth
of this statement and inquired whether, in that case, not believing in God,
meaning Jehovah and/or the Father, was tantamount to not believing in the
existence of stars?
"By no means," Duggan
straightaway replied. "For one
outgrows the Creator as one's psyche evolves away from the unconscious, in
which such theological abstractions exist, and further into the superconscious - the realm of true spirit. Whether or not one believes in the existence
of the Creator will depend on the psychological constitution of one's psyche,
and is therefore an individual matter. I,
for one, don't believe in Him, but that doesn't mean to say that I refuse to
recognize the existence of the stars in our galaxy. The literal roots of evolution, from which
our planet and all of its life forms have sprung, most certainly exist. But that doesn't imply that the Creator need
also exist, least of all in space, since figurative abstractions, whether
Judaic and primal or Christian and worldly, apply to the unconscious mind and
will only exist in that mind - assuming one's psyche is still largely
dominated by the unconscious and one is accordingly prepared to recognize such
abstractions. Mine isn't,
which is why I don't believe in the Creator.
Consequently, for me, He doesn't exist."
"All very profound," Dick Kelly
opined, taking care not to omit a timely smile.
"Simple souls like Karen and me would never be able to work that
kind of thing out for ourselves. Nor do
we always respond to such enlightenment in the most positive way, partly
because we often fail to grasp it. What
you said earlier, concerning the spiritualized nature of cinema and television,
certainly made sense to me, however, and has thrown new light on my
relationship to those media and assessment of them in terms of how they fit
into an overall evolutionary development in the arts. Clearly, if television is a kind of
multi-purpose medium and cinema a step beyond theatre, then neither could be
assumed to lead to anything else."
Matthew Duggan pondered a moment, anxious
not to allow himself to be rushed into a superficial response, and then said:
"Yes, that may be so; though video, being a more evolved development,
combines the theatrical exclusivity of cinema with the privacy of television,
thereby enabling the film-enthusiast to purchase and/or rent whichever video recordings
he may fancy and replay them as often as he likes. Thus, in the case of film videos, the
exclusivity of cinema is brought into the home, albeit at a greater cost, if
purchased new, than would be that of viewing films in public. Whether or not video will supplant cinema in
the future, as Christianity supplanted Judaism, it is arguably more related to
television than to cinema and will doubtless co-exist with the former, as Son
to Father, for some time to come - albeit more as an individual medium predominantly
stemming from theatre than as a collectivistic medium for the convergence of
disparate arts and activities, from politics to sport."
It seemed that Dick Kelly was satisfied by
this argument, for he smiled and ventured no verbal comment. His girlfriend, however, was wondering where
that potent mind-expanding drug LSD would fit it, since she had gleaned from
one of Duggan's previous visits that synthetic hallucinogens like LSD had a
part to play in the future, and wondered whether it didn't stem from cinema or
television as a kind of internal mode of visual or, rather, visionary
experience germane to a higher stage of evolution? She put this conjecture to Duggan, who
appeared to have overlooked the relationship between LSD and other forms of
visual media in his conversation this evening.
"In point of fact, LSD trips stem from
a different visual tradition," he confidently affirmed, "the
tradition, namely, of fine art. Not as
an alternative kind of fine art however, since fine art is ever a man-made thing,
but as the successor to such art conceived in its highest guise - namely, as
holography. The trip, which of course is
what recourse to LSD implies, is really the antithesis of the dream, or
internal visionary experience of the unconscious. In contrast, LSD activates the superconscious or, rather, puts the unconscious to sleep,
and this results in the highest kind of internal
visionary experience which, unlike the lowest kind, i.e. dreams, will be static
and seemingly translucent. As dreams
precede art, so trips will succeed it, being the main spiritual preoccupation
of the first of the two life forms in the post-human millennium, namely the
supermen, whose brains will be artificially supported and sustained in
collectivized contexts - the overall situation being antithetical, in
evolutionary terms, to that which preceded the human in the collectivized
lifestyles of apes in trees. So trips,
while having more in common with holograms than with films or television
programmes, will exist on an altogether superior plane than fine art, and as
the antithetical equivalent of sleep dreams.
When we abandon the conscious for the subconscious ... we dream. Conversely, when we abandon the unconscious
for the superconscious ... we trip. We abandon the former with the aid of
sleep. In the transcendental future, we
shall abandon the latter with the aid of LSD, or some such hallucinogenic
stimulus. Evolution proceeds from the
natural to the supernatural via the artificial."
"And presumably does so via the artificial
media of cinema and television," Dick Kelly remarked, to show that he was
still following the discussion, "in which, by watching films, it's almost
as though one were dreaming awake."
This time is was Duggan's turn to smile,
since that was precisely what television, not to mention cinema, suggested to
him, as already noted. "To be
sure," he rejoined, "and we might just as readily contend that, in
contemplating holograms, it will be almost as though we were tripping asleep,
by which is meant tripping externally.
Just as films suggest external dreaming, so will holograms suggest
external tripping." And, with that said, he relapsed into the
satisfied silence of one who has spoken his fill, while Dick Kelly and Karen
Gill both smilingly turned towards their television and resigned themselves to a period of external dreaming - I mean,
viewing!
CLASS DISTINCTIONS
"What,
sir, do you think of the
proletariat?" a man with a drooping moustache suddenly asked me, as I was
on the point of extricating myself from the rowdy crowd that had gathered
around a speaker's soapbox in the vicinity of the park bench on which I had
been languidly surveying the passers-by, prior to this political intrusion.
I halted, paralysed in my steps, as if by
some magnetic constraint emanating from the questioner's person, and
diffidently confessed: "Not much, I'm afraid."
"Ah, so you're a bourgeois, are
you?" the man responded, jumping to negative conclusions.
"Depends how you define a
bourgeois," I evasively replied, distrusting his deprecatory
tone-of-voice.
"An exploiter of the working
man," someone remarked to the left of the moustache-wearing person - a
woman, as it turned out, who appeared to be connected with him in some way.
"Oh well, in that case I'm no
bourgeois," I declared. "Simply an intellectual, though one of predominantly
middle-class descent."
The man looked baffled, and it seemed that
his drooping moustache twitched slightly, as if galvanized by some minor
electric shock. "Aren't the middle
class and the bourgeoisie one and the same thing?" he fairly snorted,
spoiling for an intellectual fight.
"In one sense 'yes' and in another
sense 'no'," I ambivalently answered, to the polite amusement of the
woman.
"In what sense 'no'?" she then
asked.
"Well, by being some kind of
professional who helps rather than exploits the proletariat - like, for
example, a teacher or a doctor."
The man fiercely shook his head. "They all exploit the proletariat under
a capitalist system!" he averred.
"It's only in a socialist system that such professional exploiters
can become helpers and thus not middle-class predators but ... intellectual
workers."
"Yes, intellectual proletarians!"
the woman insisted, thereby reinforcing her companion's argument.
I hesitated a moment before responding,
then did so with: "That still doesn't preclude a class distinction from
existing between manual and intellectual workers. There'll continue to be a relative
distinction between the one and the other category, as between plumbers and
doctors."
The man looked displeased, but said:
"That's still preferable to any absolute distinction, as between
exploiters and exploited, bourgeoisie and proletariat!"
"I agree," I smilingly
conceded. "But you can't entirely
get rid of class distinctions between people, even if, in the relative context,
you're enabled to spell class with a small 'c', so to speak. Such distinctions inhere to the human stages
of evolution, the ultimate one not excepted."
"So we can never live in a truly
classless society," the woman deduced on a faintly suspicious note.
"Not on the human level," I
confidently confirmed.
The man frowned and, half-clenching his
teeth, asked: "Then when?"
"Only in the superbeing
millennium," I replied. "In
other words, at that point in time when post-human life will be elevated to the
absolute status of new-brain collectivizations, each
of which will constitute a superbeing, the antithesis
of a tree."
"Fantastic!" exclaimed the man,
whose woman appeared to be on the verge of echoing him when I cut in with:-
"So it may at first seem, but that's
only because we're at quite an evolutionary remove from that classless, or
completely uniform, society, and can't be expected to properly relate to it at
present - at least not in a majority of cases.
However, I can to some extent relate to it because, in my capacity of
self-taught philosopher, I was the one who originally thought it up."
"Good God!" the man
exclaimed. "But how will this
classless society survive?"
"Through an artificial
support-and-sustain system," I told him, feeling slightly embarrassed by
the intellectual distance between us.
"It will keep the new-brain collectivizations
alive while they hypermeditate towards
transcendence."
"And how long will that take?"
the woman tentatively asked, not bothering to seek a clarification of
'transcendence', nor even, to my greater surprise, of 'hypermeditate'.
"It could take a long time," I
replied. "And that is a good enough
reason why the superbeing society should be
classless, independent of human supervision and therefore not obliging
technicians to hang around longer than absolutely necessary. The support-and-sustain systems would have
adequate safeguards built-in to them in any case, being connected to computers
which, whilst an integral component of a superbeing
entity, would serve as artificial overseers or guardians."
The man raised bushy brows in patent
disbelief and cried: "All this speculation about some post-human future is
completely beyond me! I thought we were
discussing man a moment ago."
I didn't immediately respond to this
statement because the thought had occurred to me, in conjunction with my
mention of the superbeing millennium, that perhaps
each centre in which a superbeing was housed would be
equipped with an automatic hose system that could squirt masses of foam at it
from a variety of angles, once transcendence had occurred and the centre was
threatened with destruction from the ensuing proton-proton reactions of
disintegrating brain matter. Not that
the destruction of a meditation centre mattered that much - at least not in
regard to itself. The point was to
prevent flames from spreading from one centre to another and thereby possibly
engulfing superbeings which hadn't yet overcome their
own atomic integrity, as it were, because still hypermeditating
towards transcendence.
However, with the moustache-wearing man
evidently awaiting a response to his statement, I cut short my esoteric
speculations on that subject and remarked: "Men can never transcend class
in any absolute sense, not even in an absolutist system such as exists in
socialist states, where they are divisible into the relative class distinctions
of ... workers, professionals, and leaders, not to mention soldiers and
police. We are speaking here of a
distinction between lower class, middle class, and upper class, at least as
regards the first three categories, a distinction which also prevails in the
West, though on an absolute basis, bearing in mind that Western society, being
more deeply capitalist, is divisible between exploiters and exploited. Thus the paradox of the situation is that
whereas in an absolutist society class distinctions are relative, in a
relativistic society, on the other hand, they're absolute. Yet not entirely so! For a relativistic society may give rise to a
distinction between bourgeoisie and middle class, using the latter term in a
relative sense."
The man looked completely puzzled at this
point, and then glared at me through heavily bespectacled eyes. "But I thought we'd established the fact
that the middle class and the bourgeoisie are really one and the same
thing!" he protested, half-turning towards his companion for
confirmation. "As professionals,
they exploit the proletariat under a capitalist system."
I shook my head. "Doctors, dentists, teachers, etc., who
are state employed, function as middle-class professionals, or intellectual
proletarians, as they'd say in a socialist state, and thereby form a relative
class distinction with the manual or non-professional proletariat, in contrast
to self-employed professionals, who constitute an absolute class distinction
vis-à-vis the proletariat, and may accordingly be defined as bourgeois."
"Yes, bourgeois exploiters!" the
man asserted in a gruff tone-of-voice.
I smiled reservedly. "Not that many proletarians can afford to
be exploited by independent professional gentlemen," I rejoined,
"since the fees the latter charge are such as could only be met, as a
rule, by fellow-bourgeois exploiters, whether managers, directors, owners, or whatever."
The man looked decidedly piqued by this
contention, leaving his companion to ask me whether, as a self-professed
intellectual, I wasn't also an exploiter.
"No," I replied. "For the simple reason that a writer,
which is what I effectively am, functions vis-à-vis his publisher as an
intellectual worker the product of whose labour can be sold at a profit. Thus, as a middle-class or professional
person, it's possible to be exploited by a bourgeois,
or someone who makes a profit out of other people's work in his own, not to
mention his employees', financial interests.
A similar thing can happen in socialist states, though in that context
the publisher becomes a middle-class person forming a relative class distinction
with his authors rather than an absolute class distinction between exploiters
and exploited, and simply because the profits he makes are channelled back into
the state, which, theoretically at least, is synonymous with the
proletariat."
"The only thing you forgot to
mention," the woman remarked, "is that in a
relative state, on the other hand, even the author is a kind of exploiter,
because he functions independently of the state in a largely self-employed
context. He may not make a profit from
his works, the way a publisher does, but he can become fairly wealthy from them
all the same, and thus exist in a quasi-capitalist capacity as a kind of
independent businessman!"
"Fortunately or unfortunately,
depending on one's point of view, Michael Jones has never been published,"
I laconically confessed. "So I
can't vouch for the truth of your contention."
The woman showed signs of surprise at this
juncture and verbally held her tongue.
However, the man, while softening a little in his attitude towards me,
pressed me to explain why, in returning to where our discussion had begun, I
didn't think much of the proletariat.
"After all, if you're not an exploiter yourself, but an unpublished
writer," he went on, "what-on-earth can you have against them?"
"Frankly, the proletariat are all
things to all people," I averred, after a reflective pause, "and to a
writer like me they're more often than not a noisy intrusion into my
thoughts! But that, I dare say, is
rather beside-the-point, and shouldn't be regarded in anything but a comparatively
trivial light. Before you stopped me, I
was about to take myself off to a quieter area of the park in order to think my
largely philosophical thoughts in peace.
This proletarian crowd that had suddenly sprung-up, like weeds, around
the speaker's soapbox was distracting me from my reflections and, consequently,
when you asked me what I thought of the proletariat, I replied in a manner
owing something to the fact of my having been distracted by it. That was a personal response existing on the
trivial, everyday plane. You caught me
off duty, as it were, from my ideological rectitude, which tragically affirms
the proletariat as the class of tomorrow, the only class capable, by dint of
its urban existence, of evolving towards a post-human life form. These proletarians, paradoxically enough, are
gathered together in a park, which is civilized nature
existing in the city."
The moustache-wearing man gripped the arm
of his companion and muttered: "I can understand some things about his
definition of the proletariat but, frankly, there are certain other things
which are completely bizarre to me and, for that very reason, well-nigh
impossible to understand! Nevertheless,
I'll concede that the fellow isn't quite the rogue I first took him for! There's more to him than meets the eye!"
"Aye, that's true enough!" the
woman laughed, and, together, they turned away to listen to the ravings of the
soapbox orator instead.
WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
They had
all come along to hear Richard Boyle discourse on peace, and were sitting or
standing about in groups and pairs in the philosopher's crowded
living-room. Boyle, tall and elegant,
faced directly onto his guests, his voice clear above the combination of
muffled traffic noise and faint murmurings, not to mention occasional fidgetings, which formed a background, as it were, to his
discourse - the one outside, the other inside the room.
Standing on the edge of this room between
the jambs of its single door, now ajar, Samantha Carey and Stuart Roach
surveyed the scene before them, the former with a degree of amusement, the
latter in deadly seriousness, as was his habit where gatherings of this nature
were concerned. And yet, despite the
presence a few yards in front of him of Brendan O'Day,
his one-time rival for Samantha's affections, Stuart felt curiously detached
from it all, as if he were really on the edge of things in more senses than
one! No doubt, Samantha was partly
responsible for this, since she exerted quite an attraction on him with her
hair tied-up free of her nape and a pleasant scent emanating from behind her
tiny ears. Besides, she was wearing a
very attractive dress, the most salient features of which included a plunging
neckline and clinging bodyline, with a rising slit at the back. Such a combination was bound to produce a
deleterious effect on one's concentration, or so Stuart thought as he cast a
furtive glance over his girlfriend in order both to confirm this impression and
seek a justification for it at the same time.
Tentatively, he placed the hand nearest to Samantha on the curve of her
rump and ever so gently ran it over the silken surface of the dress in
question. Although, to all appearances,
his attention had now reverted to Boyle's commanding figure in front of the
window, he was able to note, out of the corner of his right eye, that
Samantha's facial expression had undergone a faint transformation seemingly
relative to his behaviour, and now harboured the gentlest of gratified
smiles. Clearly, she wasn't entirely
absorbed in Boyle's discourse either! So
that made two of them. Nevertheless, as
though by contextual association, the situation was beginning to present itself
in a philosophical light to Stuart, who was by no means impartial to
independent speculation, and he began to investigate it while continuing to
gently caress Samantha's silk-covered rump.
Here she was, standing close to him in the
doorway of this crowded living-room, with no-one behind her. She was dressed in unequivocally feminine
attire, even down to her dark stockings and glossy high heels. He, by contrast, was in a dark cord suit,
perfectly masculine. As far as
appearances went, there existed an absolute or, at any rate, near-absolute sexual
distinction between them. He looked a
man and she a woman. Unconsciously he
had responded to this fact by placing a hand on her rump and allowing himself a
modicum of sexual indulgence. She had
apparently responded to this behaviour in a way appropriate to her appearance,
not forbiddingly (though the intellectual gathering of which they were
ostensibly a part might well have justified a negative response!), but in tacit
gratification, one could almost say encouragingly, whether because the act
itself had been responsible or because she was growing bored with Boyle's
discourse ... she alone could say. An
impartial observer would have noted a woman's positive response to a man's
caress and, if not philosophically inclined, might have left it at that. Nothing
out-of-the-ordinary, even in the aforementioned circumstances.
Stuart Roach, however, was
philosophically inclined, and now that he was attempting to put himself in the
position of an impartial observer he realized that even this at-first-sight
relatively trivial act was imbued with profound significance, implied certain value-judgements
each partner took for granted. Like, for
example, that a man was entitled to treat a woman as a sexual object when she
appeared to be such and, in consequence, responded in an appropriately positive
way to his sexual advances. By dressing
in a dress, in an absolutely dissimilar fashion from himself, a woman was
exposing herself to being treated as a woman, treated, in other words,
not as an equal ... but as a creature to caress - in short, a sexual
object. A man would not, as a rule, caress
another man in such or indeed any fashion, but simply regard the other as an
equal. What reason, however, had he to
regard a person who unequivocally affirmed a sexual absolutism as an equal, and
thus provided him with a pretext, even a duty, to treat her unequally, or as a
member of the opposite sex? Clearly,
none! And for that reason he was
justified in behaving towards her in a sexist manner, in response to the
sartorial distinctions which existed between them. This was why, despite his knowledge of the
fact that Samantha generally tended to regard herself in a liberated light,
Stuart hadn't hesitated to treat her unequally a little while ago, and, indeed,
to persist in doing so even when his thoughts and attention had turned
elsewhere. Clearly, while Samantha liked
to be regarded as an equal, she had no desire to be so regarded all the time,
on an absolutist basis, but was prepared to relapse into more traditionally
feminine postures and appearances as mood or circumstances dictated. There were certain times and contexts in
which she still wanted Stuart to treat her unequally, as a woman, and to behave
towards her in an appropriately masculine fashion. One could even gauge such times and contexts
from the way she dressed - an unequivocally feminine attire, such as she was
wearing this evening, making it more difficult for a man to treat her as an
equal than would a comparatively masculine attire, like a pair of jeans or
slacks with tee-shirt or sweatshirt, such as she wore at certain other times.
Whether Samantha was
consistently methodical about all this, however, had to be a debatable point. For Stuart had no firm reason, from
experience, to believe that she was.
Tonight, for instance, could hardly be described as a suitable occasion
to emphasize an absolute sexual distinction in matters of appearance! After all, they were at an intellectual
gathering, and by no stretch of the imagination could that be described as a
pretext for encouraging sexist behaviour!
Yet, in dressing as she did, Samantha had undermined her right to be
treated as an equal and would have been at a distinct disadvantage in arguing
against or defending herself from sexist infringements on her person. That was one of the reasons why, despite the
social incongruity of the context, Stuart had felt so little inhibition in
offering her, albeit furtively, some sensual attention. Perhaps, from her point of view, that was one
of the main reasons why she had responded positively, being unable to condemn
an act which she herself had indirectly encouraged by dressing so sexily. Just as one should not bite the hand that
feeds one, so one should not turn away the hand one has tacitly attracted. Else one will be acting ... irrationally.
Yes, the situation provided ample food for
thought, and although Boyle was still discoursing vigorously and, to all
appearances, convincingly ... to the assembled guests at this informal
symposium, Stuart had enough work cut out for himself endeavouring to digest
it, not to want to turn more than a peripheral or perfunctory ear on the
discourse in question. He was coming to
the startling conclusion that a woman who wanted to be treated as an equal, or
effectively as a superman, would do well to do everything in her power to appear equal and
thereby minimize the risk of being treated unequally, as a woman, which (risk)
could only be the greater the more unequivocally feminine she appeared. Otherwise there would be an element of
hypocrisy, not to say unreasonableness, in any complaint she might level against
certain men for treating her less as a relative equal than as an absolute
'other', in the event of sexist discrimination.
On the other hand, a woman who wanted to
invite such discrimination couldn't be regarded as superhumanly liberated, but
was behaving, when dressed sexily, in a traditional feminine manner - the
absolute 'other' of sexual relations.
Here, it seemed, lay the chief distinction between a woman bound to her
basic femininity and one who was relatively liberated. For whereas the former played a seductive
role on independent feminine terms, and could therefore be described as a
sexual predator, the latter, dressing in a masculine fashion, behaved passively
towards men and accordingly left it up to them to make such sexual advances as
they thought fit. In functioning as a
liberated woman she did not seek to enslave men but left them free to establish
and enter into sexual relations with her, if they so desired. Her social relationship to men was
intellectual rather than sexual, as befitting the unisexual context in which
liberated women and free men usually lived.
Only where there was a blatantly heterosexual antagonism between the
sexes would a woman consciously strive to draw sexual attention to herself, in
conformity with her status as an absolute 'other', or sexual opponent. Such an antagonism, it needs to be
emphasized, was relevant to but a limited period of evolutionary time. A truly post-atomic age would never
countenance sexual discrimination!
For Stuart Roach, however, there could be
no question but that his girlfriend was dressed very much as a woman this
evening, and as he stole a glance at her from his position to her left he
wondered anew why she should have chosen to assert a heterosexual distinction
between them on such an occasion, in complete defiance of her ordinarily
liberated habits. He noted a faint smile
on her lips and thought, at first, that it owed something to his sly
attentions, both visual and tactile. But
after another glance he realized, with dismay, that this wasn't so, since her
eyes, far from being fixed on Boyle (as had at first appeared to be the case)
were fixed on someone or something closer to her in front of where the
philosopher still stood.
Adjusting his own vision accordingly,
Stuart discovered the face of Brendan O'Day, his
former rival, half-turned towards her with an equally faint but evidently
meaningful smile on his lips. And,
suddenly, it dawned on him why Samantha had adopted such a blatantly seductive
appearance this evening, and, no less significantly, why she was now
smiling! He felt the blood rush to his
head as the fact of Samantha's betrayal burst into his consciousness. She had not been interested in or indeed
conscious of where his hand was, but only in Brendan O'Day! That was why she had smiled and was still
smiling. Automatically, he withdrew it
from her rump and ceased to speculate.
Boyle's discourse was, in any case, drawing to a logical if predictable
conclusion. He would soon be free to
leave.
SPIRITUAL LEADERS
'At one
time,' he said, turning to face us (the better, I dare say, to instil his
knowledge into our heads), 'peace was the exception and war the rule. Nowadays, however, it's the other way round,
and so the role of the army as a war-making institution has declined in
proportion that the role of the police as a peace-keeping one has
developed. In point of fact, the police
are to the modern world what armies were to the ancient one - a reflection of
the times. It's theoretically preferable
to live in a police state than in an army state, though no state is, as yet,
completely absolute in that respect. We
live with a kind of army/police compromise, though while the army is trained to
make war ... it occasionally finds itself having to assist the police in keeping
the peace. Nevertheless, a day will
come, I can assure you, when there'll be no armies!'
Yes, I respect that opinion, as do most of
my fellow cadets at the Police Training Centre.
We like to think of ourselves as a cut above the army, a truly contemporary
body of men with a steady and, hopefully, peaceful future ahead of us, once we
get out of here. Superintendent O'Brien
encourages us in this belief. He has
never been anything but a cop and sees no reason why any of us should ever be
anything else either, least of all a soldier, which to him would amount to a
cop-out! For to him soldiers are a dying
breed, likened, in his imagination, to wolves.
We, by contrast, he likens to sheepdogs, whose business it is to keep
the flock, or masses, in order. We take
our orders from the shepherds, or leaders of the flock. Leaders in the best sense of the word, who
are themselves to a significant extent dependent on the Word, the Way, as
proclaimed by the philosopher-kings, as they used to be called, though perhaps
philosopher-commissars would now be a more appropriate terminology in view of
the post-atomic nature of the age?
Smiling to himself on reading this
paradoxical entry in his late-brother's journal, the politician Shane Brady
reflected that O'Brien's metaphors for human society were fairly apposite, if a
shade over-simplified and even arrogant.
The fact that in an absolute society, such as the one he lived in, the
'shepherds' were derived from the 'flock' ... meant that they formed a relative
distinction vis-à-vis those whom they led, not to mention those who kept the
peace in the interests of law and order.
The 'sheepdogs', as O'Brien called them, had come to supplant the 'wolves'
in the course of time; though one could quibble with that metaphor as regards
its applicability to the army, if one so desired. For armies tended, more often than not, to
make war on other armies than to attack civilian populations, after the fashion
of a wolf attacking a flock of sheep! At
least that used to be the case prior to the twentieth century.
Still, there was a world of difference
between soldiers and police. The heyday
of armies had long since passed, because the emphasis in the modern world was
on keeping the peace internally, within any given country, rather than on
making war externally, vis-à-vis other countries - evolution having progressed
from the apparent to the essential in the course of its spiritual striving
towards a maximum internal goal. Modern
armies tended to be kept in reserve, pending hostilities from without, more
often than they were actually used in fighting a war. Theirs was an indirect mode of keeping the
peace, involving preparation for war.
They were not police, but at times they could almost be taken for
police, as O'Brien had hinted in his straightforward way. Certainly they were no longer the out-and-out
warmongers of earlier times! Their
continual presence in the world could be described as a necessary evil, whereas
the police were essentially a force for good, concerned with keeping the
peace. There was a difference of quality
between the two vocations, a greater degree of prestige accruing to the
peace-keeping body than to the - potentially if not literally - war-making
one. Virtually anyone could become a
soldier, particularly in times of war; but not everyone could become a
policeman!
Yet the modern army should not be belittled
on that or other accounts, since it was perfectly capable of adapting to a
variety of tasks and employments. Compared
with ancient war-like armies, it was only nominally an army, which was just as
well, even in countries that professed a greater respect for soldiering, like
those with expansionist interests of one sort or another. Even their armies were relatively cautious
and had long been such. Perhaps that was
because they no longer had much work to do?
Certainly the army in Shane Brady's country had done a fair amount of
peace-keeping work in recent years, and now existed on a stand-by and
relatively peaceful basis.
"Had enough of your reading?"
Gavin Howe asked, having noticed that his colleague had the expression of a man
lost in thought when he glanced-up from his own reading-matter, which, after
more than an hour, was now becoming somewhat tiresome to him.
"Ah, so you perceive my
self-absorption!" Brady responded with surprising alacrity. "I had gravitated from reading to
thinking, as is my customary habit.
Would you recommend such a tendency?"
Howe smiled guardedly, as if to justify his
position, and replied: "No, not as a rule."
Brady's face accommodated itself to a look
of surprise mixed with self-doubt.
"But why ever not?" he wanted to know.
"I would define it as a relapse from
passive intellectuality into active intellectuality, from a relatively passive
use of the will to its absolutely active use," Howe declared.
"Oh, come now!" Brady protested,
in what appeared to be a mildly face-saving exercise. "Such distinctions are trivial. In point of fact, you'd probably be more correct
to distinguish between a relatively active use of the will and an absolutely
active use of it. After all, reading
does require an exertion of the will, both in terms of following the words and
simultaneously making some sense out of them.
Awareness is being applied to something other than itself, i.e. to words
on a printed page, which are akin to external thoughts. In reading, we absorb other people's thoughts
through the medium of print, which is mind objectivized,
as it were."
Gavin Howe chuckled softly and commented
that, if one were a writer oneself, one could end-up reading one's own thoughts
fairly regularly - a comment which Brady was obliged to swallow with a
reluctant admission of its truth, whilst also admitting that it wasn't very
often that he found himself reading any of his own objectivized
thoughts, not being a writer.
"Nevertheless, you'll have to agree with me that reading signifies
a morally superior use of the will than thinking," Howe in due course
retorted.
"Perhaps it does," Brady
reluctantly conceded. "Though from
what I gather from certain knowledgeable sources, hardly the most morally
superior use of it!"
"I'm not so sure," Howe
confessed, shrugging faintly. "You
see, will is awareness, or spirit, directed to some objective outside itself, like
thinking or reading. When, however,
awareness isn't directed beyond its spiritual confines but exists for itself, as in meditation, then will is transcended, because
awareness reflecting upon itself corresponds to an absolute use of the
spirit. When spirit is used in
conjunction with soul it becomes will, which signifies its relative use. Now if meditation is morally superior to
reading, it isn't because it signifies a less relative use of the spirit but,
on the contrary, because it transcends relativity ... in the absolute. There is no will in meditation, and so one
can't talk, as you approximately did, of a morally more superior use of the
will than in reading - as implying meditation.
As far as I'm aware, reading is morally
the most superior use of the will, since it involves more passivity or, as you
seemed to imply, less activity than thinking.
Thought leads, on the highest levels, to writing, which, when read,
brings us a step closer to meditation.
We think in order to write, we write in order to read, and we read in
order to meditate - even if only indirectly."
Brady smiled in admiration of this
philosophical conundrum and admitted that, though confusing on the surface,
there was probably some truth in it underneath, so to speak, in its metaphysical
depths. "An approximation, in
essence, to Schopenhauer's metaphysics," he averred. "Though that good philosopher would
probably have had more respect for thought-for-thought's sake than you."
Gavin Howe half-agreed, via an affirmative
grunt, with the probability of that assertion and remarked: "To my mind,
thinking unconnected with any purpose outside itself, like writing, is a kind
of madness, particularly when taken to extremes. After all, there's only a difference of
degree between a person who habitually thinks to himself and one who habitually
talks to himself, the former being a more introverted version of the latter -
one might almost say a better class of madman.
The only reason we recognize the self-talker as mad and overlook the
self-thinker, is that the one is more conspicuous, because audible, than the
other. The one advertises his madness to
all-and-sundry, whereas the other keeps it to himself. Though neither of them realizes he's mad,
which, of course, is usually the way of things with lunatics."
"How
enlightening!" Brady exclaimed, intrigued by the prospect that the
world harboured numerous secretive madmen.
"I'd never considered private thought in that light
before." He chuckled faintly,
before adding: "Perhaps that explains why you interrupted my, er, brown study earlier, fearing for my sanity?"
Gavin Howe refrained from directly
answering Brady's suggestion, but contented himself by saying that some books
gave rise to fruitful reflections which, providing they didn't get out-of-hand,
were nothing to worry about, particularly if destined to lead to fruitful
writing in due course.
"As, no doubt, did some of
Schopenhauer's reflections," Brady commented.
"Especially those paradoxically
treating of denial of the will in the interests of spiritual quiescence,"
Howe confirmed.
"Which the intelligent reader would
doubtless have been impressed by," Brady rejoined, chuckling anew.
"Perhaps even to the point of
giving-up reading in the interests of meditation," Howe concluded. For, thereafter, both men gave-up thinking
aloud and reverted or, rather, gravitated to reading their respective books.
* * *
The Leader
slowly paced backwards and forwards behind his desk, as was his habit when
reflecting on imparted information and, with a sudden tensing of his brow,
which others might have called a frown, he said: "A pity Howe is becoming
what you say he is - a kind of absolute spiritual teacher. I'd always thought of him as an able
politician, which, frankly, he still is in my eyes; though if, in future, he
decides to become something else, I should have nothing against the fact."
Shane Brady fidgeted ostentatiously in his
chair, since he was of the opinion that Howe ought already to have quit
politics and gone on to something else. Yet
he kept silent.
"The emphasis in politics, as in
science, is always on changing the world or, at least, one's own bit of it for
the better," the Leader continued, tensing anew, "and so it must be
for us. Of course, there are people who
abjure the politically active approach to life in loyalty to a religiously
passive approach to it, who turn their back on the world in the interests of
spiritual advancement. Such people are
usually deluded, since they imagine that the spiritual approach is alone right
and that, if they keep at it long enough, it will eventually take them to
Heaven. Unfortunately that isn't the
case, and anyone who realizes as much is unlikely to remain an absolute
upholder of the spiritual approach for long!
Rather, he'll come, in some fashion, to understand the importance of the
active approach accompanying the passive one, not as an absolute alternative,
contrary to what some people still think, but as a means to a higher end, a
subsidiary approach to bringing into effect our eventual salvation in spiritual
absolutism. In short, the political
approach must be harnessed to the religious one, in order to create a new
synthesis in which technology serves the spirit in the interests of transcendence."
Shane Brady nodded his aching head and
smiled the smile of a man who only half-understood what the Leader was getting
at. The latter, however, had no
intentions of letting-up, but went on:-
"Was it not Marx who wrote: 'Hitherto
philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it'? Well, change it we shall, though not for the
mere sake of change but - and this is the crux of the matter - in order to make
salvation possible. Of course, the act
of changing the world devolves upon politicians and scientists rather than philosophers,
since philosophy can only draw attention to what changes need to be made and
why. The philosopher necessarily
interprets the world and draws what conclusions he can from it, and then the
politicians and scientists come along and actually affect change. Some philosophers, like Marx, appeal more to
those materialistic changers than others; some, like Schopenhauer, primarily
appeal to the idealistic changers - the priests and artists; and some, like
Hegel, strive to establish a balance between the two categories in an attempt
to reconcile them, appealing now to the one, now to the other. I, myself, wrote in the vein of a
synthesizing philosopher, which is why I adopted a political stance not wholly
materialist but embracing a concern for the spiritual life, primarily in terms
of transcendentalism and the correlative building and staffing of meditation
centres. If we are politicians, we're
politicians with a difference; men who are opposed to purely materialist values
and seek to further the spiritual life through our actions, working indirectly,
via politics, for a higher religion. It
is we who safeguard the spirit! Indeed,
we're so concerned with the spiritual life that an impartial observer would be
justified, I think, in regarding us as priests in disguise, transcendentalists
who take the responsibility of government upon ourselves not only in the
interests of spiritual progress, but from a grave concern, more particularly,
that it should ever get into wholly materialist hands whose money-grubbing
instincts would thwart spiritual development and deny the validity of a
transcendental approach to the world."
Shane Brady nodded understandingly and
admitted to himself that, although Howe had probably veered a little too
radically towards spiritual quietism, his was only an
extreme manifestation of what, essentially, they were all concerned with and,
as transcendentalists, sought to uphold - namely religious progress.
"Yes, we should regard ourselves
primarily as transcendentalists," the Leader continued apace, as was his
custom when addressing subordinates, "and so consider our political duties
as of secondary importance. Before that
atomic dichotomy between politicians and priests, or state and church, arose,
religious matters were largely in the hands of politicians who, as in ancient
Greece, served in the temple on a part-time basis, a subsidiary obligation to
their principal responsibilities as political rulers. Religion, at that time, was predominantly
materialist. Well, now that we've evolved
beyond the church/state dichotomy, we find ourselves in the converse situation
... of being spiritual leaders who take political responsibility upon ourselves
without, however, regarding politics as our principal concern, but solely in
order to keep power out of the hands of materialists, who, as already said,
would impede further spiritual progress.
We are spiritual leaders with a subsidiary obligation to politics."
Shane Brady raised sceptical brows
slightly, since he was becoming a trifle confused by the apparent discrepancy
that still existed between theory and practice in his country.
Divining as much, the Leader went on:
"Admittedly, we're still in early days and therefore can't claim to have
taken our spiritual leadership to the point where politics, and hence the state, ceases to exist.
We often see ourselves as politicians, and, to be sure, some amongst us
are more genuinely political than others."
Here Brady smiled in gratified recognition
of the fact, even though there was an undercurrent of derision in the Leader's
voice and he ought really to have known better.
"But eventually we, or our future
successors, will treat our religious obligations to the people more
seriously," continued the Leader, "we shall go down to them more
often in our capacity as meditation leaders, until we get to the stage where
politics is only a very part-time concern of ours in relation to spiritual
leadership. As yet, the people meditate
in public for no longer than an hour on Sunday mornings, and so we don't have
to exert ourselves in a spiritual capacity to them very often or for very
long. But a time will come, comrade,
when they'll be meditating for a number of hours every day, and then we, or our
future successors, will be obliged to set them a spiritual example by being
on-hand for much longer periods of time.
At that more fortunate juncture in time, politics will indeed be a very
subsidiary concern of ours, as 'the church' takes over from 'the state' to such
an extent ... as to presage the complete eclipse of the latter in the absolute
spirituality of the post-human millennium, when only religious concerns will
prevail as, first, the collectivized brains of the Supermen and, then, the
collectivized new-brains of the Superbeings bring
life on earth closer to transcendence, and thus to the attainment of pure
spirit to the post-millennial Beyond. In
the meantime, however, government will remain firmly in the hands of spiritual
leaders, like me, and so a continuity of religious progress will be
guaranteed. It is we who stand firm
against undue materialism and have the means to ensure the dissemination of
spiritual truth when the time comes for the world at large to embrace
civilization on the highest post-human level - namely, that of
transcendentalism. And we are not alone
in this matter."
Shane Brady nodded affirmative agreement
and emitted the sigh of a man who was both relieved of doubts by the Leader's
confidence and anxious not to detain him any longer than was strictly
necessary.
Perceiving this, the latter concluded:
"As for Howe, I shall have a personal word with him and decide whether he
should perhaps modify his spiritual commitment to suit our short-term
requirements or, if that cannot be done, take a different post in the
administration - possibly as Commissar for Spiritual Development, or Commissar
for the Arts." So saying, he
extended his hand and bid Brady a friendly good-day.
As usual, the Commissar for Internal
Security departed the Leader's presence reassured that things were under
control and gradually working out for the better. He, too, was a member of this
spiritually-biased administration and had a right to uphold religious progress
in the face of materialist concerns.
Indeed, it was an integral part of his job to ensure that no-one threatened
the spiritual integrity of a country which, as a socially transcendent one,
signified a transition, as it were, between 'state' and 'church', or politics
and religion - the former socialist, the latter transcendentalist. Except for a few cases, the leaders in the
current administration were indeed spiritual men, priests in disguise, as the
Leader had called them, who were intent upon furthering the evolution of 'the
church' at the expense of traditional concepts of the state, so that the state's
gradual withering depended, as much as anything, on their volition, since not
connected with a dualistic antagonism between political and religious leaders.
Back in his office, Brady turned to his
late-brother's journal, which he was still reading, and opened it where he had
left off. Smiling, he read: Another day
O'Brien said to us, 'What you have to realize is that you're a force for good
in this world and have a duty to uphold the integrity of the police. You're not there to make war on the people but
to keep the peace, and thus to serve the cause of evolutionary progress towards
the post-human millennium, when, in all probability, you'll cease to exist,
having fulfilled your destiny as peace-keepers within the human context. Your origins were in atomic society, with the
growth of a dualistic distinction between proton equivalents and bound-neutron
equivalents, which is to say, between army and police. But you came into your own in the post-atomic
context of the police state, and increasingly function as free-neutron
equivalents within such a context. Your
loyalty, as protectors of the peace, is to the leaders who, as
transcendentalists, function as free-electron equivalents in the people's
interests. You may not wear black
uniforms, but the navy-blue uniform you do wear symbolizes both your good
intentions and honour as policemen. It
contrasts sharply with the bright-red tunics formerly worn by certain armies
prior to the day when proton equivalents became quasi-electron equivalents and
increasingly took on a role in society subsidiary to
your own. One day, as I've already said,
such protons-in-disguise will cease to exist, as society arrives at a
completely absolute orientation favouring free-neutron equivalents alone. Which country is destined, I wonder, to
become the first absolute police state?'
Still smiling, Brady closed the journal and
put it away in the right-hand draw of his desk.
Probably it would be safer if they all became absolute police states in
conjunction, he mused. Assuming 'state'
was really the appropriate term?
TWO KINDS OF STRENGTH
Clive Murtagh had the education of Geoffrey Kearns in mind when
he eventually broke the silence between them by remarking: "The reason the
Church has traditionally protected and supported the weak against the strong is
that they are at least potentially, if not literally, in line for the 'Kingdom
of Heaven', since more disposed, in consequence of their comparative physical
weakness, to truth and spiritual striving than the strong."
Kearns smiled deferentially on the
reception of this conjectural information and then admitted that it made good
sense to him, since, so he went on to explain, the weak were passively rather
than actively evil - weakness being a kind of aborted or tenuous strength.
Murtagh nodded
sagaciously, mindful of his acquaintance's predilection for ironic
paradox. "Weakness isn't,
admittedly, a quality directed towards transcendence," he averred,
"but, rather, a quantity that stems less directly from the Diabolic Alpha,
constituting, in consequence, an indirect approach to the Divine Omega."
Kearns considered the metaphor of a
sculptor chiselling some quality from a quantity of marble, before asking:
"Could physical strength be attributed to the Diabolic Alpha, then?"
"I doubt it," Murtagh
replied in a tone of voice more confident than his choice of words suggested,
"because the diabolical absolutism of the
subatomic is beneath matter, since existing on the purely soulful level of
proton-proton reactions. Rather, the
Diabolic Alpha signifies a soulful, sensual strength that we identify with
gravitational force. But this soulful
mind of the subatomic can cool, in the case of small stars, into planets,
hardening into crust as the flame recedes towards the core, becoming molten. And with the emergence of matter we have the
basis from which physical strength in minerals, plants, animals, and men can
grow, strength itself being either qualitatively active, as with human beings,
or quantitatively passive, as with rocks and certain types of mineral
formation. A strong man can lift a great
weight, but the material lifted can also be strong, in the sense of difficult
or impossible to break. Perhaps 'hard' would
be a better definition."
Kearns nodded respectful confirmation, then
said: "Whereas 'powerful' would be a definition better suited to the
active sense of strength, since it's generally in that sense that we refer to
strong people, not simply in terms of their actually being physically strong. The weak, on the other hand, don't act
powerfully, but are usually acted upon.
And on that account they're doubtless more suited to a contemplative,
passive approach to life, such as the Church recognizes as indicative of a
divine orientation, and which it to some extent encourages."
Murtagh agreed in
principle with most of Kearns' statement, but chose to embellish on it by
saying: "Of course, the terms 'strong' and 'weak' are subject to
modification in the course of time and may imply different attributes in
consequence. The distinction between the
strong and the weak at an early stage of human evolution, up to and including
medieval times, was physical, whereas these days it's usually intellectual, as
when we speak of the clever and the stupid, the latter term generally implying
intellectual weakness. A man may be
physically strong but mentally weak or, conversely, mentally strong but
physically weak, and, as a rule, the two attributes don't fit together, since
the one only thrives at the expense of the other. Most clever men, whom we recognize as
geniuses, have been physically weak, whereas most strong men, whom we recognize
as tyrants, have been mentally stupid. Not absolutely stupid of course, but nevertheless relatively so by
comparison with men of intellectual genius."
"Clearly, one can't treat the
intellectually strong and the physically weak as synonymous," Murtagh averred in a meditative tone-of-voice. "For while the Church has traditionally
supported and influenced the physically weak, it has failed to attract the
intellectually strong, who, particularly in recent centuries, have remained
outside it as enemies from above rather than, as with the physically strong,
from below. Even the intellectually
weak, who are more often than not quite physically strong, haven't been
attracted by it."
An image of the average proletarian,
muscular and coarse-grained, entered Kearns' imagination, and he had to agree
with Murtagh that, from a traditionally
pre-intellectual point-of-view, the physically weak had been and still were the
Church's main concern, given the fact that it was a relative institution
in-between absolute extremes. Murtagh, however, was no Nietzsche - intellectually strong
but physically weak - to deride the Church for supporting the weak. He despised the physically strong and
regarded the physically weak as closer to the Divine Omega, if in an indirect
kind of way. The closest of all, in his
estimation, were the intellectually weak, or those who, under a different
system, would be encouraged to directly aspire towards transcendence from a
post-intellectual bias in transcendental meditation. Regardless of their physical constitution,
they would be closer to the Divine Omega during the process of cultivating
awareness for its own sake than were those who habitually used awareness for
some purpose extraneous to itself, like thinking or writing or reading, and who
corresponded, in consequence, to the intellectually strong. As the physically strong had to some extent
made the physically weak what they were, so the intellectually strong would
likewise make the intellectually weak what they were destined to become - transcenders of the will through spiritual
self-absorption. Probably the
intellectually strong would no more meditate on a regular basis than their
ancestral counterparts, the physically strong, had regularly attended
church. There was always a distinction
between leaders of one sort or another and led, that is to say, between the
governing and the governed. Such a
distinction would not cease to exist until the superbeing
millennium, when there would be neither leaders nor led but only Superbeings hypermeditating
towards transcendence; new-brain collectivizations
artificially supported and sustained in the ultimate classless society on
earth.
But Murtagh, in
his identification with the intellectually strong, had no respect for
anarchists or those who, through ignorance, confounded socialism with all power
to the people on a literal basis ... in deference to a kind of Marxist
purism. Such opponents of socialist
leaderships were more often than not deluded as to the nature of the coming
millennium, which they erroneously conceived in humanistic terms, failing to perceive
that no human society can become truly classless, moneyless, stateless, etc.,
but must be led and, if necessary, goaded along towards a society that could
become such - namely, a post-human one and, more specifically, the most extreme
post-human one at that, not strictly post-human so much as post-superhuman,
which would only arise with the second, or superbeingful,
phase of the millennium in question.
Ah, the intellectually weak! There could be no question of the
intellectually strong allowing power to get into their
hands! The people ruled in a socialist
society all right, but only through their elected leaders, using that term in
its most profound sense. The Marxist
purists, however, seemed to think that the proletariat should literally govern
themselves without recourse to bureaucratic interference or surveillance,
without the need, in other words, for machinery of state. Fortunately, theirs wasn't the voice of
authority in socialist affairs but existed, more often than not, as a kind of
ideological impotence in Western states where, compliments of bourgeois
connivance, it was free to criticize socialist regimes from an anarchic
point-of-view.
No, Murtagh had
no respect for people's anarchists, except, he once said, when their anarchy
was directed against the bourgeois state, where it constituted a kind of
indirect path to socialism through rebellion rather than revolution. The true people's leaders, however, were
socialist revolutionaries, the intellectually strong who sought power in the name
of the people, and this whether in a so-called communist context - in reality
Bolshevik 'Red Fascism' - or in a democratic socialist one, depending on the
historical/ideological circumstances.
These revolutionaries weren't imposed on the people from above, as in
bourgeois or aristocratic states, but either directly stemmed from the people,
as proletarians, or indirectly stemmed from them, as intellectuals who
nevertheless had their interests at heart.
Such leaders, Murtagh
had no doubt, were entitled to serve the people as they, with their superior
moral and intellectual qualities, determined, and to continue serving them
irrespective of whether certain wayward elements among their numbers thought
that the people should literally serve themselves, not least of all by getting
rid of all leaders! Paradoxically, it
would be the leaders who were destined to get rid of themselves, though
not before proletarian civilization had got properly under way and
transcendental values begun to assume increasing importance. Then the political/artistic leadership would
wither, while the religious/technological leadership proceeded to blossom, so
that, eventually, with the dawn of the Superman, only the latter would remain,
to direct the progress of superhuman life towards that point in millennial time
when, following the removal of the old brain from individual supermen, life was
upgraded to the superbeing level and the remaining
leadership, or technicians, could safely depart the scene, leaving the
collectivized new-brains to hypermeditate, in the
most free earthly context, towards transcendence. In the meantime, all power to the
intellectually strong!
BETWEEN TWO EXTREMES
Three men
were arguing over the value of their respective professions, and they were a
philosopher, a novelist, and a poet.
They existed within the confines of a relative, or atomic, civilization,
where each profession was permitted and respected, though none so much as the
novelist's. The relative civilization in
question was a bourgeois/proletarian one, and although the heyday of novelistic
relativity between philosophy and poetry had passed, the novelist's calling was
still the most respected of the three, since a novel, even when biased towards
poetry, was still relative and thus more relevant to such a civilization than
either a work of philosophy or a collection of poems could ever be.
The novelist, a distinctly petty-bourgeois
type, was getting the better of the philosopher and the poet, both of whom he
despised, though for diametrically opposite reasons. To his way of thinking, the philosopher was
essentially an aristocratic anachronism who pertained, in ancestral origin, to
an absolute civilization, while the poet, by contrast, was essentially a
proletarian anachronism pertaining to - as harbinger of - a transcendental as
opposed to a pagan civilization, in which post-atomic rather than pre-atomic
values would prevail.
Yes, from the novelist's standpoint there
was something decidedly aristocratic about the philosopher and proletarian
about the poet, something, in both cases, that connoted with an
absolutism inimical to relativity.
He was a novelist who leant more towards poetry than aimed to strike a
balance between philosophy and poetry - a typically petty-bourgeois
novelist. He despised, on principle, his
creative predecessors, who, as bourgeois novelists, had aimed for and as often
as not struck just such a balance and were accordingly the most relative of
novelists. He found there was too much
philosophy in such a balance for his liking.
Yet even they, he claimed, were less despicable than their predecessors,
the grand-bourgeois novelists, whose works leant towards philosophy and were
accordingly antithetical in constitution to his own.
No, the grand-bourgeois types were
decidedly too close to the aristocracy for his liking! They were virtually philosophers,
he was apt to claim in a less than generous mood, whose relativity was rather
too proton-biased for petty-bourgeois sensibilities to abide. And sometimes, as he recently found out, they
weren't seventeenth- or eighteenth-century figures but ... virtual
contemporaries - grand-bourgeois authors living in the twentieth century,
compliments of petty-bourgeois relativity!
Ah, was there not a kind of grand-bourgeois/bourgeois/petty-bourgeois
distinction between, for example, the novels of Aldous
Huxley, Anthony Burgess, and Lawrence Durrell? Did one not encounter the entire gamut of
novelistic evolution in the respective novels of these three twentieth-century
masters? Wasn't it true that whereas
Huxley's most representative novels leant down, as it were, towards philosophy
and Durrell's most representative novels leant up
towards poetry, the most representative novels of Anthony Burgess aimed at and
usually struck a balance between the two absolutes in a quintessentially bourgeois
relativity?
To be sure, Burgess may, from our
novelist's viewpoint, be preferable to Huxley, but he was still one of those
novelists whom our hero was obliged to despise for his balanced prose between
sub- and supra-atomic extremes. Durrell was the closest to our novelist's poetic
predilection, and consequently the one whom he was obliged to regard as an
equal, if only on technical grounds. At
least Durrell was a petty-bourgeois novelist!
Of course, philosophers and poets had long
existed within the respective confines of evolving relative civilization. Philosophers had even existed long before the
first of those confines made its appearance in the world, as in ancient Greece,
and in such numbers that it was a job to keep track of them all, let alone
count them, particularly if one was a man of our novelist's poetic
predilection! Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle were merely the tip of the pagan iceberg, names with whom everyone
who had undergone any schooling were pretty familiar, irrespective of whether
or not they had ever studied philosophy.
The truest and, some would say, greatest philosophers, however, were the
pre-Socratic Greeks, those who could genuinely lay claim to an
absolutism the equal of the Stoic aristocrats. Later, as Greek civilization evolved into
grand-bourgeois relativity, playwrights arose to dilute the philosophical
absolutism of the Greeks and displace philosophy from its throne, a task made
easier by certain contemporary philosophers whose decadence is too well-known
to warrant comment here.
These late philosophers and early
playwrights weren't averse to sharing the limelight with each other, though
they jostled for honours in the Greek Pantheon.
For anyone who thinks that Homer, the so-called earliest Greek poet, was
really a part of this civilization, particularly in its absolute manifestation,
our novelistic hero would have scant sympathy!
To his way of thinking, Homer was neither a Greek nor a poet, but a
Cretan chronicler of early-Greek history!
But that, I suppose, is sadly beside the point. The Greeks, like the Romans, specialized in
philosophy, but, unlike their Roman counterparts, they excelled in it. By the time the Romans entered their
decadence, philosophy held a place of honour only among the most jaded of aristocrats,
the bourgeois populace preferring theatre and that new relativity, the novel,
which of course the Christians were to develop and bring to perfection, if by
'perfection' is meant striking a balance between philosophy and poetry - a
contention, however, which our novelist wouldn't regard as warranting lasting
respect!
Neither, for that matter, does the
philosopher, who, breaking out of his shell of stoical reserve, lets it be
known that philosophy, too, was developed, if not perfected, by the Christians,
both in terms of the Church Fathers and, later, the secular philosophers of the
Enlightenment. Indeed, a study of
history revealed that each and every civilization, regardless of its
geographical confines, required a philosopher of substance behind it in order
to formulate the philosophy by which it would eventually live. What Augustine had been to the aristocratic
pagan/Catholic civilization of the early-Middle Ages, Aquinas was to the
grand-bourgeois Catholic civilization of the Middle Ages-proper. And what Luther had been to the bourgeois
Protestant civilization of the late-Middle Ages, Schopenhauer was to the
petty-bourgeois Neo-Oriental civilization of the Industrial Age. Needless to say, any future proletarian
civilization - if we exempt Marx from such an honour for want of religious
credibility - would likewise require its philosophical harbinger to establish
the philosophy by which it would live.
No civilization sprang from a void but, on the contrary, from the Word,
which determined its growth.
So saying, the philosopher relapsed into
silence; for he knew that there was no arguing against the justification for a
final philosopher, who would usher in a transcendental civilization. That would be a truly absolute classical
civilization, beyond the relative classicism of petty-bourgeois Neo-Orientalism and antithetical to the absolute romanticism of
aristocratic paganism. The pendulum of
religious evolution had swung, when viewed in an absolutist way, from the
romantic to the classic via romantic/classic Christian relativities. Catholicism was the end of religious
romanticism, Protestantism the beginning of its classicism. But in the relativity of Christian civilization,
they existed cheek-by-jowl, as it were, in an uneasy symbiosis at times
degenerating into open conflict.
And the same might be said of the
grand-bourgeois philosophically-biased novelist and the petty-bourgeois
poetically-biased one, not to mention the bourgeois novelist in between, who
were each subject to the tensions inherent in a relative civilization, and who
reserved their chief critical barbs, when intellectual violence was in the air,
for their relativistic opponents rather than for the absolute extremes of
philosopher and poet, whom they tended to regard as outsiders.
Nevertheless the poet, who now ventured to
speak, insisted that the life-span of relative writing was drawing to a close
and assured the novelist that the sands of novelistic time were running out,
never to return. The future belonged to
himself and his kind, he averred, though they would undergo a transformation
from the individual plane of poets to the collective plane of poetic
theosophists, and thus exist at a transcendent remove from their creative
ancestors. Naturally, philosophy would
cease to be written, since, technically speaking, it
connoted with the aristocratic, proton side of things and therefore couldn't be
tolerated in a post-atomic society, which, of necessity, would pertain to the
most classical civilization in transcendent passivity. Only poetic theosophists would exist, and
their work would be of an appropriately free-electron order, elevated beyond
proton constraint in the absolute freedom of meaningless words, of grammar-free
abstractions. That,
maintained the poet, was what civilized proletarian writing would be all about
and, needless to say, no petty-bourgeois novelist could be relevant to such a
civilization. The poetic novel would end
with the death of petty-bourgeois civilization, that is to say, with its murder
from without. The birth of absolute
poetic writing would follow at the appropriate hour, born of an internal
proletariat whose destiny was to further proletarian civilization in the wake
of what the external proletariats of the world ... in, for example, the film
industry ... had destroyed.
All this didn't, of course, sound very
pleasant to the poetic novelist's relative ears, though he had to admit that
the poet, for all his absolutism, was hardly a direct threat to himself, which
was probably just as well, else they might have come to physical strife. Together with the philosopher, the poet was
simply an outsider in this relative civilization - more of an outsider, in
fact, than poets and philosophers generally were. They couldn't be regarded as enemies,
no! Though they could
hardly be classified as friends, either.
They pertained to a different order, the one beneath, the other above
the confines of relative civilization.
Only he, the novelist, was truly contemporary, if, in a sense, less so
than the filmic barbarians on the proletarian side of bourgeois/proletarian
civilization.
RELATIVITY
One day
Miranda turned to me at table and, referring to a recent essay of mine, said:
"You seem to have the next civilization in mind more than anything else
these days, Jim. You must be its leading
authority!"
I smiled defensively, though not without an
undertone of pride, and confessed to the probable truth of that assumption.
Miranda shot me one of her characteristically
ironic smiles and, while pouring me some more tea, remarked that, as I saw it,
life in the transcendental civilization struck her as being a good deal better
than it had been in any previous civilization - indeed, so good as to be
virtually heavenly. "For instance,
there won't be any noisy dogs barking and well-nigh driving one mad in the
process, since, as you say, they'll have been removed."
I nodded confirmation and said: "Yes,
dogs may be acceptable within the confines of a relative civilization, such as
exists in the contemporary West, but they'd be totally unacceptable in an
absolute civilization that happened to be transcendental. Those animals would have to be removed during
the interim phase of evolution between the end of the old civilization and the
start of the new one, so that, by the time transcendentalism got properly under
way, everything that smacked of allegiance to the pagan, diabolic roots of life
would have been extirpated, whether one includes under that rubric the
toleration of dogs, the teaching of Latin, the perpetuation of absolute class
distinctions, the worship of the Father (not to mention His only begotten Son),
marriage, sexual discrimination, or anything else equally applicable to the
relative past."
Miranda smiled wanly while listening to my enumerations, then said: "An absolute society could not
tolerate beasts who weren't strictly essential to human survival.... Hmm, not
being a dog-lover myself, I kind of approve of such a measure. Dogs are such low creatures!"
"So low," I confirmed without
hesitation, "that they can only utter a monosyllabic grunt or bark or
growl or whine, assuming 'monosyllabic' is the correct word! No, a transcendental man won't be partial to
creatures that, when not barking or messing the pavement, spend most of their
time dozing or sleeping. The mere sight
of that would be objectionable to him, as it now is to me, since I already
live, at least theoretically, on the transcendent plane."
Miranda wasn't one to quibble with that,
though I could tell there was something else on her mind which might have
amounted to a quibble, if pressed into the open. "Another thing that intrigued me about
your essay was its reference to women, particularly skirt-wearing ones."
"Ah yes," I responded, breaking into
a wan smile of my own. "I doubt
that women will be encouraged to wear skirts in the next civilization, since
that would connote with the vagina and thereby denote bourgeois sexism. A post-atomic society would be elevated above
heterosexual distinctions, and so women, or rather their superhuman successors
(as we should call the truly liberated proletarian women of the future), would
always dress in trousers or, more specifically, some kind of synthetic
pants."
Miranda raised incredulous eyebrows. "Always?" she quibbled.
"Yes, just as men, or rather
pseudo-men, always used to wear skirt-like clothing in the truly pre-atomic age
of, for example, the ancient Greeks and Romans," I averred. "That was a unisexual feminine absolutism
which contrasts, if only in imagination at present, with the unisexual
masculine absolutism of the future post-atomic age. During the atomic age, however, trousers made
their first appearance in society, stressing, in contrast to skirts, the
phallic aspect of life. Thus men came
into their own, albeit as bound-electron equivalents, to maintain a separate
identity from women, who continued to wear skirts or dresses, being proton
equivalents in the heterosexual duality of atomic society. Even these days, at the tail-end of relative
civilization, women are entitled to wear unequivocally feminine attire if they
so choose; though the threat of an absolute age is seemingly never far away, in
consequence of which many of them also wear trousers, at least intermittently,
in accordance with their evolving status towards Supermen."
Miranda blushed at this point. For, as usual, she was wearing a pair of
tight-fitting denims which asserted a superhuman status in confirmation of what
I had just said. Living in a
petty-bourgeois world, however, she was less than partial to the permanent use
of such jeans. She had her skirts all
right, and they were reserved for special occasions. Most of them were short and, mindful of this
fact, I now ventured the theory that the length of a skirt or dress varied with
the degree of relativity pertaining to each phase of relative civilization, as
well, of course, as with the class integrity of individual women in any given
phase of it.
"Please explain yourself
in greater detail," Miranda requested of me, avid, as ever, for concrete
knowledge.
"Well, let's just say that, generally
speaking, a long skirt or dress will be most relevant to the grand-bourgeois
phase of such a civilization, a medium-length skirt or dress most relevant to
its bourgeois phase, and, finally, a miniskirt or minidress
most relevant to its petty-bourgeois phase," I responded. "Thus as evolution
proceeds towards a phallic absolutism the vaginal symbolism of the skirt and/or
dress is reduced, so that the feminine contracts as the masculine
expands."
"How expands?" Miranda not
unreasonably wanted to know.
"In terms of the number of people
wearing trousers as opposed to skirts or dresses, most modern women wearing
trousers at least some of the time and thereby confirming the expansion of the
masculine element in life," I confidently replied. "Of course, the individual's class, not
to mention age, will condition her choice of clothing, which is why, even in
this bourgeois/proletarian age, many women wear either medium-length or long skirts
and dresses in accordance with their bourgeois or grand-bourgeois status,
whereas it's usually proletarian women, by contrast, who wear trousers - either
literally or, more usually, in the sense of jeans or slacks. Petty-bourgeois women, as already suggested,
are more disposed to miniskirts and/or minidresses,
though they occasionally settle for medium-length feminine attire and trousers
as well."
Miranda smiled confirmation of this
perception and reminded me, by drawing attention to what she was currently
wearing, that jeans were her first
choice. "So we have this relativity
in terms of evolving skirt-lengths as well as with distinctions between skirts
and trousers, the latter mostly for men, in between the two extremes of very
long skirts and trousers only, do we?" she concluded, after a short but
evidently reflective pause.
"That's broadly how I see it," I
confirmed. "Though the first
extreme, which is essentially pagan, calls rather for the designation of robes
or togas, as pertaining to an aristocratic age.
Thus from robes to long skirts and/or dresses, and from that
grand-bourgeois stage of evolution to the medium-length feminine attire of the
bourgeois stage, which in turn led to the miniskirt/minidress
stage of the petty-bourgeoisie in the late-twentieth century - the stage still
officially prevailing in the greater part of the Western world."
"A stage that will
presumably be superseded by the exclusive absolutism of trouser-wearing
humanity with the future advent of proletarian civilization?"
Miranda conjectured.
"Absolutely," I somewhat
ironically assured her. "It will be
illegal for anyone to wear a skirt or a dress, even of short length, in the
transcendental future, since such a tendency would imply relativity in
deference to heterosexual criteria, and no relativity could possibly be
tolerated in an absolute age. Quite
simply, women will no longer exist, having been effectively superseded by
female supermen who, in the interests of social uniformity and post-sexist
freedom, will dress like their masculine counterparts. Even phrases like 'sexual discrimination'
will cease to apply, because there'll be no women to discriminate against, such
phrases being relative to bourgeois/proletarian civilization - like, for
example, the term 'liberated woman'."
Miranda looked slightly puzzled. "You mean, a liberated woman is only
relevant to petty-bourgeois relativity, in which a degree of sexism still
prevails?" she ventured to suggest.
"Absolutely!"
I replied. "The term 'liberated woman'
is itself petty bourgeois, being on approximately the same level as the
miniskirt. There'll be no such liberated
women in the transcendental civilization, only female supermen, who'll have
evolved out of the proletariat."
"Thus feminism only has applicability
to the bourgeois West," Miranda deduced.
I nodded confirmation and then remarked:
"Feminism, as Westerners currently understand it, would be as irrelevant
to a transcendental society as ... petty-bourgeois abstract art or acoustic
atonal music. It pertains, in the main,
to petty-bourgeois women who, in a late relative age, desire more sexual/social
freedoms than their gender were previously accustomed to, and who consider
themselves liberated when such freedoms are granted. Yet they don't consider themselves female
supermen, since that would pertain to an absolute age and then only to
proletarians - the class from which such people are destined to spring."
Miranda looked quite relieved by now, as
though a doubt or muddle had been cleared up.
"Ah, so now I understand how irrelevant skirts would be to female
supermen!" she averred. "Just
as trousers had been irrelevant to pseudo-men in the age before they evolved
into genuine men and acquired, on the electron side of an atomic integrity, the
right to wear them. Tell me, would these
female supermen of the future be encouraged to wear make-up or long hair and
nails?"
I emphatically shook my head and replied:
"Out of the question! They would
have to look like men, genuine men, as well as dress like them. They would be quasi-electron equivalents, the
lesser equals of free-electron equivalents.
And, of course, they would never become wives, as relative women tend to
do. After all, I haven't married you,
since that would be contrary to my post-atomic principles and undermine your
status, in my eyes, as a female superman."
"Ah, but officially I suppose I'm
really a liberated female," Miranda countered, "because we don't as
yet exist within the absolute confines of a transcendental civilization."
"Even so, a liberated female doesn't
have to become a wife," I retorted, blushing slightly in spite of my
apparent cool. "Though, alas, most
of them eventually do! But you aren't
really a petty bourgeois, so you can't be a liberated female. Just someone who's
potentially a female superman."
She smiled indulgently and admitted to the
probable truth of that statement.
* * *
I find it
difficult not to like Jim, even when he says things that puzzle me or does
things to me that seem odd at the time but which, on reflection, appear logical
and just. He has a special aptitude,
these days, for thrusting a vibrator into my crack, which he claims saves him
unnecessary coital effort and thus makes life easier for us. It's as if the vibrator has become a substitute
for the real thing. At least, that seems
to be the case at present, though he's not averse to a little physical effort
concerning one or two other channels of communication!
"What are you thinking about?"
Jim asks, as well he might under the circumstances. He is half-smiling, like he suspects some
kind of foul-play.
"You!" I
candidly confess, to his evident relief, since his half-smile blossoms into an
overt display of positive emotion, such as he only occasionally indulges in
with me, and then usually in bed.
Smiling he despises, regarding the habit as bourgeois. He never smiles in public.
"And what have I done?" Jim asks
innocently.
"What haven't you
done?" I retort, trying to keep a straight face.
"Perhaps I don't want to do it
today," Jim replies in typically oblique fashion. And I have to chuckle, which is also
something he never does.
"You're not always absolutist," I
remark, trying not to sound critical.
Jim blushes faintly and says: "The
next civilization is still ahead of us, though I doubt that such absolutism as
you're alluding to would be strictly necessary, nor could it be consistently
enforced."
"Maybe that's just as well," I
smilingly remark, "else mankind might die out."
Jim emphatically shakes his head. "They'll have devised artificial means
of safeguarding mankind's survival, involving, amongst other things, artificial
insemination from sperm banks. Children
won't be born to couples, as in bourgeois civilization, but will be brought
into the world on an impersonal basis and raised in a no-less impersonal,
collective way. There won't be any
couples, but only people - female supermen and male supermen - who'll be free
to select partners on a temporary basis, as their sexual preferences
dictate. Probably sex will mostly become
an individual, personal affair in any case, so that partners, in the
traditional marital sense, won't be required - people taking care of their
respective sexual needs with the aid of either computerized models or plastic inflatables/vibrators, depending on their gender."
I open my mouth in astonishment. "You mean that female supermen will find
sexual satisfaction through vibrators, like the one you've just thrust into
me?"
Jim smiles defensively and replies:
"Yes. Whereas the male supermen
will find such satisfaction or relief as they may desire in the contemplation
and/or perusal and possible utilization, with or without a sex doll, of
pornographic erotica, using the term in a general rather than a particular
way. Sex, in other words, will become artificial
and transcendent, as to a certain extent it already is these days in the
bourgeois/proletarian West, where a limited degree of transcendentalism
prevails and one is accordingly free, though under no obligation, to purchase
such pornography - more usually in magazine and video formats - or sex aids as
one may desire."
I nod my head as if in confirmation, though
more out of impulse than anything else, and remark: "Whereas it would
presumably be obligatory, in an absolute civilization, to indulge in artificial
or personal sex."
"Yes, since the relativity which
accrues to bourgeois/proletarian civilization would have been transcended,
making it morally untenable to perpetuate dualistic and naturalistic sex. Consequently there would be no couples,
because a post-atomic society would be elevated above an atomic integrity. So those who continued to indulge in atomic
sex might well find themselves exposed to the risk of prosecution, not to
mention official contempt."
"So it's unlikely that people would
swap partners on a heterosexual basis, as frequently happens in the
contemporary West," I find myself saying.
"Highly unlikely," Jim confirms
in deadly earnestness. "What
happens these days would seem to be a step towards the complete severance of
dualistic ties, a kind of loosening of them in pseudo-atomic promiscuity. With the dawn of a post-atomic civilization,
however, no such promiscuity could be countenanced. For it might lead to a female superman
becoming pregnant naturally, through heterosexual intercourse, and that would
be morally unacceptable in a transcendental society, where pregnancies would
have to be achieved artificially, compliments of artificial insemination."
"So female and male supermen would not
have heterosexual sex together," I respond, drawing the inevitable
conclusions.
"No, definitely
not!" Jim assures me.
"That would be atomic and could lead to grave consequences. In this respect, modern contraception may be
seen as a petty-bourgeois stratagem designed to get the better of nature
without transcending heterosexual ties.
Where, however, there were no such ties there would be scant need for or
justification of contraception, since birth control would be regulated from an
artificial standpoint, as pertaining to sperm banks and the artificial
insemination of female supermen according to requirement and suitability,
following the dictates of careful planning.
No-one would think of having heterosexual relations with anyone else;
for female supermen couldn't be treated as women, not even as liberated
ones, which would be a reversion to petty-bourgeois criteria. Even homosexual relations would be frowned
upon - there being too much flesh involved for a transcendental civilization to
countenance."
I give vent to a slight feeling of relief
and say: "So in the actual transcendental civilization, only artificial
sex would be morally acceptable, the idea of establishing or maintaining sexual
ties with anyone being taboo, since relative."
Jim nods in confirmation, then qualifies my
remarks by adding: "Of course, people of genuinely homosexual inclination
ought to be allowed access to homosexual pornography, assuming there'll
continue to be a distinction between the genuinely homosexual and the
unisexual; though most pornography will probably continue to be unisexual, as
involving the services of female supermen whose rumps are fairly prominent or,
at any rate, prominently displayed.
Probably the majority of such supermen will be more disposed, in any
case, to the use of a vibrator than pornography ..."
"Not to mention certain other types of
stimuli," I interpolate, more as a suggestion than a qualification.
"And yet there may come a time,"
Jim continues, still deeply engrossed in speculation, "when
even pornography and plastic inflatables/vibrators
will be frowned upon and prohibited."
"On what
grounds?" I ask, becoming puzzled.
"Primarily on the grounds that they
cause sexual pleasure, a fact which, whilst acceptable in a relative
civilization, may become less than credible in an absolute one, where pleasure,
together with other manifestations of sexual indulgence like love and
happiness, would be effectively taboo, since connected with the soul rather
than the spirit. In a civilization
dedicated first and foremost - one might almost say exclusively - to awareness,
anything that serves the senses wouldn't find much official support. So your vibrator might well be disapproved of
at that juncture in time - possibly a mature phase in the evolution of
post-atomic civilization."
I smile defensively, slightly censorious of
Jim's long-range style of puritanism, and say:
"If that's the case, then man may well end-up not indulging in any form of
sex at all."
"That's quite possible," Jim
says, "since he is destined to be
superseded by a life form, namely the
post-human superman, dedicated to spiritual concerns, and would have to evolve
towards that largely artificial being in the course of time."
I nod my head in apparent agreement, then
remark: "So the path of evolution, in sexual matters, would seem to lead
from pagan pre-dualistic orgies to Christian dualistic marriage,
and from there to transcendental post-dualistic artifice."
"Which could alternatively be defined,
in relative terms, as a progression from feminine to masculine via androgynous
sexuality," Jim avers solemnly.
"The feminine stage of sexuality focusing on the vagina and
implying vaginal-biased oral sex, or cunnilingus; the androgynous stage
dividing the focus of attention between vagina and penis; and, finally, the
masculine stage focusing attention on the penis and implying phallic-biased
oral sex, or fellatio ... this being the liberated woman's approach to
masculinity, which complements, it seems to me, the anal approach to
masculinity - a difference between the spiritualistic and the materialistic, as
pertaining to alternative aspects of petty-bourgeois relativity. So one must distinguish between vaginal oral
sex on the grand-bourgeois level, vaginal/phallic oral sex on the bourgeois
level, and phallic oral sex on the petty-bourgeois level - each phase of
relative evolution betokening a progression from the feminine to the masculine,
though this last phase falls short of the artificial sexuality of ...
computer-generated erotica and plastic inflatables/vibrators,
which is, after all, the goal of sexual evolution."
I smile anew, baffled and wonderstruck by
Jim's extraordinary powers of logical acumen.
"Thus after the cock-sucking/pornographic relativity of
petty-bourgeois civilization, we must expect a progression to pornographic
absolutism via an interim period of unisexual absolutism, or something of the
kind," I conclude.
To my great surprise Jim laughs briefly
and, removing the vibrator from between my numb legs, exclaims: "Oh
Miranda, you're such a darling muddlehead that I
shall just have to go barbarian in you for a few minutes in order to cure you
of your petty-bourgeois cock-sucking tendencies and impress upon you, once and
for all, that proletarian women are not to behave like liberated females, or to
consider themselves as such!"
"But I'm a female superman!" I
protest, trying to sound serious.
"Then I shall have to step down from
my theoretical perch and damn-well treat you like
one," Jim says. "Which should
give you cause to smile." And, sure
enough, he sticks to his word, switching on the vibrator and thrusting it deep
inside me.
REVOLUTIONARY REVELATIONS
"Of
course, not being a practising Christian, I don't regard the Second Coming
literally in terms of Christ's return," Brian Dillon informs us in a
slightly condescending tone-of-voice, as the train wound on through the lush
green countryside. "The man who
corresponds to a Second Coming will bear a different name from Christ and thus
approximate more to the Jewish concept of a True World Messiah, in other words
a messiah whose teachings can and, eventually, will be adopted
by every country on earth, not just those which currently pertain to the
Christian West. The literal return of
Christ, assuming it were possible, would not mean a great deal to those who had
been conditioned to Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu, or Judaic religious
traditions. Rather, the Second Coming
corresponds to a new Christ-like figure who, as well as serving the West, will
ultimately serve the whole world by being both distinct from and superior to
Christ in the scope and depth of his teachings.
False messiahs, of which there have been hundreds if not thousands, may
well call themselves the Christ and, in doing so, render themselves ridiculous
not only to those who have no religious affiliation with Christianity but, not
altogether surprisingly, to many so-called Christians too who, deep down,
aren't really expecting the literal return of Christ, and for the simple reason
that they're Christian in name only, having long abandoned most of the
theological claims and beliefs of the Christian faith, sometimes within the
context of the Church, often beyond it ... in some form of Neo-Orientalism, as implying yoga."
Both of us smile at this point, and I
venture the opinion that the man who corresponded to a Second Coming would have
no taste for the belief that he was literally Christ, being, in many respects,
anti-Christian.
"Yes, Jason, and the irony of it
all," Dillon continues, "is that such a man would be determined to
replace the Church and remove its chief upholders from the society he had come
to establish, deeming them an obstacle to evolutionary progress! So while Christians may theoretically be
awaiting Christ's return, mindful that, when he returns, the wheat will be
divided from the chaff in a kind of Last Judgement, the man destined to fulfil
the role of True World Messiah would be obliged to mark some of them out as
chaff impeding further evolutionary progress through their insistence on a
literal interpretation of Christian belief!
He would have come not to save hard-line Christians, with their Biblical
fundamentalism, but to set proletarians, who are generally outside the
doctrinal confines of the Church, on the road to salvation. Paradoxically, hard-line Christians, though
they may speak of a Second Coming, would be among the first to oppose the
teachings of a True World Messiah, which would both threaten and supersede the
atomic integrity of their civilization, with its priests and churches. The only Messiah they could reasonably
endorse would be the one who died on the Cross and who could be expected, on
his returning, to save them for being what they were. How, I don't exactly know. But, then, I'm not a hard-line Christian in
the strict sense of that word, but a predominantly rational person who isn't
deceived by theological beliefs!"
"You're a typical modern
barbarian," opines Sheila with another smile on her lips, "for whom
the True World Messiah would have genuine respect - the last thing he'd have
for all those hypocritical bourgeoisie with their
belief in a literal return of Christ!
One of the most depressing aspects of life in the West is that the fools
and intellectually weak are, in all too many contexts, protected from the wise
and intellectually strong, so that the latter are obliged to bow before the
feelings and beliefs of the former, or keep their thoughts to themselves!"
"In accordance with the democratic
principles of an open society, a civilization rooted in the Diabolic
Alpha," Dillon rejoins, his tone of voice betraying more than a hint of
hard-edged emotion. "One might say
that the provinces dictate to the city in such an open society."
I nod my head in agreement and remark that
in a closed society that was open to meaningful religious change in the
direction of the Divine Omega, by contrast, it would be the city that dictates
policy, with a consequence that fools and laggards would be given a rough ride
- assuming they weren't done away with altogether.
"O for the dictatorship of the
intelligent!" Sheila exclaims, as if to herself. "What an agreeable change it would be
... living in a society where anachronistic fools and stupid people in general,
with their mediocre views and opinions, were obliged to bow before the will of
the intelligent for a change!"
Brian Dillon chuckles briefly, his head
tilted to one side, and says: "And where those who cannot be reformed or
improved upon are banished from that society in a true spirit of judgmental
damnation, all kinds of imbecile riffraff who would have flourished in an
alpha-stemming open-society context. Of
course, the True World Messiah would not make war on those who were nominally
Christian but, in actuality, less than genuine believers in Christianity. He would not intern or do away with the great
majority of people - often proletarian - who regularly attend church in such a
Catholic country as
I nod full approval of this information and
add, largely for Dillon's benefit, that while the supersession
of churches would be a major objective of the revolution, it would be necessary
to utilize them or, rather, their upholders during the attainment to and
consolidation of power, else transcendentalism could end-up fighting a losing
battle with the tradition.
"That's quite so!" Dillon
responds. "For sooner or later,
Jason, we'll win sufficient grass-roots support from clergy and laity alike to
carry us to power. There can be no
alternative for our country than the way we've mapped out. That way is harnessed to the teachings of the
True World Messiah, who cannot fail us, being an integral part of historical
necessity."
"He cannot fail us, for he has the
Truth," Sheila remarks as an afterthought.
I smile and remain silent, since we have
arrived at our destination now and it is accordingly time for us to alight from
the compartment, leaving Dillon to continue on his solitary way. It was a long but interesting journey, having
the conversation of such a radical, if at times hot-headed, man
at our disposal. Who knows, but perhaps
we shall meet again, if not in this life then probably in the next one?
POLAR ATTRACTIONS
As a
writer, Kevin Danby could be described as an idealist rather than a realist,
and thus as one who depends on imagination more than observation - in short, as
a spiritualist, so to speak, rather than a materialist. One of his favourite authors is Tolkien, the creator of that masterpiece, The Lord of
the Rings. One of his main literary
aversions, however, is Zola, that bulwark of literary realism. The realists he despises as paralleling a
socialist approach to the world; the idealists, by contrast, he admires, as
paralleling a transcendental approach to it.
He likes to think of himself as a transcendentalist, a man for whom the
expansion of the spiritual element in life is more important than the
contraction of the material element there, relatively important as that is. He claims that progressive proletarian
literature is divisible between a 'red' and a 'white' approach to the world,
that one can tell whether an author is a materialist or a spiritualist, so to
speak, by the nature and content of his work.
We are back to a familiar distinction between the mundane and the
transcendent, the emotional and the spiritual.
Not surprisingly, Danby will tell you that
imaginative literature is inherently superior to its observational counterpart
on the same class plane. You cannot
treat the apparent and the essential approaches to literature as equal. Huxley and Koestler,
though arguably petty-bourgeois authors, don't write on the same level. The one is more concerned with the inner
world, the other with the outer one.
Their temperaments are virtually antithetical. Schopenhauer distinguished between inner and
outer when he wrote The World as Will and Representation. Danby will tell you that 'Will' corresponds
to imagination and 'Representation' to observation. The imaginative author can free himself,
through his work, from the representational.
The observant author, no matter how engrossed in his work, remains its
slave. The former aspires towards the
Divine Omega, whereas the latter, dependent on representation, stems from the
Diabolic Alpha. He may be orange rather
than red, but he falls a long way short of white!
Kevin Danby, with his interest in politics,
will tell you that a red absolutism is impossible and therefore could never
arise. A world entirely given to the
materialist approach to literature could never arise, because a
material/spiritual dichotomy runs through the world in response to evolutionary
relativity - at least this has been the case since man outgrew pagan absolutism
and attained to a dualistic, and therefore partly transcendental, integrity ...
with the development of religions like Christianity. Yet, in evolving away from one absolutism
towards another, man will certainly arrive at a point in time when the
spiritual approach to literature entirely supersedes the materialist approach,
as a white, or transcendental, civilization is established throughout the world
in conformity with evolutionary requirement, and man pursues an exclusively
essential course towards the post-human millennium. Such an idealistic literature, appertaining
to proletarian civilization, will be a good deal different from and superior to
the representationally imaginative literature of
masters like Tolkien and Huxley. It will be completely abstract, denying
appearances in a wholly transcendent context - imagination free to wander where
it may in the most radical literary essence.
Man will be weaned of proton constraints in this free-electron
literature of spiritual absolutism.
Words would no longer be chained, like so many slaves, to
appearances. They would be free to
dissolve into meaningless essence. Danby
is already experimenting with such abstract literature at present, in
anticipation, one might say, of the coming transcendental civilization. Such literature, he claims, will complement
the most serialized atonal electronic music and the most classically abstract
holography.
Is he right, I wonder? Knowing Danby as I do, I would say that he's
partly right or, at any rate, that what he says may hold true for a time. Certainly, visual education and/or
entertainment, such as one acquires from computers, will continue to appeal to
most people, since computers are to a limited extent the evolutionary
successors to books. Read books? Middle-class intellectuals will probably
continue to do so, but the majority of people will prefer, I feel confident,
the more spiritually-relaxing medium of computers. Books are destined to die out, though not,
apparently, before they've attained to a maximum essence!
* * *
"You
have all the makings of a perfect female superman,"
"How flattering!" exclaimed
Nicola Clarke, the impetus of which exclamation induced a slight shift of
position in her own, not uncomfortable chair. "Though there aren't many liberated
females in late twentieth-century Ireland, bearing in mind that our country
isn't strictly an integral part of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, as
applying, in the main, to America and Western Europe. Most women who aren't bourgeois tend to be
potentially supermen."
Nicola laughed gently before responding
with: "You mean, even shallow vaginal symbolism will be out of the
question with female supermen?"
"Indeed I do,"
"Something which they're already
becoming these days," Nicola suggested, as if to console her overly
philosophic companion.
"Yes, though I still encounter a great
many skirt-wearers on the street,"
Nicola couldn't resist the impulse to laugh
anew, especially as she herself possessed one or two long dresses and skirts
which, however, she had sometime ago given-up wearing, though they had been a
regular choice during her youth, when moral ignorance made the wearing of any
number of blatantly sexist things rather blissful. Youth, as
"Well, at least you can't despise me on that
account," Nicola at length rejoined, her amusement having made no
conciliatory impression on the occupant of the other armchair. "I'm usually to be found in jeans -
namely cords and denims. Though
occasionally I have my feminine relapses and wear a short skirt, such as I know
you personally take some pleasure in, despite your theoretical pretensions. After all, I'm only potentially a female
superman. Just as you, in this
transitional period of evolutionary time, are only potentially a male superman
and therefore don't automatically object to my skirt-wearing tendencies."
Edmond Martin blushed faintly, more out of
a need to quell the amusement mounting in his soul than as a betrayal of
embarrassment. "What I would
automatically object to," he asseverated, "is the sight of your miniskirted legs bereft of nylon stockings! I don't mind being confronted by the graceful
outlines of your legs, providing the flesh is covered. And preferably in a dark colour, like the
pairs of blue and black stockings you habitually wear. Anything else would strike my potentially
transcendental psyche as unacceptably pagan."
This time it was Nicola's turn to blush,
and not from suppressed amusement either!
"Whilst I may have paraded bare legs from time to time in my
youth," she confessed, "I would no more think of doing so these days,
than of going about in a long skirt. As you well know!"
"Indeed I do," Edmond Martin
admitted, his own blush having subsided.
"Though it's pleasantly reassuring to be reminded
of the fact." He took a
short reflective pause, then continued: "Of course, like skirts, stockings
will become obsolete in the future, since they pertain to a relative age and
are what, in common parlance, one might describe as 'the best of a bad job',
largely because they cover the flesh without actually hiding its contours, like
a pair of trousers would tend to do."
"Trousers don't hide the contours of a
female's rump," Nicola briskly retorted.
"Thank goodness for that!" Edmond
Martin declared. "For
if they did, you'd never get women to wear them."
* * *
As a
philosopher Edmond Martin stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries,
mainly because he writes from a broadly proletarian rather than a narrowly
petty-bourgeois point of view. None of
his works has been published in the West to-date, which is only to be expected,
since what he writes has little or no applicability to Western society as it's
currently constituted. This isn’t to say
it would be welcomed with open arms in the former Soviet East at this point in
time, either! There is too much
transcendentalism in his work for that to happen. Socialists, he assures me, will be converted
to transcendentalism in due course, once circumstances permit the supersession of Marxism and the world tends towards a white
absolutism from a social base. One
apparently can't expect any such thing to happen for some time yet, however.
Getting back to the West, which Edmond
Martin characterizes as a bourgeois/proletarian civilization, the fact is, he
tells me, that artists fare much better than philosophers as a rule, and for a
very good reason: namely that the emphasis in an extreme relative civilization
will be on entertainment rather than information, enlightenment, or
instruction. In other words, being
entertained is the norm for a civilization such as this, particularly when it
is drawing towards a climax and actually existing in its ultimate spiritual
manifestation. Entertainment, which he
sees as the chief business of petty-bourgeois artists, accords with the beingful essence of this stage of relative civilization -
instruction and/or enlightenment, by contrast, affirming a doingful
ethic which, whilst of some applicability to the West, could become dangerously
irrelevant to the spiritual integrity of such a civilization, and for the
simple reason that, in any extreme guise, it would counsel or encourage
revolutionary change where none was desired.
Such counsel, he maintains, can only be applicable to a state
historically destined for revolution, that is to say, to one that isn't
strictly an integral part of bourgeois/proletarian civilization and is therefore
entitled to its philosopher, whose instruction should fall, like seed, on
fallow ground, to bring forth the fruit of revolutionary change.
So one must distinguish, he informs us,
between the educator and the entertainer, and understand that while the former
will be something of a pariah in an extreme relative civilization, such as
currently exists in the West, the latter will be honoured as the creator of a
literary 'promised land' germane to the ideological integrity of the
civilization in question. Only a few
philosophers can be tolerated in such a civilization and, needless to say, they
will have to be bourgeois or petty-bourgeois types, whose work falls well-short
of advocating revolutionary change.
Their status as philosophers, however, will fall somewhat short of the
leading artists.
Of course, writing on a proletarian level,
Edmond Martin isn't strictly a philosopher but, so he tells me, a philosophical
theosophist, a status which apparently signifies a convergence to omega on the
level of philosophically-biased literature - pure philosophy, according to him,
being a thing of the past, modern philosophic writing having to accommodate
itself to the poetic bias of the age and transcend philosophy from a literary
base. The contemporary petty-bourgeois
variety will do so relatively, which is to say, in terms of being divisible
between an essayistic purism and a novelistic relativity in which philosophical
theorizing will predominate, constituting the very raison
d'être, as it were, of their existence.
The futuristic proletarian variety will, in accordance with post-atomic
criteria, transcend philosophy absolutely, which is to say, from the
homogeneous context of philosophical theosophy - the resultant volume
transcending both the absolute context of pure philosophy and the relative
context of novelistic literature. Hence
Edmond Martin can be described as neither a philosopher nor a novelist but only
as a philosophical theosophist, the root educator/enlightener appertaining to
the inception and subsequent development of an absolute civilization. There isn't likely, he tells me, to be
another such educator/enlightener after him, but only - and here I have to
smile - poetical theosophists, or people, like me, whose business it will be to
entertain the proletariat on the supreme level of a transcendent poetic
absolutism.
Is he right about this, I wonder? Certainly I have no wish to argue with the
claim put forward for himself, since it is unlikely
that proletarian society will require another philosophical theosophist after
his definitive truth! But as regards
poetic transcendentalists, I'm not so sure, bearing in mind that, as Edmond
Martin conceives of it, transcendentalism would entail the poetic treatment of
both short prose and novelettes (alternatively regarded, within this context,
as medium prose) in volumes destined to culminate with or intimate of absolute
poetry. Now surely that would constitute
a concession to petty-bourgeois relativity, whereas, if the forthcoming age is
to be truly absolutist on proletarian terms, no such concession ought to
exist? Rather, volumes of free-electron
poetry would be compiled by poets either working together or being published
together in anthologies, the resultant publication constituting a transcendent
poetry. Maybe I am wrong about this,
overlooking the moral significance of transcending traditional terminology in a
literature which reflects a convergence to omega, as it were, on poetical
terms? Yet somehow, my artist's instinct
tells me, as Edmond Martin's philosophical one never could, that this isn't
necessarily so.
* * *
"I
very much doubt that women-become-supermen will be directly dependent on
men-become-supermen for getting pregnant in the next civilization," Kevin
Danby opined as, in the comfort of his bedroom, he put an arm round his
girlfriend's slender waist and drew her closer to himself, the resulting
upright postures at the foot of his bed suggesting the possibility that, at any
moment, the pair of them might tip over backwards onto their backs.
"You mean that female supermen will
have better things to do than involve themselves in a sexist relationship with
their male counterparts," Yvonne Driscoll suggested, in a delicately
ambivalent tone-of-voice.
"Putting it less generously than you,
I would argue that they won't be permitted to involve themselves in sexist
relationships with their male counterparts at all," said Kevin Danby,
"since encouraged to maintain an absolute
sexuality employing vibrators of one description or another instead. The male supermen will likewise be encouraged
to do the same thing, though their sexual absolutism, when not availing itself
of plastic inflatables, will be centred on unisexual
erotica of one degree or another, involving female supermen in a variety of,
for the most part, rump-biased postures.
Probably such pornographic erotica won't make any great concessions to
coital relativity but will be absolutist, that's to say, employing but one
model in each photo."
Yvonne smiled faintly, her comprehension of
the situation in no doubt, and asked: "But how, in such a sexually
absolute civilization, where vibrators and/or plastic inflatables
and rump-biased erotica were the norms, would women - I mean, female supermen -
become pregnant?"
"Indirectly," Danby replied, his
choice of word harnessed to the terminological bias of an earlier
statement. "In other words, through
artificial insemination, as involving a suitable syringe and quantity of sperm
extracted from a sperm bank, its quality or vintage, so to speak, readily
ascertainable and regulated by the state, or whatever. In all probability, there would be two kinds
of sperm bank - one for the leaders and another for the led, each of which
would stock a range of sperm from donors approximating to the same I.Q.
levels. Professional female supermen
would be entitled to quantities from the first kind, their non-professional
counterparts to quantities from the second."
"And how would each category of female
superman obtain access to any given quantity of sperm?" Yvonne inquired of
him, not unreasonably in the circumstances.
"I dare say by submitting a form,
obtainable from the relevant propagation authorities, to the effect that they
desired a pregnancy, and giving information about themselves and their donor
preferences," he obligingly replied.
"It could transpire that this will become strictly regulated by the
authorities in the course of time, thereby making at least one pregnancy
compulsory for every female superman and ensuring, in the process, that the
number and dates of artificial inseminations were recorded in the interests of
social control. Too many female supermen
becoming pregnant simultaneously could lead to social chaos, and not only in
terms of a lack of hospital beds, either!
With vital professional/industrial roles for them to fulfil, one
couldn't very well leave the artificial insemination of such supermen
completely to chance. Certainly the
state would have to serve the people in this matter, as in so many other
matters, and thus ensure the continued rational functioning of proletarian
civilization. I dare say there would be
a maximum of two pregnancies for each female superman, in order to minimize her
natural/sensual obligations and enable her to continue in an everyday
artificial role during the greater part of her adult life. After all, children would require collective
upbringing in specially-run nurseries, though again a distinction would have to
be upheld between nurseries and/or schools for the offspring of professional
people, and nurseries and/or schools for the offspring of the masses in
general."
Yvonne nodded her understanding of the
subtle logic behind this contention and remarked: "Though whereas in a
relative civilization there exists an absolute distinction between each type of
school, in an absolute civilization, on the contrary, there would exist only a
relative distinction, as between two different types of school - one for the
education of a future transcendental leadership, and the other for the general
improvement of the proletariat."
"Yes, and all the latter type of
schools would approximate to what, in an extreme relative civilization, is
termed a mixed comprehensive," he averred.
"Only, one wouldn't speak of mixed schools in an absolute,
non-sexist civilization. Possibly, by
then, Christian names would have been superseded by transcendental names,
assuming 'names' is really the word. For
it seems unlikely that Christian names, not to mention surnames, would be
respected in a transcendental civilization.
Probably names will be completely different or, more likely, people
simply be referred to by numbers."
Yvonne frowned slightly and said: "It
seems that you're dissatisfied with anything which isn't completely
impersonal!"
Kevin Danby gently nodded his head,
chuckled briefly, and admitted: "To be sure, and that applies as much to
effecting pregnancies as to transcending Christian names. A self-introduced artificial insemination,
officially regulated by the powers-that-be, would guarantee both impersonality
and the preservation of the absolute sexual integrity of a female superman in a
transcendental age. Never again would
those capable of becoming pregnant be directly dependent on natural means of
acquiring sperm. That, you may be sure,
will constitute a significant progression in human affairs!"
UNDERSTANDING BUREAUCRACY
The fact
that a bureaucracy is the antithetical equivalent to an aristocracy, within an
absolute context, was something we hadn't realized until Owen Carmichael
pointed it out to us the other day, while we were having lunch together in the
local café. I had never even associated
the two before, let alone begun to think seriously about the nature or status
of bureaucracies. But Kathleen and I
were left in no doubt about the fact that, according to Owen, an aristocratic
elite and a bureaucratic elite were as different as it is possible for any two
elites to be.
For instance, Owen explained to us, and to
me, Seamus Deane, in particular, that whereas the masses existed for the sake
of an aristocracy, a bureaucracy, by contrast, existed for the sake of the
masses. More explicitly, the peasants
were tyrannized over by an aristocracy, whereas the proletariat are served by a
bureaucracy. And just as, in the age of
aristocratic absolutism, the peasantry and the aristocracy were two entirely
different classes, the former existing to serve the class interests of the
latter, so, in the age of bureaucratic absolutism, the proletariat and the
bureaucracy are two entirely different classes, the latter existing to serve
the social interests of the former.
Therefore a bureaucrat was, in any absolute state, the antithetical
equivalent of a tyrannical aristocrat.
Another thing that neither of us had
realized, but which Owen had the spiritual generosity to inform us about, was
that a bureaucracy stood to the leader of an absolute state as the aristocracy
had formerly stood to the ruling monarch, in consequence of which a further
distinction therefore existed between the leader and his bureaucracy, as
between the monarch and his nobility. So just as a bureaucracy was the antithetical equivalent of
an aristocracy, the leader of an absolute state was antithetically equivalent
to reigning monarchs. Now, as if that
were not enough, we also learnt that the party, particularly in its cabinet or
central-committee manifestation, was to the bureaucracy of an absolute state
what royalty had formerly been to the nobility.
Thus the old distinctions between monarch, royalty, and nobility were
paralleled, in their latter-day manifestations, by the new distinctions between
leader, party, and bureaucracy, all of which stood to the proletariat in a
relation diametrically antithetical to how the old distinctions ... had stood
to the peasantry.
So whether or not
anarchists or Marxists approved of the fact, class divisions had to be upheld
in a bureaucratic state no less than (they had been) in an aristocratic one. In each case, the basic division was between an elite and the masses, though the constitution of the
elites, no less than that of the masses, was radically dissimilar. Aristocratic tyranny stemmed from the root
cosmic influence of the Diabolic Alpha.
Bureaucratic service aspired towards the climax of evolution in the
Divine Omega. The one was basically
phenomenally selfish, the other ... phenomenally selfless. A bureaucrat was an altogether morally
superior type of man to an aristocrat!
Of course, Owen had no intention of leaving
relative civilization completely out-of-account, and so drew our attention to
the fact that, when such relativity combines tradition with progress, both
aristocrats and bureaucrats can co-exist within the overall context of
bourgeois hegemony, as in England in the late-twentieth century. Given the hegemony of the bourgeoisie,
however, aristocrats don't exist on quite such tyrannous terms as did their
absolute forebears, while, conversely, bureaucrats don't exist to serve the
people as extensively or comprehensively as do their counterparts in
contemporary absolute states, whether corporate or social democratic in
constitution. The relative bureaucrat,
though entitled to a degree of prestige which distinguishes him from the
people, is reined-in, as it were, by his bourgeois masters from too radical a
degree of service. Similarly, the
relative aristocrat, though still entitled to a degree of prestige which
distinguishes him from the people, is reined-in, by these same bourgeois
masters, from too radical a degree of exploitation. Both classes are like puppets dangling on
bourgeois strings. Only a revolution
could possibly free the bureaucrat from relative constraint. Yet it would put an end to the aristocrat's
existence altogether, not to mention that of his bourgeois master.
Owen reminded us, that lunch time, how
aristocratic tyranny stemmed from nature.
Just as the leaves on a tree existed for the sake of the tree, conceived
as roots, trunk, and branches (an analogy with monarch, royalty, and nobility),
by drawing sunlight and moisture into it, so the peasantry, that great mass of
naturalistic humanity, had existed for the sake of the aristocracy, working to
make them richer in natural wealth. Thus
a pattern originally stemming from the diabolical galactic roots of evolution
and extending into nature and beyond could be discerned in the ordering of
feudal society around the interests of a tiny but extremely powerful minority -
an aristocratic elite who had fought their way to the
top.
At the opposite extreme to such a natural
state-of-affairs, however, the socialist society which employs a bureaucracy to
serve the proletariat, or artificial humanity of an urban environment, bespeaks
an arrangement aspiring towards the Divine Omega which could theoretically be
defined as initiating a pattern that will eventually arrive at the converse
situation to trees, with their enslaved leaves, by the time evolution attains
to the superbeing millennium, in which an artificial
support-and-sustain system, reminiscent of the roots, trunk, and branches of a
tree, will serve the collectivized new brains of the earth's highest life-form,
namely a Superbeing, and thereby enable it to hypermeditate towards transcendence. Thus what the leaves were to a tree, the
support-and-sustain system will be to a Superbeing,
though the terms of service and raison d'être of the life form
served would be diametrically antithetical.
True to comprehensive form, however, Owen
reminded us that just as apes in trees came at a later date than the trees as
such, so, conversely, would Supermen in artificial 'trees', or
support-and-sustain systems, arise at an earlier date than the Superbeings, being the collectivized human brains of the
superhuman millennium, an epoch in time in which a life form antithetically
equivalent to apes would prevail, compliments of the technological expertise of
the millennial successors to bureaucrats, and live not for transcendental
meditation but hallucinogenic contemplation - a kind of romantic, because
apparent (rather than essential) religiosity between the preceding classicism
of meditation, as germane to the transcendental men of the ultimate human
civilization, and the succeeding classicism, through hypermeditation,
of the new-brain collectivizations of the superbeing millennium.
Unlike the Superbeings,
however, the Supermen wouldn't exist in a totally classless society, but in one
where an external supervisory class of millennial technocrats served the
spiritual interests of the superhuman masses, while maintaining contact,
through artificial channels of communication, with a class of spiritual
leaders, or priest equivalents, whose duty it would be to liaise between the
external and internal classes (of the millennial technocrats and supermen
respectively), their own lifestyle, although partaking of superhuman form, demanding
a separate integrity from each of the other classes. Only, apparently, after the millennial
technocrats had upgraded life from the superhuman to the superbeingful
stage at some later juncture in millennial time, would a truly classless
society be established, as the new-brain collectivizations
of each Superbeing hypermeditated
towards transcendence in complete self-absorption, requiring neither external
assistance from technocrats nor the mediation of spiritual leaders, both of
which classes would effectively cease to exist.
So a definitively classless society,
analogous to though distinct from Marxist communism, is still some way into the
future, that much Owen assured us, as we sipped cold lemonade and did our best,
despite the general hubbub throughout the café, to concentrate on what he was
saying, not least of all about the religious predecessors, so to speak, of the
spiritual leaders, whom he defined as meditation masters, and who would develop
alongside the bureaucracy as a new spiritual aspect of service - leadership
eventually passing, as a matter of evolutionary necessity, from materialist to
spiritualist hands, while the transcendental civilization progressed towards
the post-human millennium.
So just as there had been priests and
aristocrats in the pagan and early-Christian civilizations, so there would be
meditation masters and bureaucrats in the coming transcendental civilization,
the former gradually superseding the latter as circumstances permitted, men of
science of a certain stamp likewise gradually superseding artists, so that, by
the time the post-human millennium was properly attained to, a new breed of
priest equivalents, namely spiritual leaders, and a new breed of scientists,
namely millennial technocrats, would have come to the fore, to replace the
older, pre-millennial manifestations of each class; politics, in the hands of
bureaucrats, having been completely superseded, art likewise, since
hallucinogenic contemplation would prove more than a match for any form of
artistic endeavour, being, in a sense, the ultimate manifestation of the
aesthetic ... conceived in terms of an intimation, through apparent means, of
the Divine Omega. However, the
bureaucratic control would necessarily continue to exist, in some degree, up
until the post-human millennium, since evolutionary progress on the human plane
demands regulation from outside as well as example and instruction from inside,
and therefore couldn't be left to artists and priest equivalents alone, even if
they were an indispensable factor in the overall process. Bureaucrats, though subject to modification
in the course of time, would continue to serve the proletariat throughout the
duration of the transcendental civilization, just as, in the context of state
socialism, they had served them on a purely or predominantly materialistic
basis, with no concern for religious progress.
That, Owen told us, had been an integral part of historical necessity,
not something to be derided. And
Kathleen and I, being bureaucrats, were prepared to believe him.
A THINKER AT LARGE
"You
can't have the best of both worlds," Derek Reilly said, relapsing into an
idiomatic truism. "I would describe
myself as a spiritually courageous person, but I have to pay for such courage
with an unusual degree of physical cowardice.
So it is with most men of my stamp.
What you gain on the spiritual roundabout, you must lose on the material
swings!"
Very true!
And, knowing Reilly, he doesn't regret having lost anything on the
latter, never having spent much time on them anyway! His is an extreme constitution, and one very
much in line with the bias of the times.
One can't do better than to be spiritually courageous. Are not Mahler, Shostakovich, Martinu, Vaughan Williams, Honegger,
and Prokofiev among his favourite composers?
* * *
"We
shouldn't concern ourselves with bourgeois civilization," Pat O'Grady
said, speaking to no-one in particular.
"As transcendental revolutionaries we needn't admire anything
bourgeois, least of all such works of art or philosophy or whatever as were
produced in fin-de-siècle Vienna or Paris or London! We're proletarians who must think not only in
terms of opposing such manifestations of bourgeois civilization as have invaded
our island, but of developing and furthering proletarian civilization, as
outlined in the works of our Leader and Teacher."
To be sure, O'Grady is the kind of man who
would be useful to have around in the proscription office of a revolutionary
state, mercilessly castigating alien class-influences, and consigning to the
rubbish bin of history all those works of literature or philosophy or whatever
that would be irrelevant to the proletariat and of no consequence to the
bureaucracy. I can just imagine him
saying: "Freud? Away with him! Huxley?
To the Devil with him!
Lawrence? Down with him! Wittgenstein?
Out with him!" Soon our libraries and book shops would be
purged of everything not essential to our transcendental integrity.
* * *
"A
liberated female shouldn't be confounded with a barbarous female
proletarian," Jennifer Hanlon said, amidst a flurry of surrounding
laughter. "The former is
essentially petty bourgeois, and so pertains to an extreme relative
civilization, whereas the latter exists in absolute states or, alternatively,
as a manifestation of the barbarous majority within the confines of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization. Someone who's a barbarous proletarian, given wholly to external
values, is unlikely to develop into a liberated female. On the contrary, she's potentially a female
superman, the post-sexist designation for women in an absolute civilization,
such as will one day arise from the ruins of its barbarous precursor. Only when the proletariat become truly
civilized by adopting transcendentalism, or people's religion, will women
effectively become female supermen ... in relation to male supermen, their
masculine counterparts. And, unlike
liberated women, female supermen will be liberated even from sex, as
traditionally understood and practised in relative terms."
I have no doubt of that fact, since
relativity of any description, including the homosexual, would be out-of-bounds
in an absolute civilization, where people would indulge in personal sex, as
involving some kind of absolute pornography or plastic inflatables/vibrators,
depending on their basic sexual orientation and/or gender. Propagation would thereby become an
artificial matter, subject to administrative control. Consequently there would be little or no
sexual discrimination, since even female supermen must be treated like and
regarded as men - unlike liberated females, who continue, despite their
liberation from certain traditional constraints, to regard themselves as
women. In sexual relations, they're
particularly prone to fellatio. They may
also be open, if cohabiting with a lower type of petty-bourgeois materialist,
to periodic anal violation. It's
doubtful that very many of them would be into male pornography. On the other hand, proletarian barbarians are
more given, when not masturbating, to conventional heterosexual relations,
though this may not exclude 'fringe' oral sex.
Their civilized successors, in the transcendental civilization to-come,
will almost certainly be more partial to vibrator stimulation.
* * *
"You
can't fight a modern war with antiquated weapons!" Derek Reilly cried,
turning upon O'Grady with schoolmaster-like resolve. "Bullets will become anachronistic
before long, tanks and field-guns no less so.
What we should concentrate on developing are powerful laser beams and/or
guns, with a range and accuracy, not to mention impact effectiveness,
outclassing all materialist weapons. To
get the better of a reactionary enemy, now as before, it would be necessary to
have a fighting force equipped with more sophisticated weapons and capable of
using them to maximum effect, which is a question, after all, of
technique."
So it is, though I would rather have a good
army equipped with traditional weapons than a poor one equipped with
revolutionary ones! However, Reilly has
a point, and I would be the last to deny the potential value of laser weapons
for defensive warfare. Ships, of course,
are a shade time-worn, but planes, particularly jet fighters, shouldn't be
underestimated, since, unlike tanks and artillery pieces, they suggest some
degree of technological transcendentalism.
I would certainly put more store by a corps of
jet fighters equipped with air-to-ground missiles. Better still if they had laser beams
to-hand. As for laser guns, I would
ensure that the nation's revolutionary corps were given priority over the
regular army in the supply of such weapons!
* * *
"When
people say that transcendentalism is no different from yoga or Buddhism,
they're talking nonsense," Pat O'Grady said, somewhat later that evening
and to everyone within range.
"There's no concern with petty-bourgeois happiness or yoga
exercises with transcendentalism, which, by contrast, corresponds to an
absolute stage of spiritual development in the cultivation of self-awareness,
as pertaining to the future proletariat.
Besides, transcendentalism implies knowledge of the limitations of
meditation on the human plane to achieve total transcendence, and therefore
couldn't lead to the kind of ascetic fanaticism so characteristic of oriental
sages traditionally. People would be
given an evolutionary perspective as to exactly where 'humanist' meditation
fits in and by what it will be superseded, come the post-human millennium. They won't suffer from false expectations
concerning their prospects of salvation through naturalistic means of
cultivating spirit alone. They will
learn that man is but a link in the evolutionary chain who must some day be
'overcome', to coin a Nietzschean term, once
technological progress makes possible the establishment of his millennial
successor, the Superman, who will in turn be superseded, and so on, until
evolution attains to a climax in the Omega Absolute, the ultimate spiritual
transcendence."
All very true! Transcendentalism isn't simply Buddhism or
Hinduism in a new guise, but potentially a true world religion transcending all
so-called world religions ... of a provincial cast. People will do regular stints of
transcendental meditation (meditation which transcends feelings in its
exclusive concern with self-awareness) in specially-designed meditation
centres, where they will be supervised by meditation masters, the proletarian successors to petty-bourgeois gurus. They will also acquire an evolutionary
perspective, as O'Grady wisely calls it, and thereby learn some facts about the
nature of religious evolution and its future transformations, embracing
post-human life forms. To keep them in
ignorance about much of this would be to treat them as if they were
irresponsible, dull-witted children.... Though it wouldn't be
necessary or indeed possible to impart everything that was known or
written about transcendentalism to them.
For those who were especially keen to learn, there would, I am sure, be
no shortage of relevant information available.
For the rest, a basic grounding in transcendentalism should
suffice. And I am confident that
additional cultural ingredients, as it were, along the lines of some atonal
electronic music, abstract poetry, and non-representational holography ...
would prove appropriate, provided, however, that they were kept in
subordination to the essential ingredient - namely, spiritual
contemplation. Probably these cultural
aspects of transcendentalism would be scaled-down and superseded, in the course
of time, by a more puritanical approach to self-realization, as involving
meditation alone.
* * *
"Naturally,
a state moving towards proletarian civilization would have to take measures,
sooner or later, to curb and possibly terminate human indulgence of animals,
particularly pets like cats and dogs," Colin Dunphy
said, in response to a remark made by Jennifer Hanlon about dog's noise in her
neighbourhood. "While the pagan
root remains intact, as it effectively does throughout the duration of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization, it's of course natural and socially acceptable
for people to indulge a love of animals.
But a society that was evolving towards a transcendental framework could
not encourage any such indulgence, because where there is, or will be, an
exclusive orientation towards the Divine Omega ... conceived as transcendent
spirit, there can be no sympathy for that which stems from the Diabolic Alpha
in animality - the pagan root having been, or in the
process of being, extirpated from human affairs, as transcendental man turns
his back, so to speak, on 'the Creator' and aspires ever more ardently towards
the attainment of an ultimate creation. So one would not encounter anyone walking a dog down the street in
the transcendental civilization, since such a mode of behaviour, which betrays
commitment to an animal, would be incompatible with transcendental ethics and
morality."
I am sure he is right, though if anyone did
have the nerve to be seen with a dog after such behaviour had been rendered
morally unacceptable, he would run the risk of drawing police attention and of
having to pay the penalty in consequence - possibly internment for corrective
education. Certainly all 'unnecessary'
animals, or those which weren't considered strictly essential to human
survival, would be put under ban and duly removed, as evolutionary requirement
dictated, and Dunphy may be right to suggest that
such a radical policy ought to be carried through while the revolutionary state
was evolving towards a transcendental civilization rather than actually in the
civilized framework. After all, all
forms of liquidation correspond to a mode of barbarous behaviour.... As to the
animals concerned - dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rabbits, budgerigars, parrots,
etc., it might be more expedient to ban
them by degrees rather than all at once, beginning, say, with fierce or large
dogs and proceeding to the less conspicuous pets in due course. Whether one could impose the same
transcendental criteria on the rural areas as on the towns and cities ... must
remain open to conjecture; though I, for one, would be prepared to allow
country folk to hold-on to such pets as they may possess longer than their
proletarian counterparts in the cities, if only on the understanding that,
eventually, all such pets would have to be abandoned, especially with the elevation
of greater numbers of country-dwellers to a proletarian status as villages were
expanded into towns and towns into cities, due to a combination of local
development and decentralized urban accretions designed to speed-up the
urbanization, as it were, of villages and towns. A more enlightened generation, some decades
hence, would probably think no worse of the liquidation of a dog or a cat than
contemporary generations think of the elimination of troublesome insects, like
flies or wasps.
* * *
"One
thing that our revolutionary proletarian state will have to do, before long, is
to ban horse-racing and greyhound-racing," Terry Shannon said, turning to
Derek Reilly, who happened to have an ear conveniently cocked to the same
wavelength. "Neither of those
naturalistic sports, employing animals, could be encouraged in a society
gravitating towards an exclusively transcendental framework, with no respect
for the pagan roots of life. Artificial
sports would, however, be another thing, and probably some form of motor-racing
will survive and continue to exist for many decades hence.... Though even that, together with all types of competitive sport,
would be subject to gradual curtailment and eventual proscription, as
proletarian humanity evolved further along the road of co-operative
transcendentalism, scorning all forms of competition, particularly when
physical. However, as for horse-
and greyhound-racing, we need not expect them to survive the relative epoch of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization."
I wouldn't want to disagree with that
assumption, since, like pets, these sporting animals
could be described as 'unessential' to human survival and incompatible with a
society exclusively orientated towards the Divine Omega. Personally, I take no interest in either
horse- or greyhound-racing, and would no more be seen at a race meeting than in
the company of a dog. The spectacle of
so many beasts thundering round a racecourse has always struck me as infinitely
boring, unworthy of the attention of anyone with claims to spiritual insight or
intellectual originality! I would much
rather watch a motor race, where the artificial predominates over the natural
and proceedings consequently have the ring of modernity about them. Curiously, Shannon made no mention of
athletics, which involves natural force no less than animal sports, and in
which category I include boxing and wrestling.
Should athletics survive a relative, bourgeois/proletarian epoch, I
wonder? If I had any say in the matter,
I would be no less inclined to put athletics under censorious scrutiny than
animal races, deeming it incompatible with the artificial, co-operative
criteria of a society moving towards or actually in a transcendental context.
* * *
"But
what you don't seem to realize, Sean," Jennifer Hanlon said, responding to
a remark I had just made, "is that most people can't listen to music
unless it is humanized by some vocal ingredient of utilitarian import, usually
romantic or sexual, which becomes the focal-point of attention. Purely instrumental music generally fails to
arouse their interest, because it demands more aesthetic sophistication than
most people, with their utilitarian integrities, possess, being, in essence,
transcendental. They have to hear
something they can relate to their everyday sexual lives, and nothing serves
this need better than a love song."
"Nothing serves this limitation
better, would be nearer the mark," I commented on a ruthlessly objective
note. "Though with me it's just the
opposite, since I can't relate to love songs but have to listen to instrumental
music - the purer and more serious, the better!
And I have to listen to it through headphones, which give one the
impression that the music is taking place in one's head rather than coming at
one from outside. Nowadays I despise
stereo speakers, deeming them too 'apparent'.
Indirect meditation through focus of awareness on aural stimuli cannot
be better served than via headphones, and the aural stimuli cannot do better,
in my opinion, than to be electronic and, preferably, atonal, albeit of an
atonality serialized according to strictly classical principles."
I could tell that Jennifer was puzzled by
this contention, though she did her best to appear impressed. What I hadn't told her, however, was that such
music would only be created on a consistent and regular basis in the future,
when the transcendental civilization got properly under way and all forms of
acoustic tonal music, not to mention its atonal counterparts, had effectively
been rendered obsolete.
RELATIVE DISTINCTIONS
There were
two men and a woman in the room, one of the men, whom we shall call the first,
older than the other, but the woman younger than he who shall be called the
second. "The Christians may
acknowledge Heaven," the first man said, "but they do so sideways on,
as it were, and facing back towards Hell.
Their sense of hierarchy is retrograde, stemming from the Alpha Absolute
and assigning the most importance to that which is closest, on earth, to the
Father - namely a monarch. Hence their sense of class hierarchy ... with proletarians at the
bottom and aristocrats at the top.
Being upper class corresponds to a closer approximation to the Alpha
Absolute."
"This is particularly true of the
British," said the second man, who was only a year younger than the
first. "Even though the bourgeoisie
are, to all practical purposes, in charge of society, the aristocracy are still
regarded as socially superior. Which
paradoxical fact accords with the bourgeois' almost boundless capacity for
hypocrisy! To believe
one thing in theory, but to do another in practice!"
The first man nodded spontaneous
affirmation and remarked: "Precisely because, being British, they
correspond, even in this predominantly post-atomic age, to the most atomic of
societies - the epitome, as it were, of bourgeois civilization. Wherever and whenever life is relative,
particularly when the relativity is moderate, hypocrisy will be the order of
the day, an inevitable consequence, one might say, of its dualism. The only reason why life is paradoxical is
that it owes this fact to the inherent relativity of human existence, a
relativity never more conspicuously prominent than when human evolution attains
to a bourgeois, Christian stage of balance between the two biased extremes,
viz. the pagan and the transcendental, and does so, moreover, without its
practitioners being in the least aware of the situation. They may be Christians, but they won't have a
clue about what it would mean to be transcendental, not even envisaging any
such eventuality. They take their
dualism, their balance, for the norm, one might even say for granted, even
going so far as to elevate it, in their bourgeois imaginations, to the status
of an ideal - indeed, the ideal, sacrosanct for all time! 'The balance is correct, and anyone who
attempts to defy it will be guilty of hubris, and may suffer the nemesis of
divine retribution in consequence!' Thus
reasons the bourgeois, that arch-hypocrite, ironist, and victim of worldly
paradox."
The woman, who had hitherto kept silent,
now said: "Whereas a post-dualistic society presumably knows better, and
is accordingly dedicated to the higher ideal of aspiring towards the Divine
Omega from a transcendental standpoint."
"That's right," the first man
said. "And we may be sure that it
will be the least hypocritical, ironical, and paradoxical of societies, because
the most absolute. It will signify a
complete transvaluation of values, even to the extent
of designating what, in relative civilization, was woman as a female superman -
the post-sexist lesser equal of male, or genuine, supermen. Thus there will be no feminine/masculine
dichotomy; only a distinction between greater and lesser degrees of superhumanity. For
that will accord with a sexual absolutism no less imperative, in a
transcendental civilization, than all the other absolutes, including the
political, religious, scientific, artistic, and social, as applying to
proletarian humanity. One couldn't
possibly tolerate absolute class distinctions in a transcendental age. Only the relative distinctions between
leaders and led, bureaucrats and proletariat, would be applicable."
The second man nodded eager agreement,
before saying: "The proletariat being, despite the questionable
justification of that term these days, the class orientated towards the Divine
Omega, the ultimate human class, antithetical, in every respect, to the
peasantry. Peasants and proletarians are
opposites, just like aristocrats and bureaucrats. The two extremes cannot mix."
"Certainly not in an absolute
age," the first man rejoined, "though there have been attempts to mix
them, to varying extents, wherever relativity has held sway, with, by and
large, disastrous consequences! But a
peasant cannot be transformed into a proletarian, any more than an aristocrat,
in the strictly traditional sense of that term, can be transformed into a
bureaucrat. They pertain to completely
different environments, not to say epochs."
"Probably it would be mistaken to
attempt to impose city criteria upon the rural areas," the woman opined,
briefly casting deferential glances at both men. "One can't treat peasants as if they
were proletarians in disguise. That which
stems from the Diabolic Alpha cannot be expected to aspire towards the Divine
Omega."
"True enough!" the second man
agreed. "So peasants, or their
nearest modern equivalents, should be utilized for what they're worth to the
economy, and then left to get on with their work in the fields. Some of them will gravitate to the city, and
some will be proletarianized in the course of time,
as industry and urbanization increasingly encroach upon the country and suck
farm labourers into a largely artificial lifestyle, transforming them, or their
offspring, into proletarians. The rest,
born farmhands and country-dwellers, must be left to their largely naturalistic
lifestyles and utilized in the name of agricultural and dairy produce. Since agriculture is becoming increasingly
mechanized, it should be possible to regard such country-dwellers as agricultural
proletarians, this entailing a relative distinction between pseudo-proletarian
country-dwellers and genuinely proletarian city-dwellers, or industrial
workers."
The woman smiled smoothly. "Like the distinction between female
supermen and male supermen," she remarked.
"One evidently designed to overcome sexual discrimination!"
"To be sure," the first man
said. "And
designed, in this case, to gloss over the dichotomy between rural- and
urban-dwellers, bringing both classes under a common designation, its being
understood, in any case, that there exists a significant distinction between
the modern mechanized farm-worker and the traditional peasant."
"Rather like the distinction that
exists between the industrial worker and the traditional artisan," said
the second man, eager to follow-up one parallel with another. "While to some extent the two may
co-exist in a relative civilization, albeit towards the tail-end of it, there
could be no possibility of their simultaneous existence in an absolute
civilization, since artisans would have been entirely superseded by industrial
proletarians, just as peasants would likewise have been entirely superseded by
agricultural proletarians - the lesser brothers, as it were, of their
urban-dwelling counterparts."
The first man smiled delighted confirmation
and said: "Yes, artisans, no less than peasants, would be a thing of the
past, which they're not, incidentally, wherever relativity prevails. And the same of course applies to
aristocrats, who continue to exist in such countries as
"Indeed, and whereas artisans and
peasants alike served the interests of the aristocracy," the second man
affirmed, "the bureaucracy is designed to serve the interests of both
agricultural and industrial proletariats, this corresponding to a transvaluation of values whereby the roles of service are
reversed ... from a majority serving an aristocratic minority to a minority
serving a proletarian majority who, paradoxically, become the new favoured
class."
"Particularly in
their urban and industrial guise," the woman said, smiling, "since
they evidently correspond to a greater degree of superhumanity
vis-à-vis the agricultural proletariat."
The second man coughed ironically and said:
"That may be so, but all proletarians have to be treated pretty much
alike. Just as female supermen will be
treated pretty much like their male counterparts. Certainly not as women, at any rate, since
that would entail a concession to bourgeois relativity, and any such
concession, equivalent to a sexist regression, would be incompatible with the
absolute criteria of a transcendental civilization. And no less incompatible
with the treatment of agricultural proletarians as if they were peasants."
"Here, here!" responded the first
man, who had an ear for logical consistency.
"It would be no less absurd of the bureaucracy to regard
agricultural proletarians as peasants ... than for the industrial proletariat
to regard bureaucrats as aristocrats, and thus as tyrants or rulers rather than
servants. Bureaucrats are, in a sense,
secular saints, who selflessly serve the people's material interests. They don't enter the proletarian 'promised
land' of the spirit themselves, but remain outside it, dedicated to the
betterment of the new favoured class."
The woman coughed gently, in response to
this statement, and remarked: "Woe betide the new favoured class if they
resist their betterment by rebelling against the bureaucrats! For the bureaucratic servants of today can no
more permit reactionary or regressive tendencies among the proletariat ... than
the aristocratic rulers of earlier times could permit revolutionary or
progressive tendencies among the peasantry.
That also corresponds to a transvaluation of
values, does it not?"
"More like an antithetical
equivalent," the first man said, before succumbing to a reflective silence
which the second man made no attempt to disturb, since he was the one who least
approved of intellectual noise.
DOING IT ALONE
"The
instinctive mind and the rational mind don't evolve apace," he said,
standing close beside her in the back garden they shared as fellow-tenants of a
small suburban lodging house - he a self-styled philosopher, she a student of
philosophy who had recently moved in.
"The one is static because natural, while the other is evolutionary
because intimating of the supernatural.
I can despise fine weather with my rational mind, having reasoned over a
period of time that cold, grey, wet weather is more conducive to a cultivation
of the spiritual life than its converse ... in hot, bright, dry weather. And yet, I can still find myself thinking,
with my instinctive mind, how pleasant it is when the weather is warm and
dry. We speak - do we not? - of a 'fine day' when the weather is like that.... Which is, after all, a perfectly natural response and assessment. Yet, for that very reason, an obstacle to the
spiritual life, which demands, on the contrary, the most artificial attitude to
the world, and thus, in effect, a contempt for 'fine days'. Only when we cultivate the artificial to any
significant extent do we have a springboard, as it were, from which to launch a
significant aspiration towards the supernatural, which, to a limited extent, we
carry within ourselves in the awareness mind of the superconscious."
"Whereas the instinctive life is
largely connected with the feeling mind of the subconscious, is it?" she
responded on a deductive note.
"To be sure," he confirmed. "And when our feelings are uppermost, it
is this mind which conditions the formation of naturalistic thoughts, making us
respond to warm weather in a positive way.
How difficult, on the other hand, to endorse a Nietzschean
'transvaluation of all values' with regard to such
weather, so that instead of responding to it with our instinctive minds, we
impose our rational minds upon it and regard what would otherwise appear a
'fine day' as an obstacle to the spiritual life, because the sun corresponds to
the Diabolic Alpha and is thus an incentive for sensual indulgence. Wherever the pagan, diabolical root is
intact, as it must be prior to the inception of a transcendental civilization,
people are entitled to give precedence to naturalistic criteria in their
response to warm weather, and thus speak of a 'fine day', much as they speak,
wherever bourgeois civilization obtains, of upper/middle/lower class
distinctions based not on artificial but on naturalistic criteria, with the
aristocracy at the top in consequence of their closer proximity to nature and
effective identification with the galactic-world-order, that is to say, the
infernal rule of stars over planets at the roots of cosmic reality."
"Is it likely, then, that people would
be encouraged not to regard warm weather as making for a 'fine day' in the
transcendental civilization?" she asked him, slightly puzzled.
"Very much so," he replied,
nodding, "since such a civilization, free of the diabolical root, would
reflect a complete transvaluation inimical to
naturalistic criteria. Everything would
be evaluated according to strictly artificial criteria, as applicable to an
advanced civilization - in point of fact, the ultimate civilization. The rational mind would take precedence over
the instinctive one to such an extent ... that the latter would all but be
eclipsed by reason. Even if one did
respond to warm weather in a positive way, one would be more inclined to keep
that fact to oneself than share it with others in a public concession to
diabolic criteria. Reason would caution
public restraint in this, as in so many other matters impinging upon the
spiritual life. Just as people
progressed from making love, or having sex, in the open to confining it to
their dwellings ... with the transformation from pagan to Christian values, so
they would progress from openly referring to warm weather as 'fine' ... to
keeping any such instinctive thoughts or responses to themselves."
"With the possibility of ostracism or
prosecution for failing to do so, am I right in assuming?" she asked,
smiling faintly.
"Yes, just as they risk prosecution,
under bourgeois law, for making love in the open," he solemnly replied,
slightly to her surprise. "While
making love has not been outlawed, it has at least been discredited to the
extent of only being permissible within private bounds."
"Then what of pornographic
films?" she asked.
"A different matter," he assured
her, "since the public viewing of a sex film has little to do with the
public indulgence of sex. Indeed, it
constitutes an antithetical equivalent to the pagan orgy, a transcendental mode
of sexual indulgence whereby passive, as opposed to active, acquiescence in sex
is the norm, an acquiescence of the head rather than the body, of the spirit
rather than the soul - an awareness sex as opposed to a sensual sex,
contemplated and not aggravated. Yet,
much as this spiritual communion signifies a vast moral improvement on the
pagan orgy, even the public enjoyment of pornographic films is slowly becoming
less morally acceptable to the ongoing evolutionary dictates of the age, and is
accordingly losing ground to the private enjoyment of pornographic films
through video."
"Thus video-viewing signifies further
moral progress to the extent that it presupposes the private rather than the
public enjoyment of pornography?" she concluded in a touchingly ambivalent
tone-of-voice.
"To be sure," he confidently
confirmed. "And not least of all as
regards violence and horror, which are likewise viewed rather than literally
indulged-in by their video patrons, so that the acquiescence in violence and
horror, no less than in sex, is sublimated, passive, and predominantly a matter
of awareness rather than brute sensation; though a degree of the latter
undoubtedly accrues to the voyeuristic experience, confirming the allegiance of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization to the pagan, diabolical root. For such a civilization is not absolute but
of an extreme relative constitution, a relativity favouring the transcendent,
and hence the sublimated, as effected by these artificial media, the passive
indulgence of which establishes an antithetical equivalent to the brute, pagan,
literal indulgence of public sex, violence, horror, war, et cetera, as germane
to naturalistic criteria. However, while
bourgeois/proletarian civilization may not be absolutist on the highest level,
it is biased in favour of such an absolutism, and the
gradual expansion of sublimated evil into the private domain bespeaks, it seems
to me, a furtherance of this bias."
"Though not a furtherance,
seemingly, that's likely to lead to a total prohibition with regard to the
viewing of violence, sex, et cetera, in public." she surmised.
"No, I don't think we can expect that
degree of transcendentalism from bourgeois/proletarian civilization," he
agreed. "Being relative, it won't
completely outlaw the public viewing of sex and violence in sublimated
evil. Such a day is only likely to arise
with the development of an absolute civilization some decades hence, which
doesn't mean to say that public viewing per se will be proscribed; for it may
transpire that certain types of film, say of a religious or a scientific
significance, will be considered appropriate for public viewing. Yet I dare say that if private video-viewing
survives beyond the bourgeois/proletarian era, it will be the sole context
within which the sublimated indulgence of sex, violence, horror, and the like
will be tolerated."
"Is there any guarantee it will
survive into an absolute age?" she asked, puzzled anew.
"No, but there'll be quite a number of
people in possession of video recorders and recordings made at an earlier date
who may choose not to part with them," he replied, smiling faintly. "Probably a new type of video, relevant
to the absolute criteria of a transcendental age, will be manufactured to
replace the more violent, sexist, and generally relative types of video. For as the transcendental civilization gets
properly under way, all forms of relative sex will be frowned upon by the
authorities, and this should extend to the pornographic as well as to the more
conventional modes of sexuality. Many
videos that were acceptable within the confines of bourgeois/proletarian
civilization would prove irrelevant to an absolute one. Possibly they would be withdrawn from stock, and
their sale or appreciation rendered untenable."
"Presumably while newer, more relevant
ones, together with computerized erotica, would be acceptable as an aspect of
absolute sexuality," she conjectured.
"I dare say so," he said. "In particular for male supermen to
contemplate in private, while female supermen found equivalent satisfaction in
vibrators of one type or another, which, for them, would establish an
antithetical equivalent to natural copulation, as, incidentally, would the use
of so-called 'sex dolls' by their genuinely masculine counterparts."
"You mean to say there would be no
natural sexual activity?" she sceptically exclaimed.
"I do," he affirmed. "Since natural sex, besides invoking a
concession to nature, would entail relativity, and that could hardly be
compatible with an absolute age, irrespective of whether the relativity in
question were heterosexual or homosexual.
For I dare say that even homosexuals would be encouraged to progress, in
the course of time, to unisexual pornography rather than remain victims of the
flesh, since sexual sublimation would be the order of the day.... As regards
propagation, that would be a matter for the State to regulate, as the
introduction of artificial insemination on a compulsory basis would preclude
the necessity for sexual relativity and enable female supermen to lead sex
lives independently of male supermen, to their mutual moral benefit."
"Does this imply that women and men
or, rather, female supermen and their male counterparts won't sleep together in
the transcendental civilization?" she asked, somewhat nervously.
"It does indeed!" he
replied. "For sleeping together
would entail a concession to relativity, and expose the people concerned to the
possibility of sexist deviation. Rather,
every Superman, whether female or male, will have a single bed in a room of their own, where the indignity of sleep can be kept, as
with sex, to oneself. This would be in
complete contrast to the group or communal sleeping of pagans, and would
signify a moral improvement on the à-deux sleeping
of Christian or bourgeois dualists, as germane to relative civilization. In the interests of consistency where sensual
obligations were concerned, people would probably cease to eat in public, i.e.
in cafés or restaurants, but do such eating as was necessary in private,
thereby keeping the degrading spectacle, from a transcendental standpoint, of
sensual indulgence in this matter off the streets. Is it not a fact that many people now do most
of their eating in private anyway, having first visited a food store or
take-away restaurant?"
"Yes, so it would seem," she
answered, blushing faintly. "And
it's also a fact that many people now sleep alone and indulge in personal sex
of one sort or another."
He smiled gently but made no comment, and
she realized that their discussion had reached a climax beyond which he was
unable or unwilling to proceed.
TWELVE THINKERS
Carmen Daly (secretary)
I have been
complimented for dressing in a miniskirt, which is considered to be the chastest of skirts by dint of the fact that it symbolizes
shallow vaginal sexuality. I am regarded
as a liberated woman, a type peculiar, apparently, to the petty
bourgeoisie. But I have also been told
that my sartorial status, in this respect, is merely 'the best of a bad job',
since even a short skirt indicates femininity and thereby affirms a sexist
distinction appropriate to an extreme phase of relative civilization. Although the choice of a short skirt is, from
this point of view, preferable to a medium-length or a long one, it's not
preferable to a pair of trousers or jeans, whether in denim, cord, or any other
material. The woman who regularly wears
pants is potentially, if not actually, a female superman - someone, apparently,
who is the civilized proletarian equivalent of a liberated female, the
successor, as it were, to this petty-bourgeois ideal.
That, by contrast, affirms a post-sexist
integrity ... pertinent to an absolute civilization. But, unfortunately, I'm not a female
superman, nor even potentially one, but a liberated female, partial to short
skirts. I have been told that the
flounced ones are preferable to the straight or tight varieties, since by
tapering upwards, from the hem to the waist, they defy the earth's
gravitational force and thereby suggest a freedom from and independence of
diabolic constraint. However that may
be, I've only recently taken the advice to wear the shortest possible
miniskirts and/or dresses, so as to reduce any feminine symbolism still
further. If I cannot bring myself to
wear jeans all the time, then, so the lesson runs, I should at least wear the
'higher' type of petty-bourgeois mini, which apparently betokens an aspiration
towards the proletariat.
According to this theory, skirts and/or
dresses may be classified, in class-evolutionary terms, as follows:
aristocratic ankle length; early grand-bourgeois lower calf-muscle length; late
grand-bourgeois higher calf-muscle length; bourgeois knee length; early
petty-bourgeois lower thigh length; and, finally, late petty-bourgeois higher
thigh length. After which evolutionary
period the feminine is completely superseded through the wearing, either by
potential or actual female supermen, of trouser-like attire, though not
necessarily of the same length as their male counterparts.
David Green (tailor)
I would
never wear tails, not even if I were offered a sizeable financial
incentive. To my mind, they signify too
great a concession to the earth's gravitational force, the way they taper
downwards to a point. There is something
dualistic about tails which suggests a grand-bourgeois
class integrity, particularly when compared with the single tail type of frock
coat worn, as a rule, by aristocrats, with but a single pre-dualistic,
quasi-pagan affirmation of the earth's gravity.
If anything, this is morally worse than double tails, since more
materialistic and lacking, in consequence, a 'triangular' space between each
tail.
Yet I would no more wear tails than a top
hat which, effectively tapering upwards from brim to crown, suggests an
affirmation of the sun's gravitational force or, at the very least, a
concession to it. So with tails and top
hat a 'gentleman' betrays a simultaneous allegiance to both earthly and solar
gravitational forces, the powerful competing attractions of the Diabolic Alpha,
and does so, moreover, in ostentatious fashion.
That is something I could never do; for my allegiance is towards the
Divine Omega, which is why I make a point of wearing flared trousers, their
upwards tapering defying the earth's gravity.
Unfortunately, I don't always wear
head-gear, but when I do, as in winter time, it is a Russian-style bearskin hat
that tapers downwards, thereby not merely ignoring the sun's gravity but
affirming man's spiritual independence of it - like, I might add, my flared
cords.
Thus I am quite the antithesis of a
gravity-mongering 'tails-and-top-hat' man.
There is a late petty-bourgeois/proletarian integrity about my
clothing. And not only
in terms of style but also in terms of colour, since I prefer to wear dark
clothes - indeed, nothing less than black. I dress to affirm truth, not to look
beautiful, and so wear the most essential or appearance-denying colour,
appropriately transcendental. I have
been complimented on my sartorial smartness and, to be sure, that accords with
my affirmation of truth. Were I to dress
scruffily, in dirty worn workman's clothes, I would regard my appearance as
signifying an anti-beauty ugliness - a kind of negative or indirect affirmation
of truth.
However, I prefer the positive and direct
affirmation of it, as befitting my spiritual bent. But if it came to the crunch, I would rather
dress scruffily than in beautiful fashion, like a dandy. I regard ugliness as the lesser of two evils.
Carlo Stropetti (writer)
I don't
like people staring at me. I'm not a
woman, to take especial pride in my looks.
I only take pride, as a rule, in my intelligence, which I use in the
service of my spiritual life, with particular reference to my literary
interests. I don't strive to attract
attention to my appearance, but am anxious, on the contrary, to deflect
attention away from it. Was I less
essential, less spiritual, I would welcome people staring at me. But, as it is, I do my best to ignore their
attentions. My significance is on the
inside, not the outside!
Yet not many people realize this, even
though I rarely reciprocate their curiosity.
Indeed, I don't even pay much attention to beautiful women whenever I
encounter any, which, frankly, isn't very often in the predominantly
proletarian environment I've grown accustomed to living in. I am too wrapped-up in my thoughts or in
contemplation to be much concerned with female beauty! Besides, I would not want to humble myself
before it, since I am a man, and one who realizes and daily affirms the
superiority of the spiritual life in his concern with truth. Most women take beauty,
and their own beauty in particular, for the highest ideal, the most important
accomplishment, and accordingly entertain inflated ideas as to their own
worth. I shouldn't want to confirm them
in that opinion; for, as a man, I have a right to uphold the sovereignty of
truth and to lead, in consequence, a more absolute existence. Not being a slave to feminine beauty, I am
free to lead an independent life in the name of 'masculine' truth.
I never feel inferior to a woman. On the contrary, I cultivate my detachment
from the world with a degree of pride, making sure, however, that such pride
doesn't interfere with the development of my spiritual life. I am relatively free, but most women are
enslaved to their own beauty, which, in my opinion, they pride themselves on
overmuch! This is less true of the petty
bourgeoisie than of the bourgeoisie or grand bourgeoisie. Less true again of the
proletariat, whose women, for the most part, are neither beautiful nor
attractive but if not ugly then ... certainly plain, in accordance with their
barbarous status as potentially female supermen. There is no reason why they should ever be
anything else. For beauty is not the
means to truth!
Connor Cleary (dietician)
I firmly
maintain that thinking solely in class terms is not enough. A proletarian civilization wouldn't,
admittedly, have any class enemies in it, and neither would there be any tribalists. But
proletarian homogeneity on the basis of occupation and/or environment would
not, by itself, signify an ultimate sifting of man from reactionary or
anachronistic dross. A transcendental
civilization would not be true to itself unless it had been purged, in advance,
of physical types incommensurable with its post-atomic spiritual
integrity. I mean by this that there
could be no toleration of endomorphic types, which is to say, of fat men.
Yes, I foresee the day when, like bourgeois
oppressors and tribalists, overly fat people will be
rounded-up and removed from mainstream society - their physical constitutions
deemed incompatible with a society dedicated to an exclusively divine
orientation. They would be regarded as
pagan types, too fleshy to accord with the radically spiritual bent of a
transcendental civilization. Their
existence, while permissible within an open-society context, would be no-less
impermissible within a closed-society context that was spiritual ... than the
existence there of tribalists of one description or
another. Anything that smacked of the
pre-atomic would automatically be excluded from admittance to a post-atomic
society. Many atomists would likewise be
excluded, though mesomorphic types, whose muscular
physical status places them in-between the fat and the thin, the sensual and
the spiritual, would continue to find vocations in a transcendental
civilization, as, for example, in the police, certain kinds of industry, agriculture,
and (until it was disbanded and/or metamorphosed) the army - that magnet of
muscular types.
And yet an absolutely spiritual age would
be partial to the cultivation and protection of ectomorphic
types, whose slender builds and intellectual predilections would accord with
the highest manifestation of the human type, and be especially relevant to the
ultimate stage of civilized evolution.
As a thin man myself, I can speak with some authority on this matter, and
I am confident that, as time progresses, every measure will be taken to ensure
the optimum spiritual development of the ectomorph,
who will be the human type, par excellence, from whom the
Superman of the superhuman millennium will be created.
Katya Gregson (model)
I have
always been slender and lightweight.
Unlike other women, I have never had to go on a diet in order to
slim. My appetite has never been large,
in any case, but I haven't kept to a moderate intake of food and drink out of
consideration for my weight and shape.
Both these factors are very constant with me, which is just as well, I
think! My slender body makes only the
minimum of concessions to gravitational force, both upwards and downwards,
since I am alike small-breasted and narrow-hipped, with but the slenderest of
legs. At one time I used to regret this,
but, these days, I realize that such an overall slenderness is a moral
advantage and confers on one a social distinction, in the eyes of the more
intelligent people, appropriate to an affirmation of evolutionary progress in
spirituality.
What a contrast between my gravitational
neutrality and the conspicuous commitment of most women's bodies to
gravitational force! How some of them
pride themselves on being shapely, on tapering-down from the hips to the ankles
and tapering-up from the breasts to the head!
I doubt that such shapeliness would find much encouragement in the final
human civilization ... of transcendental man.
No more, for that matter, than would the even more radical tapering,
either side of the stomach bulge, of fat people, regardless of which sex. Conspicuous physical concessions to
gravitational force would be taboo in a post-atomic age, of that I have no
doubt! People would be admired for their
slenderness, which would be accorded due recognition as the physical
ideal. Instead of being regarded as
skinny, as I often am by heavyweight boors, people of slender build would be
held up as the golden mean for a transcendental civilization - a mean relevant
to the proletariat. Efforts would
doubtless be made not only to encourage slimming in the medium-built and
medium-weight, i.e. in those of approximately mesomorphic
constitution, but to orientate genetic engineering towards the breeding,
through artificial insemination, of slender physiques, so that ectomorphs, or thin people, would vastly predominate -
their physical constitution better suited to a transcendental cultivation of
the spiritual life.
Barnaby Evans (manufacturer)
I think sex
with a plastic inflatable, a so-called 'sex doll', morally preferable to sex
with a woman, insofar as one is dealing with the artificial, indeed with what
could be described as the antithetical equivalent of a prostitute, just as a
combine harvester is the antithetical equivalent of a peasant wielding a
scythe, and a tractor with mechanical hoes at the back antithetically
equivalent to a peasant wielding a hoe. Thus from the natural to the artificial, from peasants engaged in
manual work to agricultural proletarians manipulating mechanical tools via a
farmer/farm-labourer compromise.
Just so, from prostitutes
to 'sex dolls' via wives. The
prostitute corresponds, one might argue, to the pre-atomic, the 'sex doll' to
the post-atomic - a distinction between paganism and transcendentalism. Of course, prostitutes could not be tolerated
in a post-atomic civilization, any more than wives. But I believe that 'sex dolls' would be,
even if sex with such a doll involves a form of sexual relativity, as with the
use (by women) of a vibrator, and is therefore less good than pornographic
erotica, which, in appealing primarily to the head, i.e. to eyes and intellect,
encourages a more passive relationship between individual and stimulus.
However, not everyone is on the same
spiritual wavelength, nor capable of the same degree of sexual sublimation, so
I believe that the male proletarian masses should be entitled to avail
themselves of 'sex dolls' in addition or as an alternative to certain kinds of
absolute pornography, if a more transcendental relationship to sex is beyond their
powers. Probably, as the ultimate
civilization developed and people became more spiritualized, 'sex dolls' would
be phased-out, with pornographic sublimation becoming more widespread and all
concessions to bodily sex accordingly minimized. Sex would then be predominantly an affair of
the head, to the extent that it existed at all!
As for homosexuals, I don't see why they
shouldn't have access, on the proletarian level, to male inflatables,
assuming that such inflatables could be manufactured
along suitably masculine lines. At least
that would enable homosexuals to transcend the flesh, and thus draw a step
nearer to pornographic sublimation.
Marcus Black (doctor)
I would
have no hesitation in endorsing euthanasia for certain categories of the incurably
ill, not only in order to put them out of their misery or pain, but to save
other people the burden of looking after them, as well as to save the general
public the inconvenience of having to witness their behaviour and/or condition. I refer, in particular, to cretins and
imbeciles, to the severely autistic and radically malformed - in short, to
those categories of spastic who are of no use to themselves or to anyone else.
A child who is unable to count or speak
coherently, who will grow into an adult with the mentality of a young
child - such a lamentably unfortunate
individual, who besides being imbecile is malformed and unpleasant to behold,
should be high on the list of those for whom euthanasia is the only merciful
solution. An open society, with its
respect for the pagan root, may keep such unfortunates alive on the grounds
that they, no less than everyone else, are products of nature and, in some
sense, offspring of 'the Creator'. But a
closed society, with no such pagan allegiance, should have no qualms in
disposing of these wretches in the name of intelligence, spiritual progress,
and, not least of all, the wellbeing of the people who, for the most part, are
of sound limb and mind ... or, at any rate, would be in a society run in their
spiritual interests.
As to cripples, who may require constant
attention, the question of introducing euthanasia should not arise if such
physically restricted individuals are capable of leading a fairly normal
intellectual or spiritual life, since it is more important to be sound in mind
than in body, and anyone who can read or watch television or think for himself
is not as badly off as may at first appear.
Since human evolution will probably lead,
in the course of time, to human brains being artificially supported and
sustained in collectivized contexts ...
for purposes of synthetically-induced upward self-transcendence, the man who is
obliged to spend most of his time in a wheelchair is, in some sense, closer to
that eventuality than most of his sound-limbed fellows, and is accordingly
entitled to if not more respect ... then certainly to some respect,
particularly if he is intelligent and capable, in consequence, of leading a
satisfyingly positive spiritual life - not the least aspect of which should be
meditation. But the child or adult who
is incapable of doing so could have no place in a society exclusively
orientated towards the Divine Omega.
Cripples may be respected and even admired, but spastics and cretins
should not be! They, on the contrary,
should take their place beside the incurably insane in the forefront of
candidates for euthanasia.
James Steiner (radical politician)
Being
essentially meritocratic in my class integrity, I
would rather serve the people on dictatorial terms than serve them democratically,
in other words as an ideological dictator than as a democratic president. I am no Khruschev
or Brezhnev to go around in a suit and adopt the role of the proletarian
equivalent of a bourgeois president. I
favour the militant pose and would probably spend much of my time in some kind
of military or quasi-military uniform, even though I would be anxious to
distinguish myself from a military dictator, whose role I have no ambitions to
usurp! My choice of clothing has long
been dark, and I imagine that the uniform I wore would also be dark, with
matching boots. I would wish my personal
bodyguard to also dress in dark uniforms, and would encourage both the secret
police and army to do likewise.
Being a people's transcendentalist, I would
attach special significance to the police, both secret and conventional, since
I believe the ideological bias of a regime dedicated to the cultivation of an
internal proletariat is towards the security services, whereas in a
state-socialist society, by contrast, it is towards the armed forces, who, in
theory if not necessarily in practice, are regarded as the means to the
international spread of a socialism rooted in dialectical materialism. Not that I would ignore or neglect the army,
in either its conventional or revolutionary guises. Yet I regard the conventional army as a
necessary evil that must be utilized in the service of historical progress and
gradually curtailed, its life-span incapable of extending into an absolute
civilization, but drawing to a close following the democratic overcoming of
relative civilization, after which time evolutionary progress will demand the
establishment of an absolute police state, which it would be the duty of
people's transcendentalism to further and take a lead in encouraging.
However, I do not envisage a situation
emerging whereby no armed force will exist to tackle counter-revolutionary or
external aggression, particularly while the world is still exposed to the
possibility of such aggression. Just as
women would become female supermen in a post-atomic civilization while still
remaining, at bottom, feminine, so the army would become an armed security
service while likewise remaining fundamentally military; in other words, so the
army would be transformed into an armed police service in order to supplement
the unarmed police in the protection of law and order. For it seems to me that, strictly speaking,
the police should be an unarmed body and must remain so in fidelity to their status
as a peace-keeping organization, in contrast to the armed quasi-police, who may
be regarded as a revolutionary metamorphosis of the army, serving to supplement
the genuine police in a quasi-electron deference to post-atomic criteria.
Thus a revolutionary armed security service
would complement the secret security service in a people's transcendental
civilization, existing alongside the conventional police and eventually
entirely superseding the conventional army, so that an absolute police state
would be created which was composed of conventional, secret service, and armed
quasi-police.
Timothy Lee-Jones (philosopher)
I'm an
extremely quiet man by design and regard this fact as a mark of my spiritual
maturity and cultural nobility. This
doesn't prevent me, however, from being the victim of other people's noise and,
often enough, the noise of animals and machines, such as dogs and cars, in
addition. I have lived so long in a
noisy environment that I suffer from cerebral and stomach inflammation in
consequence, and am obliged to regularly resort to wax earplugs, if only to
reduce the bodily tension that such noise engenders. Noise, I have absolutely no doubt, is my
chief torment, and I dare say there are those who would understand me when I
maintain that hearing is more often a curse than a blessing! Unfortunately, it cannot be switched
on-and-off at will, so the best one can do is to stuff wax into the ears and
persevere with any physical inconvenience that may arise, as some will do once
the use of earplugs becomes habitual.
And yet, living in an urban environment, I
have discovered the value of earplugs and could not conceive of life being
possible, in this situation, without them.
They're the other side, as it were, of modern life, a means whereby
sensitive people may in some degree protect themselves against the base tyranny
of noise.
Yet this is negative, and the problem
should also be tackled positively, through measures designed to reduce
environmental or other noise pollution as much as possible. For noise corresponds to the diabolic side of
life, stems, as it were, from the raging of solar energy in the proton-proton
reactions of stars. I wouldn't like to
hear the sun from a few thousand miles distance - assuming, for the sake of
argument, it were possible to get that close.
Silence, on the other hand, corresponds to the divine, aspires, one
might say, towards the electron-electron attractions of transcendent spirit in
some future Beyond.
The relative world is ever torn between
diabolic noise and divine silence, never completely silent. But the ultimate human civilization ... of
the transcendentalists ... should approximate to the spiritual absolute in a
predominantly silent context, an environmental situation where noise of any
degree was the exception to the rule rather than - as often seems to be the
case in relative civilization - the rule itself.
People will learn to be much quieter in
that final civilization than they've ever been in any previous one. There will be no hammering, because hammers
will have been placed under ban, their use entailing too great a concession to
natural force. Buildings will be
prefabricated and any repairs that may prove necessary will be accounted for in
a relatively prefabricated way. There
will be no shouting or singing or swearing on the streets, for that will be
made an offence against the peace, subject to prosecution. There will be no dogs barking or cats
wailing, for such animals are likely to be destroyed or at the very least removed
from mainstream society as incompatible with a post-atomic civilization. There will be no blaring of record-players,
radios, or analogous machines, because the appreciation of music will be
confined to headphones, in accordance with absolutely essential criteria. Televisions and similar sound-transmitters
will be manufactured with a volume ceiling much below the current one, and
users will be required to keep the noise down to a minimum level and/or avail
themselves of special headphones connecting with the machine.
There will be numerous other such
improvements where noise pollution is concerned, and they will make life in the
ultimate human civilization approximate more closely to Heaven, in this
respect, than it has ever done before.
Geraldine Harris (social worker)
Youths and
adults should not be obliged to share the same house. If a youth doesn't make as much natural noise
as a child, he passively, and sometimes actively, acquiesces in artificial
noise, not the least manifestation of which involves pop music of one kind or
another. Besides having a greater
tolerance than adults for noise, youths have more physical energy and are
therefore inclined to violent and regular movement to a greater extent than
adults. The evolution of man from the
cradle to the grave is, in some sense, a progression from the diabolic to the
divine on human terms, a progression beginning in maximum noise/energy and
gradually evolving away from that into a capacity for silence and
contemplation, whether intellectual or spiritual.
Thus human life approximates, at either
extreme, to the absolutes, with a kind of balanced relativity coming
in-between. Generally, females
approximate more closely than males to the diabolic absolute, males more closely
than females to the divine absolute, so that while female babies and children
are both noisier and more energetic, as a rule, than their male counterparts,
male adults, particularly when elderly, are quieter and more contemplative than
their female counterparts. From an adult
point of view, however, it should be feasible to contend that, if it doesn't
come from animals or machines, most noise one hears throughout life comes from
babies, children, and youths - noise being the audible manifestation of energy.
Consequently there ought to be some way of
ensuring that adults aren't unduly victimized by it. Now one of the best ways would be to ensure
that adults were not obliged to live with either children or youths, the two
most conspicuous categories of offenders against adult values. For while certain measures could be taken to
make life less noisy in the future, measures to change the basic energy-biased
constitutions of children and youths would be difficult, if not impossible, to
affect, in consequence of which the most that could be done, from an adult
standpoint, would be to confine noise-loving creatures to a particular
environment, such as nursery, school, college, etc., where they would have less
effect on adults.
Thus I foresee a time when, as an aspect of
this better social ordering, youths will be obliged to live in different houses
or blocs than adults, where, if they cannot be quiet and contemplative, they
can at least be themselves to themselves and not (as is all-too-frequently the
case at present) to people with radically different values!
Ben Freeman (lawyer)
Of the fact
that adults have in the past served what is not in their best interests, but
antipathetic towards them, I've absolutely no doubt. They have been too often and long the victims
of babies, children, and youths - in that order. Such is the way of things in a relative
civilization.
In an absolute civilization, on the other
hand, this would not be the case; for post-atomic criteria would ensure that
proletarian men, become male supermen, and proletarian women, become female
supermen, did not form matrimonial relationships in the name of children. Male supermen would be free of such
relationships, while female supermen would not be dependent on their more
masculine counterparts for babies, but be free to avail themselves of
artificial insemination obtainable, through state regulation, from clinics with
sperm-bank facilities. Neither would the
babies, once conceived, be dependent on their producers, because their
development would be entrusted to the State which, in the future equivalent of
kindergartens, would employ qualified professionals to take over the task of
nurturing them from traditional private means, like mothers, and thus leave the
female supermen free to attend to their various professional or artificial
duties, including the cultivation of spirit.
The upbringing of children would
consequently take place independently of their producers, both donor and
bearer, and wouldn't directly impinge upon the adult world. Female and male supermen would themselves
live apart in separate units, each adult being entitled to a small flat of his
own which he would not share with anyone, least of all for sexual purposes.
No superman, male or female, would be
obliged to acknowledge 'his' children; for propagation would be largely if not
entirely an impersonal affair, with no family strings attached. Babies, children, and even youths would be in
the care of professionals, and never again would adults be obliged to serve
what is not in their best, i.e. spiritual, interests. I look forward to this post-family epoch of
human evolution, when children are not raised in parental love or strife but in
state service, according to the highest impersonal ideals.
Joseph O'Farrell (teacher)
With my
allegiance to transcendental metaphysics, to transcendentalism, conceived in
both practical and theoretical terms, I'm not exposed, like a petty bourgeois,
to occultism, not even to the highest kind of occultism ... in mediumism. There is
none of the Yeatsian or Huxleyite
concern with a 'spirit world' about me, since I know that, from our standpoint,
no such world exists.
Even if pure spirit exists, which it could
well do in the guise of individual spiritual transcendences (assuming there
were other planets in the Universe more advanced than our own which had passed
through a post-human stage of evolution and attained, via superbeing
equivalents, to transcendence), it would not be accessible to mediums for purposes
of communication with the living, and for the simple reason that, as an
electron-electron attraction, pure spirit could not be contacted by the living,
having nothing in common with them and having nothing to impart to them -
thought being alien to an absolutely post-atomic mind; though not, of course,
to a human mind, least of all to one that claims it can induce pure spirit to
part with thoughts or, more ridiculous still, act as a link between the impure
and the pure, and so translate the thoughtless into the thoughtful!
No, even given the fact that no-one from
this planet has ever literally attained to transcendence (including Christ),
since it presupposes new-brain collectivizations in
the superbeing millennium, such pure spirit as might
exist in the post-millennial Beyond would have no connection, ancestral or
otherwise, with the earth. Like it or
not, mediumism is but a petty-bourgeois manifestation
of the occult, a manifestation not directly dependent on soul, like its more
diabolical precursors, but on a false interpretation and projection of spirit,
the least despicable kind of occultism, but nonetheless still far from
admirable from an absolutist point-of-view!
Unlike a petty-bourgeois metaphysician, a
metaphysician of the transcendental civilization won't be exposed to the
occult, since no religious relativity will be possible on the absolute
plane. I'm not now exposed to it, but
anyone who practises relative metaphysics within the wider context of bourgeois/proletarian
civilization is almost certain, sooner or later, to succumb to a complementary
occultism, a situation which, unconsciously upheld, will be taken for granted,
given the relative integrity of such a civilization.
Hence Huxley's relativity between
metaphysics (in petty-bourgeois transcendentalism), as applying to yoga and/or
oriental mysticism generally, and the occult (in petty-bourgeois mediumism), as applying to an interest in the 'spirit
world' and the emotional or, rather, intellectual treatment of spirit, i.e. its
identification with and manifestation in thought, as expressed through a
medium's voice. This oscillation between
the genuine and the pseudo is the relative norm.
By contrast, the transcendental
civilization to-come will know only the truth (of transcendentalism), and that
truth, as proclaimed by he who in his global universalism corresponds to a True
World Messiah, will endure absolutely.
