There is something self-mutilating about being a clown, but also mutilating of everything else - it's either sprung from or nurtured a deep nihilism in me, a deep conviction that nothing really matters, which I'm trying to address. Nietzsche '“A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”
Obviously it comes from fear - you fear even taking yourself seriously in case you're being ridiculous
I mean, looked at through another set of eyes it not remotely serious. It's like Eliot dismissing a wasteland as vaguely musical bleating or whatever his phrase was. Sort of pathetic. There's an interesting essay on bathos in Prynne
Henry IV is almost a play about this - Falstaff vs Hal's father. The competing claims of clownery vs victory.
And another reason Shakespeare's so brilliant - the mixture of high seriousness and low comedy, with neither completely undermined by the other.
Like, it IS ridiculous, objectively, at some level. The poem I posted last night is ridiculous. In all sorts of ways. You can occupy a vantage from which pretty much everything is ridiculous. Blake had this word of especial opprobrium, but I can't remember it.... Mockers, or scoffers, or something along those lines.
Yes that's right. But this stuff is not set the stone, that's the whole point. Today a nihilistic jester, tomorrow a self actualising Lord of light. The day after, a heap of broken images. And on and on.
"If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise"
Because I've ended up actually reading Evola (because it turns out that doing so gives you a handle on a whole current of thought whose roots and ramifications were previously obscure to me), I've been struck by the particular promise he makes to his readers, that cultivating a spiritual-aristocratic indifference to the turmoil of this fallen age is the path to self-actualisation as a divine, regal figure in the age to come. This is obviously a powerful myth to associate one's own aspirations and tribulations with. And maybe there are better and worse versions of that story that one can tell oneself: Evola's is kind of maximally grandiose, and requires an enormous apparatus of circumstantial woo to sustain it, but at the level of personal myth I can identify strongly with more John Barleycorn-ish cycle-of-death-and-renewal narratives, where your powers lie fallow for a time because some new dimension of selfhood is in preparation. These stories help us sit out periods of seeming stagnation, times of weariness or disorientation, and see them as part of a necessary and ultimately fruitful process. We can do that without imaging ourselves Lords-of-the-Earth in waiting. The "king" may be a projected figure of our own ability to rule ourselves, enact changes, set things to rights. The "fisher king" is that self-rule in abeyance, biding its time by the water. (I'm very moved by the Terry Gilliam film of the same name, because it's evidently about broken selfhood, selfhood in abeyance, and the mechanisms of secret repair which are at work at such times - but like "They Might Be Giants", it's also about how we repair one another, how human connection restores us to the world)
. the commodity fetish will always kill left mysticism. your mate should understand that. it's not that it's not possible, but its only possible for a few isolated people. ok brilliant but that was going on long before capitalism, and the *left*. In which case it makes more sense to look into things like kaballa, ibn arabi's concept of annihilation, mulla sadra's existentialism siriwarti's illuminationism etc etc...
I've said this a million times before. the problem with the guennon types is they think there was an *tradition* which got subverted by modernity. their concept of phenomena seems to be static, totally enthralled to utilitarian logic where oppositions, contestations and boundaries are somehow not less porous. like the thing is you can't tell someone from 18th century syria that they are living in an *traditional* society because that would not make sense. A lot of it is just naked orientalised depictions of islam, as if islam was not a living breathing worldview with huge amounts of divergence and variation. it's quite nauseating in all honesty.
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There is some excellent stuff within Evola's work, but it's fundamentally flawed. This can be analysed. But it does require a new sense of spirituality. Not all paganism is equal. Evola's version is race/nation-based, hierarchical, solar and patriarchal, but throughout his work he opposes an earlier polyracial/inter-tribal, egalitarian, lunar and matriarchal/gender-balanced spirituality. His work can be deconstructed to find these threads. And systems like Tantra and Taoism exist in a crossover zone between these two versions of paganism, making the situation even more difficult to disentangle. Yet just throwing all of this out with the bathwater, as this Open Letter seems to advocate, condemns the Left to the worse type of soulless, reductionist materialism and, because nobody is really satisfied with this for long, it eventually pushes anyone of spark and spirit into the hands of the Right.