Count the present days until today arrives (ME)
(strongly inclined toward the practice of the occult since childhood), knew how to control the flow of disordered reactions in my spirit, passing from cigarettes to the pipe (much less harmful), and from the pipe to nothing, that is, Prajapati, the supreme god of Hinduism in his three aspects: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the destroyer --- fortunately, at that moment I was too scared to be afraid, and I thought it was funny how fearful people like to experience terrifying sensations, as if a masochistic pleasure almost sexually stimulated them to play with their own weakness --- The brightness of the hotel bar bathroom blind, however, revived me like a glass of cold beer after a long walk, while I peed and thought about what to do --- the sound of the helicopter outside, more or less above where I was, was very clear; and it gave me a close-up view of big problems; agents with a lot of money to burn in a few days of operation? --- highly attractive, Yerma, in a miniskirt; as soon as I saw her for the first time in the photo (recommended by our incredible top-of-the-line source in Madrid), I started reading her first book (the only successful one) in PDF; it seemed to me, right away, poorly composed, those dialogues full of sentences were horrible (I laughed, frankly); however, I liked the main character, the climate of the European bourgeoisie kind of getting screwed in 2016, amid President Trump's squeeze on world trade --- I liked how Yerma felt about her characters, it was something that in a way evidenced her great literary culture, despite the tedious swamp of the first chapters (in fact, she didn't let herself be carried away by the temptation of a story completely crushed by the meditative gymnastics of carefully chosen words, of armies of useless phrases drained by sleepy and sulfurous nights inside the heads of the characters immobilized in the immobile world of the meantime --- By God (the helicopter!), they know for sure that I'm down here, and they want me to know too --- perhaps already aware of everything, because of the amount of flybys, they want to see if the rabbit comes out of its burrow running erratically --- no ---
ResponderExcluir--- so I zip up my pants and head back to the bar: Yerma is already there, at a table I reserved for us, sipping her coffee and croissant, staring vaguely at the other guests like someone gazing at the Himalayan peaks with gnome-like distrust --- participating, offhand, in the fatal discovery of the true identity of a country, a government, a police force, or an intelligence service; successive layers of masks of a world corroded by the fascism of every nation's backstage, the absolute monarchy of Capital disguised as democracy and the rule of law, a family-sized "cover legend" in the newspaper and television networks to cover up all this obvious vilification made legal by the domestication and immobilization of nomadic instincts ---
--- "You were quite controlled, when I left you alone with those two" (I said to Yerma) "Did you feel them unstable?" --- Yerma took a deep, almost trembling breath, a final concession to largely unprepared nerves --- I immediately put on my steely face and said: "You will receive $500,000 just to obtain for us, in an impeccably civilized manner, that pile of political and geopolitical concerns unpublishable until tomorrow morning. The 'task' is not simple, nor even safe, but we have neither time nor adequate positioning. It's time to move from essence to substance, without further ado. In this, your habit of spending endless sleepless hours will be of great help, I believe. In the vast market of 'intelligentsia' of the 'free world,' my instant trust in you may seem careless, somewhat amateurish, or hasty, but I see flashes of a mischievous child in your eyes, wanting to walk into a trap;
ResponderExcluirperhaps occupied in the last hour in unconsciously delighting in making associations with insufficient data, giving one last chance to the terminal state of your writer's vanity to become the protagonist in a small, suddenly improvised, deadly operation, an operation of intelligentsia that for the next few years may perhaps free you completely from the ridiculous and cretinous effects of the hypocrisy of the literary world, that narcissistic tribute that character vices have to pay to authentic virtue in real life'' ---
Excluir--- I was probably radiating perfidy when I said that at that moment, because I wasn't speaking seriously, but rather managing the psychic tension within her to where we 'needed'; however, women of sexually active age, especially those in their Balzacs, in any circumstances tend to instinctively forgive anything in an educated man who gallantly expresses a desire to go to bed with them --- ''It's just my impression'' (Yerma said suddenly) ''Or are we surrounded by secret agents on all sides here?'' --- ''Indeed'' (I replied) ''The world of commerce in human destinies is always a little more pragmatic than we imagine. Maybe not all the "big beasts," but certainly many officials and press officers here could at any moment pull an automatic from their belt and blow our brains out, or shove your unconscious body into a car trunk and disappear without a trace for two thousand kilometers or to the nearest clandestine airport hangar, and then WELCOME TO GUANTÂNAMO, or one of those ranches the CIA keeps in Virginia, or those remote and invisible islands of the Southern Command, to interrogate "extra-class guests..............
ResponderExcluir....................As you can see, it's a historical prejudice that all the world's secret agents (Russians, Israelis, Iranians, and English) look like American businessmen, and that only the Chinese disguise themselves as Japanese tourists (it's quite the opposite, if you ask me); all prone to swallowing excessive operational instructions too quickly and generally digesting them only briefly (all to quickly advance their careers), but watch your tail when you decide to execute them at the drop of a hat. Now, on to your instructions: Do you remember a writer from Malaga, a friend of yours, who died in 2009?'' --- Yerma stared at me in surprise; I thought she was beginning to lose touch with reality or that I was moving too fast with her (there was no time to beat around the bush); I would have to deal with this perilous possibility constantly, from now on --- "Julian Monléon?" What's wrong with him?'' she confirmed and asked --- ''What's wrong is that he was married to a writer called Bernarda Torroella shortly before he died; you've probably heard of her, she's here in town'' ---
Excluir
ResponderExcluir--- "Obviously, but I never met her. Julian had distanced himself from us greatly in the last years before his death; when he married, we hardly saw each other anymore, so 'encouraged' by his 'wife' had he become, raving with immense mental energy for an imminent masterpiece, capable of bringing Europe to its knees, fusing a jumble of ancient tales with a mass of schizophrenic notes that (I'm told) Bernarda herself saw as the ultimate substratum of genius. Poor Julian became so agitated and sickly with these encouragements from the marital bed that he plunged headlong into drugs and megalomaniacal delirium, hallucinating day and night about unsympathetic and lifeless characters amid 'women who bore the moon and the sun in their bodies,' and who 'opened to him the baroque curves of the secret word.' The posthumous edition of this "mental disorder" (paid for by Bernarda herself) revealed to us only a poetic prose without rhyme or reason, incapable of coherently capturing the simplest novelistic situations. Despite everything, Bernarda wrote in the preface to that commemoration:
"A sense of plastic ordering in free verse transposed into the crystal of the stream of consciousness, resonating in the flowing prose at the touch of each consonant like subterranean harpies of an undulating psychological time. The vertical cry of the 'ode' (read by Góngora) summoning a surprising vocabulary that constantly coalesces around the metaphor." I never forgot that preface that (God forgive me!) had us bursting out laughing in bars for a month straight," Yerma concluded. "So!" I immediately retorted, marveling at the photographic power of my new 'operational extension's' memory. "It seems our mutual understanding of all things emerges less slowly the more we drink. A toast"
ExcluirPost script
ResponderExcluirBy Lezama Lima in ANALECT OF THE CLOCK
ResponderExcluirSymbolism? It had become the banquet without guests from which only the final chill of the tablecloths and the initial glow of the candlesticks escaped. A murmur arose, a reflection, but we disdainfully moved away to inhabit a substance that distributed—an instantaneous unity of the continuous and subtle—in the proportion of sleep in the muscles of the serpent. The symbol mingled with the cymbal, in the same way that the serpent coils around the branch of the almond tree (moving, nourished by autumn, semi-moving). The same music did not accompany in its first peasant situation as a pair of words, as a profiteer of an imperturbable condition, but in the intoxication of not being, it tried to nourish the residue of each poem, of each abandoned experience,
By my book from 2016 MANTRAKR
ResponderExcluirTHE VEDAS! These artists were searching, in occult traditions, for elements that predated Judeo-Christianity and Greek classicism—that is, creative methods and spiritual values from Egypt, Persia, India, and China. They sought their aesthetic ideal in the most primitive arts, in the "primordial" revelation of beauty. Stéphane Mallarmé declared that a modern poet should go beyond Homer, because the decline of Western poetry had begun with him. When the interviewer asked him, "But what poetry existed before Homer?" Mallarmé replied, "The Vedas!"
Right I cannot adulterate the word VEDAS here but this punctuation doesn't tell us anything aaaaaaf.
It is remarkable, writes André Breton in his pamphlet entitled
ResponderExcluirFlagrante Delito:
that without having corrected themselves in the slightest, all the truly qualified critics of our time have been led to demonstrate that the poets whose influence is currently most vivid, whose effect on modern sensibility is most felt (Victor Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry) have been, to a greater or lesser extent, marked by this tradition. It is not that we should see them as "initiates" in the full sense of the term, but both of them at least felt this attraction strongly and never ceased to show it the greatest deference. What is more, it would seem specifically that without having it in mind in any way, and while abandoning themselves in complete solitude to their inner voices, they happened to "recover" this TRADITION, to insist on it in another way. It would be necessary to understand beforehand that poets are nourished, without knowing it, by a source common to all men, a source of life and inexhaustible psychic energy where the remains and products of ancient cosmogonies ferment and are endlessly remade.
Gustav Meyrink, as seen by Borges.
ResponderExcluirPresentation of the Austrian author and Borgesian reviews of The Golem and The Angel in the West Window.
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The author of The Aleph speaks about Meyrink in Captive Texts:
"The facts of Gustav Meyrink's life are less problematic than his work. He was born in 1868, in Vienna. His mother was an actress (it is all too easy to verify that his literary work is histrionic). Munich, Prague, and Hamburg divide his youth. We know that he was a bank clerk, and that he abhorred that job. We also know that he tried two forms of revenge or two forms of escape: the confused study of the confusing "occult sciences" and the composition of satirical writings. In them, he attacked the army, universities, banking, and regional art. ("Art," he wrote, "where the artistic is absent and where the regional is falsified.") Starting in 1899, the famous magazine Simplizissimus published his writings. From that period dates his translations of certain Dickens novels and certain Poe stories. Around In 1910, he compiled some 50 short stories under the parody title The Magic Horn of the German Bourgeois, and in 1915 he published The Golem.
The Golem is a fantasy novel. Novalis once yearned for "dreamlike narratives, inconsequential narratives, governed by association, like dreams."
It is as easy to compose such stories as it is impossible to compose them in a way that they are not illegible. The Golem—incredibly—is dreamlike and the opposite of illegible. It is the vertiginous story of a dream. In the first chapters (the best), the style is admirably visual; in the last, the miracles of the serial novel abound, the influence of Baedeker is stronger than that of Edgar Allan Poe, and we enter without pleasure into a world of excited typography, inhabited by vain asterisks and incontinent capital letters... I don't know if The Golem is an important book; I know that it is a unique one.
ExcluirMeyrink's other novels, Walpurgis Night, The Green Face, and The Angel in the West Window, try in vain to resemble it.
Gustav Meyrink is also the author of Bats—a collection of fantasy stories—and of a novel fragment entitled The Secret Emperor. "
Jorge Luis Borges. Captive Texts. April 29, 1938.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Angel from the West Window, by Gustav Meyrink
ResponderExcluirThis more or less theosophical novel—The Angel in the West Window—is not as beautiful as its title. Its author, Gustav Meyrink, was made famous by the fantastic novel The Golem, an extraordinarily visual book that gracefully combined mythology, erotica, tourism, the "local color" of Prague, premonitory dreams, dreams of other or previous lives, and even reality. This fortunate book was followed by others that were slightly less pleasant. In them, the influence, not only of Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, but also of the various theosophical sects that swarmed (and swarm) in Germany, was evident. It was evident that Meyrink had been "illuminated" by Eastern wisdom, with the disastrous result that is de rigueur in such visitations. Gradually, he began to identify with the most naive of his readers. His books became acts of faith and even propaganda. The Angel of the West Window is a chronicle of confusing miracles, scarcely ever rescued for its poetic ambiance.
J.L. Borges. Captive Texts. October 16, 1936
Meyrink according to Lovecraft
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Lovecraft (1890-1937), the consummate master of the "materialist horror story," in his excellent essay "Horror in Literature," gives us his views on Jewish literature and also, tangentially, on Meyrink and the Golem:
Preternatural Literature on the Continent (excerpt). By Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
"A very flourishing branch—though hidden until very recently—of preternatural literature is that of the Jews, maintained and nourished in the dark by the dark heritage of ancient oriental magic, apocalyptic literature, and the Kabbalah. The Semitic mentality, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and perhaps the store of frightening and secret knowledge that survives in the ghettos and synagogues is much greater than is generally believed."
The same Kabbalah, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy that explains the universe as emanations of the Deity and implies the existence of strange spiritual realms apart from the visible world, of which fleeting glimpses may be obtained by certain secret spells. Its ritual is linked to mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and it attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the alphabet, a circumstance that gives the Hebrew letters a kind of spectral charm and potency in the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has retained much of the terror and mystery of the past; and upon closer examination, it will probably be found to have exercised an important influence on preternatural fiction. The best examples of its literary utilization are the German novel The Golem by Gustav Meyrink and the drama The Dybbuk by a Jewish writer using the pseudonym Ansky.
ExcluirFirst, with its somber and haunting suggestions of unattainable wonders and horrors, it is set in Prague, and describes with singular mastery the ghetto of this ancient city, with its pointed and spectral facades. The name comes from a fabulous artificial giant, supposedly fabricated and animated by medieval rabbis using a certain mysterious formula. The Dibbuk, translated and published in America in 1925, and more recently adapted into an opera, describes with singular force the possession of a body by the demonic soul of a dead person. Both golems and dybbuks are fixed types and often serve as ingredients in later Jewish tradition.
ExcluirH.P. Lovecraft, Horror in Literature (1927)
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"Also lapp'd up Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, lent me by little Bobby Barlow. The most magnificent weird thing I've come across in aeons!"
(Lovecraft to James F. Morton, April 4, 1935)
INGENERATUS
ResponderExcluirThe old master Julius Evola dedicated one of his last articles to Meyrink's "system" in the daily Roma on July 7, 1972. It is not a literary analysis, but rather an analysis of the esoteric and initiatory content of his novels, a mere four pages that demonstrate that almost 45 years after having encountered Meyrink's work within the framework of the Ur Group, Evola had not forgotten his contribution to the reformulation of Western esotericism.
Evola says: "Meyrink is a truly unique author in his genre. To say that he wrote 'novels' is not entirely accurate. While the supernatural plays an important role in them, the whole is not reduced to the fantastic as in the work of Lovecraft or Hoffman."
Unlike these authors, to whom we could add Jorge Luis Borges, who was attracted to the Hebrew Kabbalah, especially in his story The Aleen, Meyrink does something very different from novels: as a whole, he creates his own initiatory system. You have to be very careful with this word.
Initiation is based on a prior and higher concept: the existence of two separate worlds, the physical world and the metaphysical world, the world that is matter and the world beyond matter. Initiation is the bridge that unites both worlds and allows human nature, essentially material or "spiritual" (thought and volition), to pass into the higher world. There are different initiatory "models" depending on the different traditions, but they all begin with the idea of death-resurrection. Death for the old man, bound only to the world of matter, and the resurrection of a new man, ontologically altered in his inner essence, not as a concept but as a perceptible reality. This, and nothing else, is initiation.
ExcluirThe problem that arises is that, since initiation is tied to specific traditions, and given the panorama of the destruction of traditional forms characteristic of the West since the Renaissance, it seems as if the doors have closed, leaving only three residual forms of initiation: the doctrine of the sacraments of the Catholic Church, transformed into a liturgy that seems to have lost the memory of its origins; Masonic initiation, of which it is highly debatable whether there has been regular transmission from the moment the Grand Lodge of London was formed in 1717, which by then lacked "initiative regularity" in relation to the ancient corporations; and, finally, the remnants of the medieval corporations that only survive in France in the phenomenon of "compagnonage" [to which we have dedicated a couple of articles in infokrisis].
ExcluirThus, the outlook is bleak: Freemasonry and Catholicism are debatable as initiatory systems, and as for compagnonage, it is linked to a single country (France) and the practice of a few professions, and is also extremely distorted today. It is not surprising that, since the 19th century, some Westerners have turned their gaze to the East.
ExcluirThe result has been no less catastrophic, and those who have been imprudent enough to follow René Guénon's example by joining Islam, or those who have been attracted to Tibetan Buddhism, which arrived in the West in the 1970s, have suffered vicissitudes that almost fall into the realm of the bilious rather than the initiatory. As for Zen, its only advantage is its simplicity and the absence of rituals requiring membership in an "initiatory school." Not to mention the destruction wreaked by countless sects, beginning with the Theosophical Society and its various offshoots and splits, that led generations of Western "spiritualists" down dead ends, if not into the worst deviations. Meyrink knew them. In his youth, he was involved with the Theosophical Society and spiritualism.
He soon abandoned the former and was horrified by what he saw in the spiritualist sessions, which he frequently attacks in his novels, especially in the chapter of The White Dominican entitled "The Face of Medusa." Meyrink himself experienced the closure of initiatory paths in the West. He was, of course, familiar with Hebrew Kabbalah, practiced some form of Hinduism, and was also familiar with yoga techniques.
ExcluirEvola emphasizes that his themes were close to the Hindu doctrine of anâtmâ, which denies the existence of a self in the human being. This doctrine was incorporated into early Buddhism, and Evola quotes a fragment from The Green Face: "Do you believe that all those who are walking these streets right now possess a self? They possess nothing. They are possessed at every moment by a phantom that plays the role of a self in them." Freeing oneself from this “ghost of the self” is the goal of all initiatory doctrine and is almost obsessively present in Meyrink's work, constituting the core of The White Dominican and The Golem.
Meyrink, disillusioned by the various initiatory systems that were either degenerate or that reached Europe in poor conditions of transmission, or that were simply true caricatures of doctrines (Theosophy, Neo-Rosicrucianism, and occultism in general), decided to develop his own system, giving it coherence and homogeneity. This system is present in his novels and is what the "last Evola" in Riding the Tiger (1966) calls "autonomous paths to transcendence," something that René Guénon considered a heresy. Thus, Meyrink's works contain a true initiatory method and cannot be read as simple imaginative stories, more or less brilliant and more or less literary perfect, but rather their transcendent and transfiguring dimension must be perceived.
ExcluirThe technique Meyrink uses to convey this knowledge is to create a harrowing atmosphere (the Prague ghetto in The Golem and the "house of the last lamppost" in its final chapters), the aristocratic baron's residence where the protagonist lives in The White Dominican, the Green Childer's Hall of Mysterious Items in The Green Face, etc. He then creates an almost dreamlike or completely dreamlike plot, alternating chapters in which the novelistic plot progresses with others where he takes the opportunity to establish the foundations of his initiatory theory.
ExcluirThe latter are inseparable from the former; it is impossible to understand the outcome of his novels without considering the theoretical contributions, which are, moreover, perfectly integrated into the narrative.
Post script
ResponderExcluirDe cartas de GUENON a EVOLA
April 18, 1949
Excluir"For my part, since I was 22 or 23 years old, I have been associated with initiatory organizations, both Eastern and Western, you can see from this that the supposition you are considering could not be applied to me in any way."
(...)
The parodic and caricature-like manner in which (Gustav Meyrink) has frequently presented this information gives a truly sinister impression (it is regrettable that I cannot tell you by letter all the difficulties I have had in repairing certain evil consequences of his Green Face); moreover, his connections with the Bô Yin Râ school (...) are certainly not a very favorable indication either."
(...)