Second Book: Slumbering at Dawn
XIV.
Disastrous consequences: comparing a single translation of, for instance, Collins Classics and any of our “classic” publishers (Laguna, Rech I Misao, Prosveta, etc.) leaves one devastated and uncomfortable, noticing the many typographic errors, misplaced letters, and the notion one becomes accustomed to, likewise, produce the same sense of despairing annoyance for others. The older the print, the worthier. Comparison of a same author in two different cultures—one is enjoying the small, make-shift work of translating and publishing, fixing up the background and prettying the stage, the other cares solely for the grandeur of the stage, the existence of it. Even the publisher carelessly plays around with antiques: from my collection of books by Collins Classics I can’t find a single error—I open the first page of any of our publishers and I observe with a certain humiliation, on the first page, a dozen errors. One gets used to disrepair, only to lose the capabilities to see it as worthy of discussion. Corrupting a text, or often misinterpreting it through explanations in order to assist the reader turns him into a subject, he who is meant to be most free, and the personal act of reading suspicious.
The mistakes of the future are coming to haunt us, mistakes we don’t have the courage to repeat.
XV.
Custom as survival: When tombs start getting painted with graffiti, and graves demolished in order to make more economic space do we recoil in horror, discovering that even the dead must be made useful. “He passes by, as if by a Turkish graveyard” goes the old saying: even the dead shall in time come to be replaced by a stronger breed if one is not careful as has occurred to us down south. For that is custom, applied, practical ritual, purposeful sentience: the living can battle even through their dead, and once the dead of a different culture overtake the old dead – certainly survival is no longer feasible for long. Where will dead French rest?
XVI.
To be seen as “dangerous”: To smile with your heart and not lips, comes out in people around us as an accusation, that we are dealing with a serious individual, a somber one, a person that shouldn’t be messed with, even if that person might consider themselves most harmless—something in them warns us and puts us off. This is especially troubling where others treat such a man with an almost constant anxiety, adding on to his silence or physique certain moral or intellectual qualities. Such a person begins to comprehend he is understood as dangerous even if he has no understanding of this himself and becomes almost an aristocratic individual out of perception, even if he couldn’t be anything farther. Or learns to smile submissively not to smile, but to reduce another person’s sense of danger. However, once he becomes conscious of this, every time he stops smiling, he begins to master people around him.
XVII.
Character as banishment: There are people who crack jokes, and are the center of attention in order to conceal or push out a deep sense of melancholy—comedians often have the unhappiest of childhoods. Their gestures and cadence are also a means of battle, for affection which they might lack. For them there is always a danger of plunging into acting the fool willingly since even this is better than to not be seen. On another hand, once solitary, these types often become the grimmest of characters, and most profoundly deep: for these are spirits, who couldn’t deal with isolation of their own character in public and will say one thing and think another. Almost terrified of lacking affection they begin to measure its production through themselves, and making others amused often brings them no amusement. Interestingly, their courage must be to miss their mark, to confront what fears them most—everyone gone silent.
XVIII.
Dangerous individuals: On the other hand there are people who still retain in themselves, without fully understanding, a capability to intimidate or appear as beyond approach: an individual formed out of such circumstances is in fact convicted to either go upwards or perish. If he successfully goes upwards he is greeted with confusion mixed with wonder, and if he falls down, a sense of “understanding” greets him—that he is what is most likely perceived. What happens with such individuals, what happens with those not mediocre out of necessity? For some mediocrity will be a desire, the ability not to be seen as harmful, to not have a potential differing from the one everyone assumes. For others, however, the need, and desire to crush and banish such an individual is absolute – his mix of qualities might prove to leap into greatness even through mediocrity. Since his mediocrity is nothing more than becoming more of an individual, becoming more, not less, comfortable with yourself: and once such a person becomes fully comfortable, it is released and will strive to achieve things we can’t comprehend.
XIX.
Spite as an immoral conviction: In any people that have started awakening themselves a certain furious thunder rests in all their waking life, a certain aesthetic irritation with superiority which is foreign and even if it is superior the people choose something inferior if it is theirs. With the accusation that they are prejudiced does their spite, not any comprehensible conviction, grows, for this spite is the desire to make one’s own laws and customs, to claim a new prophetic sight and historical outcomes unlike those prescribed—Islam emerged out of spite against an alien prophet: Mohammed is not just a prophet, but a prophet of blood revelation, that our blood, our creed, our way, chose itself as the proper way to be, similar to Russian messianic sentiments of the past.
XX.
Sickening the healthy: Amongst immature races and peoples, to fulfill political desires of others following their historical momentum, their conception of rise, growth, culmination and eternity—to end up in theirs “ideal outcome” introduces a new kind of traitor in a people: a traitor of foreign sentiments which nobody understands but wishes in order to make themselves mighty—it is as if Scythians, awed by Greeks, started writing plays without theatres of stone, in a place where there is no sunlight but only rainfall: in order to imitate Greeks badly, everyone must catch a cold. A man who would leave the theatre and those miserable circumstances has made an absolute choice—and must be killed or banished so that the imitation can proceed. Nietzsche, likewise, sickens the healthy: how much fascination is found in Serbia with Varangians and Germans, and Vikings! A Romantic fascination with heroes of a wildly different race goes so far that a local begins comparing a romantic fantasy with his historical ancestors declaring them worthless! Europe manages to seduce still, in strangest of ways—a barely civilized people like ours suddenly long for a different kind of barbarism which is felt as more “heroic”…meanwhile, we become the symbol of a criminal barbarian, one that is not “heroic”, one that is not “poetic”: by the same Europeans which made their ancient criminals great! In music, prose, petty fascination the Scythians are once more a great tremor of a waking nightmare…!
XXI.
Aesthetic immorality: That petty worship of strength, false, simulated brutality, nonsensical fascination with “blonde beasts” could only be made by a people already gone soft, and by a man who was barely a man in his time. Nietzsche is a man raised by women par excellence…tis petty heroism and fascination with barbarians, his hatred of weakness, compassion, morality is not a hatred of morality itself but of a women’s application of it: the poor man was clearly raised solely by women! All men under a heavy shadow of a woman long for strength and power, a certain carefree violence, growing tired of speech—the greatest moralist, the greatest of dialectic swindlers is one’s mother, aunts, and sisters. He will, in order to escape, to grow free and unrestrained begin to worship the outside of a man’s freedom, wanderlust, plundering and rapacious bloodlust. This is the sickest of ages because it is a woman’s age: an age of mothers without fathers and grandmothers without uncles, where any son is dragged around by a single mother which always has a few things to say: and the poor young man discovers there is no discussion since all women know best how to disarm, cripple men! He will try to shout and argue: she will look at him as if a fool or gaze at him hurt, he will try to prove a sensible point only to be proven callous or unreasonable. If he is driven to violence by such incapability to be understood as he means to, suddenly he is torn between a sadistic sense of power and overcoming his master, and a horrifying sense of breaking himself, and humiliating his manhood—men, he senses, are not supposed to fully care so much about the opinions of women. In his behavior will be found a pettiness of a woman which he will fear, despise or idealize. Not having a close encounter with men and a lot of them, he will begin to perceive them as the rugged outside women perceive: however, where any woman would grow irritated by not being heard, by a man’s callous disregard for her petty schemes, a young Nietschzean will see in this his own desire…they idealize barbarians in order to escape domestication by women! Every son raised solely by women becomes warped: twisted, sadistic, cruel, pettily conspiratorial, conniving, using his own suffering and morality as a weapon, the way a woman uses it, perceiving even strength, might, power, as something to regain not something he is born with. His hysterical nurture must lead him either to knowing women fully and despising them, as occurred with Nietzsche, or fleeing from them in a deep solace, even if every bodily urge calls out to him to come back. And the accusation which comes against them is one which they can’t go against: namely, that they can’t be pleased. Just like a young mother can’t comprehend the revulsion her slowly maturing son begins to feel against her—she has given him “everything”, she has “sacrificed” herself for her, never understanding she gave him “nothingness,” and her sacrifice was in fact stripping him of manhood, because she “knows” what he wants and the best way to achieve this. One sees them all across the planet—young men dragged around by mothers who are in their own world without noticing their offspring’s crooked, bent down backs, calling their silence, loss of all active powers, “calmness”, talking about him, how this is “my son, so and so”, forcing him to put on a smile and this time, play the role of a “good son”, not a man, but a permanently crippled idiot. A woman’s greatest fury comes when a man waves her away—she huffs and puffs, furious over being considered annoying only to come back with a wave of accusations, which always come down to her sacrifice, her toil, how much she struggles and so on. In time, such sons will most likely become eternal bachelors or second choice fathers…dreaming of wild, open plains, unrepentant malice, focused, willed acts of any kind, which rise in importance as they grow more silent, most dangerous of men, who consider willed cruelty to others a man’s character—this arose out of their exterior being a man’s and their interior being a woman’s! It is the most miserable of enslavement… passing through a park, I saw a young man sitting on a bench and some woman towering over him, yelling at him: “How are you not ashamed? Huh? Is that what I deserved?” and so on. The young man’s head was down, his hands clasped and his mother was enjoying herself, regaling us with his “re-education.” Our eyes met and I saw such animalistic hopelessness, a sense of entrapment with no way out, knowing full well he could never explain himself, reason with her, debate, shout, argue, bicker. And, when he looked at that woman I saw in his eyes such malice, concentrated hatred mixed with shame that I knew this creature, too, will be broken down, become silent, and become “a good son”. I meet men who regard women as the object of greatest disgust and terror daily—everything prettied up by women in turn produces silent men. In culture, in music, in poetry, in philosophy—a woman will always feel personally insulted if she is an editor so the last creative types seem to be impotent men and tyrannical women. This is the perfect coupling of democracy: the impotent man loathes women, no doubt, but also seeks to undermine any man with callous disregard for women’s trifles, fully undergoing a woman’s moral sense of right and wrong, and the tyrannical woman, which used to huff and puff, now blackmails all of society with her “endangerment”, haranguing all of society for a new decency, new laws and customs to make women feel safe and nurtured and “respected”. She goes around, seeking them out, those “men”, ruffians: with what pleasure does she recoil when men simply wave her off!
XXII.
For “valor!”: has it occurred to you Nietzsche only wrote for men? That his ideal reader is, clearly, a man and not a woman? That more and more, youthful literature, literature of the young is missing almost entirely female characters? As if it is a last escape? All great authors raised by women will not write a lot about them. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, was coddled to the point of practical incompetence: they appear as the strangest of creatures in his literature. Cosmic horrors make sense but a woman does not. Most Russian and Slavic authors had experiences with women: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Selimovic, Sholokhov, Gorky…Dostoevsky even had a large family! He even had the gall to make a dedicated woman a prize, waiting for a man! If you told any modern man: “A woman will wait for you.”—he would burst with laughter! There is his genius! It sounds more incomprehensible to a young man than the wildest of claims: a woman will wait for him! Reading aloud the Odyssey for my friends, my thinkers, they immediately begin grumbling whenever Penelope appears. Rolling their eyes, they say: “What nonsense!”, or they say: “You know why she waited for Odysseus? Because he was already the best man in Ithaca!”, or would say: “A woman only waits for warlords and kings—a mediocre man gets replaced!” Even if I try to reason, they lash out: “No! We already know the outcome is false…! It can only be true for greatest of men!” Another one interjected: “For Penelope, choosing a different man would be marrying down! There is no greater sense of shame for a woman! Disdain they have for mediocrity is as high as the heavens! Odysseus was simply the best catch, and a woman would rather not give herself at all than sell herself for cheap! That’s a woman’s pride…” I asked: “What is to be done then?” The response was: “One must become Odysseus!” “And if one can’t become Odysseus?” I asked, and one fellow interjected: “Better not to court Penelope.”
XXIII.
Worshippers of leisure: muddleheaded intellectuals, with all manners of “liberation”, glorifying their ideal life, which is passive, sitting around doing nothing but reading instead of working has resulted in disgruntled workers who were shaken awake to the fact they are “unhappy”, since a sentiment of their unhappiness is intellectual fulfillment of merit which of course they can’t have. Do I make sense to you? Here – for the lazy. Through worship of leisure, excessive worship, one becomes incompetent. Loss of capabilities to be a mute slave, a dumb oaf for a decade or two turns one into a failed individual, a collective pseudo-individual, persuaded there is nothing more demeaning than labor, begins to proclaim his individuality, his free time as some purpose of life, as if he will achieve greatest of wonders if he just has all the time for himself. In reality, he begins slumbering, loosens up his human qualities and mere passing of time turns into ticking of the clock. Completely isolated and alone, this worshipper of self-pleasuring is smarter he believes, since there is only this one life so why not use it? In time everything they loved grows to sicken: video games, books, pornography, women, even their own constant presence which is inescapable. Waking, somnambular consciousness’ turns everything into torment: missing the chance to become slaves first in order to emerge freemen second, or servants to masters, enslaved by chance crumble down into fear… even going out for a beer, alone, becomes shameful for them, and going out to find work difficult. They reach 30 or 40 without a day of work, these strange new apparitions… yet, their life, instead of being leisurely, is frighteningly isolating and no person fears old age as they do.
XXIV.
Critique of mothers: which great ruler has not killed his father and spared his mother, I often asked myself? Which one of us needs a solitary life? Life without women is ashy and dry, giving us a sense of pathetic failure as we have approached this era where once more, solitary, silent deaths greet us, and a new kind of monastic men emerge not out of desire but necessity, lack of any other option: take pity, oh women! That which is hardest is often easiest to smash!
XXV.
Spirit and character: a Serbian is by definition an exaggeration, filled with the wildest of desires and ideas which lash him through, most incontinent man, with no consistency whatsoever for whom politics is the sweetest of desires since in it he finds his capability to blabber, exaggerate, proclaim petty provincial wit as some historical wisdom… Forbid politics! Twenty years of censorship, of maturation would be required to even have a single thought come out of their thick heads! From famous Serbs you couldn’t scrounge up a single mediocre German, or a worthless American: half-baked men through and through, we are however loudest, and even for me the incapability to think impersonally, is sometimes almost crippling: we adopt all political fashions first, only to miss all philosophical discoveries. Or we confuse the two, seeking to overcome a necessary gestation through a simulated decree – one hears in this country an incessant need to “preserve national heritage”, to preserve “the national spirit”, “safeguard language and customs”, and any outsider’s first question is always why is everything in disrepair? Why are your castles and buildings rotting away, why do you strangle youth with the need to put on a national uniform (as if that will make one suddenly sprout in wisdom!), why do you fear labor without an echo?
XXVI.
Spiteful animosity of Serbs to development: in all of Europe you will not find more pig-headed, stubborn, incapable to listen to their faults, people: it is almost a point of pride, this spite of ours, we celebrate it in poems and culture, this spite of a former slave which is most crippling once a society becomes free since we seem to perceive every agreement as a kind of submission, or a loss of power. Think about our incapability to make philosophical reason: all third-rate cultures have the appearance of an exotic culture, which is to say, a half-mute, mumbling political brothel filled with shouts and curses where everyone is going around, moving chairs and smashing tables. First, we have such eternal Romantics who wax poetically about a nation of historical losers, accusing others of being traitors, as if not wanting to lose a debate, an argument, a war, a struggle, is in fact a mark of a suspicious man…entirety of culture deciding to lose, pre-destined to come out weaker out of haste, out of thick-headed, mule-like, pseudo-philosophical nonsense! After them come the historical Realists who instead of observing time chronologically forward, observe it going backward so that all the territories we have lost will come back to us, as is logically consistent and just! Just! A complete mental confusion over proceeding of time which is not mere provincial politics, with no clue of anything beyond, everything either wears their mark or is proclaimed irrelevant! Third, we have the “Humanists”, whose sole idea is to be spiteful to the spiteful: if a man claims this or that novel is good, his opponent will claim not only is it bad but the person who wrote it is either immoral or without any talent. The opposite of a nationalist in this country is not a liberal, but a nationalist of a different country: our “opposition” goes to Washington and demands from a different country to sanction their own. Out of spite that the nationalists won this or that election they go even to our enemies offering them our heads on a plate, wildly exaggerating our circumstances so the foreigners will come to believe a new Mussolini is rising, or a new Stalin. This incomprehensible malice, this spite – to starve themselves out of spite! And the nationalists also win an election out of spite of the electorate, as a big middle finger to “improvement!” “No improvements for us thank you very much…! We are perfect as we are but, since you tried, not only will I demolish everything I will ensure nothing ever grows.” This sick sentiment is now found even in the greatest of nations: in Americans, French, Germans, in Westerners. Even liberals are carried by this spiteful opposition to development, if this development they perceive as personally insulting: I wouldn’t be surprised if they welcomed Chinese (or communist) or Russian (or nationalist) domination out of spite to their “great” opponents. This sentiment of a vassal has stunk up liberalism, even human decency and compassion: you will get precisely what you hate the most and a sick, twisted glee, going around the world gossiping over a petty victory emerges. Twisted, broken characters of spite will bring about the downfall of Europe: what matters if we perish if they perish first!
XXVII.
Behavior of Serbs towards decency: don’t long for a great overcoming! It will come whether you will it or not… loss of organizational capabilities where it appears the world has lost direction and we can’t reign in wild stallions of Helios is our own responsibility as we sought solely freedom and none of its harshness—an industrial worker, a peasant, is ten times more useful and required than a citizen today. It is through liberating them has an issue emerged, namely, that even in the countryside the youths long for a better life which was promised by all current philosophers. With what shock shall they discover one day they were happy! Tied to the land, enslaved to its great, majestic rhythms, occasionally birthing a great local spirit, endless and simple. We must learn to become unhappy, in order to regain senses of happiness, no longer to long for that which can’t be achieved without labor – a laboring philosophy has never been birthed in this country but only a done-deal philosophy, a philosophy of applied ideas—do this and that and everything will be done. Voting, democracy, economy, done. Write about the “peaks” which are in fact only mirages, as it appears that a “failed life” doesn’t produce a “great deed” anymore: in order to write of toil, one must toil—a few weeks in a factory makes any communist these days. Yet no workers are communists, only those whose hands are clean. A few encounters with voters persuades they shouldn’t even be allowed to think let alone speak. Then, for what reason do we pretend otherwise? This country isn’t worthy even of democracy, which is now the cheapest of merchandise…
***
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Edward Goodwin Moorcraft is a young man who likes to read simple horror stories and write them.
