Fourth Book: Sunfall
XLII.
Archeological memory: it is most painful to know one can’t go back in historical momentum, and things which are dead, are gone. Reading the Bible leaves me shell-shocked and mute: grim brutality of Old Testament, prophets and laws, thundering and quaking coming down upon ants, and the New Testament, its stylistic, poetic flairs, a compendium of the greatest of Greek minds, a culmination of centuries of Greek-like sentiments spreading, from the age of Alexander, only to culminate in the New Testament, a Greek overcoming even of Mt. Olympus, concealing God, Zeus, “originating principle,” Alfa and Omega, beyond exploration, perhaps knowing that over time Mt. Olympus became a mere hill, after the first climber hoping to meet the Gods came back down disappointed, telling the thinkers how there is nothing up there but shrubs and eagles. Even reading the Bible today is no longer a revelation, and Tertullian’s “credo quia absurdum,” his belief because it is impossible echoes in us as emptiness of any possible act of such disbelief, since for us only the concrete, verifiable is an act of faith or belief…the Bible is read as a wonderful series of allegorical teachings in the same manner Greek gods became symbols of natural powers and their humanization. The last remaining active force is demonic, malevolent, conspiratorial something, it is no longer Hades, no longer Hell, but an active sense the world is once more malevolent and must be purified with a sacrifice. Reading how we “drink Christ’s blood”, how he offers us his flesh as a sacrificial lamb—a Greek-Judaic, classical sentiment, of heifers and white bulls, dragged in front of an idol or monument and bled out. It becomes impossible not to perceive the greatest artistic forgery ever achieved: greatest of men, debating and arguing over which books have the greatest of artistic, philosophical, literary merit to become a creation of a new faith: apocryphal gospels, heretic texts, sect-like hallucinations are to be eliminated through Greek-like capability of impersonal thought and categorization—how much more would apocryphal writers despair if they knew what it meant to become a part of the compendium of books known as The Bible!
XLIII.
To sufferers of obsolete pain: you come to accuse mankind of savagery, you despise organized religions, you proclaim them unfit for existence that had courage to struggle in their time, you who has abandoned any struggle in your era. Approaching near-sentient wit with your modern education and looking back, you happen to know it is all wrong, as if they have to answer to you, and your pettiness appearing to you as the most rational of agreements, even if you lash out at diseases of this age, even if you decry “tyranny” and “injustice,” completely unconscious all your agreements are for everyone to agree to submit to you. But, what have you suffered, you sufferer of ancient pain? Why does it matter to you to suffer such desires? I tell you—you and me are a chronological dead-end. Our suffering is not sacrificial enough, and we have no capability to become Buddhists: abandon the notion it would temper you. In time you would come to accuse them of not worshipping suffering which you now go against for occurring. In order to stop injustice, you become bloodthirsty…the modern liberal is becoming bloodthirsty. Modern humor—one third mirth, one third cruelty, one third savage destruction…?
XLIV.
Rotten meaning: that which is below you, corpses of many centuries are now felt as strangled beneath a heavy mound of desolation, no longer slumbering to awaken and the dead have died a second death, and their Heaven has likewise burned down, only to be consumed. What you don’t expect, however, is that those “wicked relics” of a once ferocious religion must also come to disappear: this is an age of disappearance of churches. Who knows how many will be left at the end of this century? You would seek to preserve them as some kind of pub, or some kind of a lecture-hall, only to discover that without believers they are too costly, and you either must tax the entirety of population or remove them to make room for shopping malls, apartment blocks, and suddenly your desire to overcome superstition turns you superstitious in a different sense: that you wish to abuse a collection of stones that have lost their purpose and must come down sooner or later because otherwise, your old age would become a haunting, sentimental memory of greatness which was thoroughly demolished. I tell you: most certainly, you will come to witness Cathedrals become Mosques or banks, or temples of a new learning, only to understand a nonbeliever of a monotheistic faith is still different than an atheist of a new faith. Prepare yourself for a day there will be no church graveyards! For what was to be protected was the seat of the soul which would come to life – an Islamic sentiment is different. The body is done for; there is no return to this Earth. Ah, Greeks, you most cunning of masters! Invigorating us with deepest hope that we will return to this life as we were! In full strength, somewhere around thirty, and our reward would be to butcher a fallen mankind, our revelation blood and shrieks of unrighteous. This is no mere reincarnation—you don’t return in an endless cycle, oblivious of a different life before this one: it is a thorough rebirth of yourself in waking life, once more action, blood, sweat, flesh and desires. Now, we must dream a different calamity—that there will be no return of us as we are, for all time. At best, one can claim some spirit endures but barely. The atheistic adoration of Buddhism (I speak of Westerners) is much more an aesthetic fascination with an intellectual religion-creed—one needs mental capabilities to achieve some kind of Nirvana or understanding everything is an illusion: they assume Buddhism is an intellectual’s religion. We can’t however like ancient Russians go around the world picking and choosing a faith: temples are not in full glory but beyond salvation.
XLV.
Righteous sentiment: our suffering in this world might come to mean we are not righteous, or that it is not purposeful as before, only proof of our stupidity. Suffering without meaning, especially in art and philosophy is waiting to emerge. Those who were once optimistic about progress are now swaying on wild currents, between hysteria over going back in time, or going into a new dark age, lashing out from this sentiment not even sensing it is precisely which they shame in others: a metaphysical bloodlust, a desire to have new local mythologies and meaning. Observing historical periods and political swings exhausts us; we decree a compassionate or enlightened humanity only to be disappointed come dawn. In such circumstances our psychology turns on the nearest enemy—an American in Belgrade is always amused how he walks freely through a country his nation bombed while natives are bickering across plots with neighbors. If they had to observe a meaningless suffering would they go insane? Americans already ran out of people to offer enlightenment and political salvation. What to do? Turn on one’s neighbors…
XLVI.
Perfection of entertainment: it is incredible how much modern humanity invests in entertainment and how perfected is that entire system. Watching Game of Thrones, I am always amazed that a surface of an entire planet had to be used in order to still dullness and repetitive nausea of this age and I noticed that as societies are nearing culmination, means of entertainment become sophisticated to a point of absolute perfection, only lacking something which gave everything before certain naturalness. Same with The Witcher, another show Americans made—older classics now appear almost silly and errors are easily perceived but much more forgiven than today. This humanity always dreams about variables of this world which comes to slander this reality. It is a difference between late Romans, masters of the world, who have reduced imperial management to taxation, legions, and literary achievements and early Gothic cathedrals—heavy, filled with haste and desire, a certain rawness of an emotion which is good enough. For them the world is much more of an interesting backdrop. Today, people have grown so tired of living they count even the smallest of errors online, or have incredibly complex discussion over “what-if” of a show that is perfected to a point of soullessness. Movies from earlier periods all have in them a certain assumption they will not give people a reason to live another day. I even heard, in passing, two young men discussing: “Listen; of course I won’t kill myself. How can I kill myself before playing the latest video-games?” And this was considered the first topic for proving life is worth living! These simulated emotions, however, can only amuse us for a short while—playing a video game these days makes one confront silence, and a sense of pointlessness creeps in, when you ask yourself without asking: “What am I doing?” The perfect simulation of a fabricated reality grows boring. Americans, now bored even with Netflix and Hollywood, also keep up with Japanese animation, Korean game-shows and Chinese soap-operas as we all do. Everyone finds their own dull, fabricated product through which he discovers reality is no longer enough. A strange victory—of fantasy over science-fiction—shows modern humanity has grown tired of something. People used to dream about new horizons which are incomprehensible in a technical sense: now they long for heroic sagas and a certain brutal callousness, a romantic nothingness. What was lost was pleasure in ordering and dominating this here reality, structuring it so that one is amused even with voting, being a judge, a soldier, a statesman, that is, to make errors in this here reality which others would fiercely debate and reason for or against, in a higher sense of life as entertainment good enough, perhaps best of all. Old American movies were made as a cheap thrill, as entertainment for people with families and homes, and children that really should sit still. New American movies are made almost as meaning, or to relive a great experience. This new humanity is not sentimental…perhaps Derrida was right with his hauntology. Old apparitions—of ideal 1980s and 1990s or any other period comes to haunt us as something we long for.
XLVII.
Slumbering towards ruin: I am already tired and I barely begun. Dawn greets me and I have nothing to focus in this age of culmination, this in scale greatest and most self-important, an age which has already managed to suppress entire centuries into a few political battles for or against liberty, economic uplifting…a new Roman system has emerged, like old Latifundia of wealthy Romans—once everything goes up, monocultures emerge—in food production, in construction, in expected behavior. We must admit we are still playing around with technical capabilities of rapid development: a factory or a school, even an official building, now needs barely years or months to be constructed. This gives us an illusion we can skip ahead in time, perhaps even reach a time when human longevity goes even further…above our heads lies an artistic possibility undreamt of before: open, endless space for conquest and glory, introducing a most dangerous comparison with Earthly life, that it is now thoroughly provincial, an entire surface of a planet made into a petty squabble of well-off families and their poorer neighbors as their descendants roll their eyes…if it turns out that a cosmic frontier shall never emerge and that we are stuck, here, with each other, until the Sun burns out or we despoil Earth beyond repair, shall we come to a new worship of calamities which are now cosmic in scale, a true death of Earth itself, plunged into this growing sense of political and cultural irritation which sporadically bursts out in spiteful opposition, intellectual bloodlust in “making the past own its mistakes”, only to end up as warlords of a new culture. A culture which will look up, no longer as a possibility but as a calamity. Who will calm down a furious science-worshipper, a man who was promised through philosophers and artists a new dawn which will be unlike anything before if it turns out this dawn was in fact, dusk, and his dusk?
XLVIII.
Jealousy of ages to come: every person born today feels as if they have missed the only chance to become physically immortal: almost everyone has a weak assumption that, if scientific development continues as usual, a true first generation of perhaps Christ-like men, “Engoddened” men will emerge and from this sentiment do worshippers of scientific research yell out, roaring: “Quickly! Our time is coming to an end! Death with every year comes closer and fulfillment is so close if you only reached out a hand! More funding for research, more space-flights, more reason!” This emotion appears strongest in America, and weakest here: honestly, we could care less…I am not sure why. But to them the notion they will get stuck here, perish, and repeat even a good life, endlessly, produces out of them political demons who seek to overcome which can’t ever be conquered: Death. Now, however, since you no longer can dream of an afterlife of immortality, the very possibility it might emerge in two centuries time (how short! And how vast of a chasm!) makes the active nihilist, a scientific-worshipper of ages to come and all who work on building a new humanity, through liberal politics, progressing towards eternal bliss on this earth and in this life, restless. They shall become saints (they believe) at least, of a new era, remembered fondly, in opposition to those who crippled mankind. In order to make haste do they appear slow, in comparison to Asians, who slowly building up their wealth, emerge at the pinnacle, believing they will be here, again, as a different person in a different life. Americans, in order to fulfill a democratic planet, begin making political mistakes… don’t hasten to this new dawn. Dusk like mine shall greet you. A society which has lost all practical means of ordering life, amazed by only highest delusions.
XLVIX.
Imagined barbarians strike best: the Turks are up to something hilarious—while Arabs, Muslims and Islam are considered new barbarians or something in Europe, Turks made a movie about a great historical battle between Serbs and Turks in 1389 and it is glorious…our king drinks wine from a human skull! Turks as the enlightened rulers coming to greet a barbaric mass of cruel savages! Brilliant!
L.
To worshippers of warlords: you decree a desire for new strength, complaining about a loss of pride and spirit, longing for a new barbarism, thunderously chirping how might is right without understanding you are incapable of enduring such circumstances for even a day, let alone years and decades. Shall I tell you, then of these “mighty barbarians?” What about ripped off heads nailed on a wooden pike and tied with barbed wire, mass fields of corpses covered with lime in order to rot faster, rape camps, death camps, competitions in hunting men when they are let out on a field and shot at, drunken bouts of wild ferocity, shooting at shaking peasants, skinning of captured soldiers? What about a head-lamp? My father once spoke about YNA soldiers who used to carry a strange trinket—they would behead an enemy soldier, drill his skull or open a circle, pull out the brain and put a flashlight in the same manner ancient Celtic tribes used to bring out heads of their enemies as a conversation piece. What about killing off helpless elders stuck in a nursing home as occurred somewhere in Croatia? What about a field of bloated corpses of, some say, Albanians, which were carried down the river, emerging from a truck the soldiers sunk and blew up, thinking flesh would sink down? Strong against the weak, weak against the strong, cunning in defeat, shameful in victory are your warlords. “This is not what I desire and, these are your faults, not mine, our warlords would be unlike you. After all—we are not savages or subhumans.” And that is precisely why you can’t ever come to know what I speak of. For all the things I write of happened for us recently and the people consider them a proper means of conducting warfare. I keep getting surprised by an incredible amount of bloodlust in this region – the amount of people that told me: “Well, if we didn’t kill them they would kill us! They protected us!” And this I heard not from youth which is impressionable but elders pretending to be wise. I observed their petty, worthless character, of petty tribal cretins counting themselves as herds of pigs. What about worshipping the worshippers? You would emerge out of it certain the Devil rules this region. And that is our salvation. Better for your society to die a decent death than live a devil’s bargain I believe. Here they are, these “majestic beasts” that said “Yes to life!” How petty and stupid they appear in comparison to the weakest of monks of Mount Athos, or a fiery believer of the past, how weak strength and its worship come out! I have discovered I have no desire to worship strength and warlords even if I have the same bloodlust coursing through me. And as it turns out, whips and chains and punishment Nietzsche said kills these types of beasts, weakening their vitality, is a great crime…truly, one must either be a romantic idiot or a fucking German which is about the same, to conjure up such artistic horseshit. Truly, he lived in a society of decent individuals…! Meanwhile, proper combatants, capable soldiery without petty charismatic thieves, like Americans, are slandered as “cowardly,” while Russians are called “brutal.” Well—if you desire warlords, why do you pick and choose like a woman on a fucking yard sale? Russians are too hard, Americans too soft, and we are insane, so you will mix a perfect concoction of your idealized warlord, who will be so majestic people will just magically submit to his great, overpowering charisma and clear superiority. Of course—otherwise, he wouldn’t be a “proper barbarian”. All worshippers of warlords ought to experience a single national bombardment and see people placing buckets on heads—buckets!—to come to senses. Your warlords are conniving, scheming cutthroats—your Vikings were a bunch of free-sailing bums going around pilfering monasteries like idiots, in the same manner roaming warlords of Balkans had their spoils—TVs, cars, house appliances, cash, gasoline and booze, with a little bit of local rape—your majestic conquering of women. “Do not compare our great masters of the seas to your backward hillbillies you savage!” Or what? We were already bombed once and half the people are ready for another round. We might not sail the seas, but on plains we roam and in mountains hide, and God help any of you romantics if you happen to meet us! Worship if you must strength, but overcome the need for such worthless masters—truly, an age of kings comes in blood. Blood of warlords.
LI.
The competence of barbarians: it is not brutality that makes them as such, but incompetence—for they above all still subsist on others for all art, weaponry, and culture and theirs is a culture of scrounging. And yet were these people, at their highest also, in a sense the most moral—no conquering “blonde beast” ever declared kin-slaying something desirable. The Scandinavians, Celts, Germanics, they passed through these regions, were birthed from this great middle land and, many things they were… but immoral they weren’t. One subsists on others out of a lack of choice, not as a great ideal: all these barbarians would regard their worship as ridiculous. Celts were talented in forging and smithing, Scandinavians developed a highly organized society and all of them worshipped not strength but seers—man with a different kind of strength. All covetous desire of barbarians goes towards this competence. To turn seers into conscious power, into—thinkers. And through this, they overcome the need for scrounging.
LII.
Boiling blood: this incredible irritation, which now erupts in flares of bloodlust and fires, from sporadic burning of cities of America, to constant displeasure with local and global affairs, down to protests, sanctions, exaggerated sense of suffering, is what we are up against or for. That sacrifice, of a man on a cross, has tempered mankind’s fury for two millennia, and now has it come to an end. Be wary of your displeasure! Learn to be humble and pleased when you don’t desire, in order not to greet dawn a changed man, emerging out of dusk fully awake with possibilities you will come to regret. True, we are being domesticated for a new age of technological enslavement, but sooner or later humanity shall once more grow tired even of its good sunset and shall greet a new night and this will be a time some of us will remember fondly.
LIII.
To flatterers of savages: “this breed if left alone will never be overcome in success—let us therefore cripple it best we can and in its crippling proclaim they can be as equal in savagery as their inferiors.” Ah, you flatterers and adulterers! Like a mother with a good son adopting some drifter, clothing him and feeding making her son feel embarrassed! After all, for a woman an ideal is “peace in our dwelling”: what is lacking is perhaps a man’s lack of care: he slaps all the same, and this stepson and son, inheritor and adoptee come to a silent agreement: “Let us not bicker anymore in front of him! Our mother’s love is heavy and makes us bicker and conspire against each other—but his hand is twice heavier!”
LIV.
A proper measure: your innards churn with a sense of disgust with this age, while your mind is in a constant fog of darkness made up of news, decline which can no longer be concealed, and a mad desire to not be land new dwellers will desire to be in. Even if you wish to chase them out, their wailing is seen on a camera which awakens your sense of right and wrong, even if your mind knows full well they will never stop coming. Thinker of dark thoughts! Know that even mighty seas are out of a good catch these days; wild forests are getting cleared in order to make room for monocultures for gruel and grazing cows; mankind has reached its greatest possible mass that even China can no longer feed its vast population locally. Don’t despair, for despair as a measure is not a proper response. What is this knowledge if not evil? To obsess over another man’s or another race’s coming dawn proves more detrimental than harshly adapting to new circumstances—Hitler was jealous of Russians, and his delusion was that Slavs shall one day flood every corner of Germany. In order to prevent a dawn which was not his to prevent, he crippled his people for all time. All slanderers of Christianity who regarded Islam as a manly religion only now feel the malice we felt for centuries they have for all nonbelievers, but even Islam shall not endure long this day and this age. Your mind shall predestine you to ruin, if you will not submit to a different kind of overcoming circumstances: to go back to unconscious life of family and home, nurturing a new generation. Would you see this as a living country? Half of Vienna now speaks local dialects of the Balkans—what does it matter? “He is most miserable of men.” I was told by a friend about an acquaintance. When asking the reason, I got a response: “Ah, the poor man had to emigrate from Ukraine to Serbia!”
LV.
Let us forget: a strong mind forgets more than it lets on, and even strong races and great periods. Otherwise, you would have known in Voltaire’s time how common were punishments such as cutting of nose and ears, hangings, plunder, and general mayhem and that bandits were frequent all throughout Medieval Ages. Having grown tired of compassion for individuals, compassion was for society—kill them all the same for there is a soul, then kill them again through Hell. In an age where children are rare have we assumed their form? Who is to say bandits are not writing poetry and their side of truth these days? As we have come to a point every life is worthy in saving, have we gifted away the peace of all societies. Forgetting their humanity might be a necessary overcoming of cruelty…
LVI.
To intellectual forgerers: I wonder if it is a fate of every man who begins to think to appear to himself as a charlatan, or a fraud, lonely and isolated, always worried over how he appears in eyes of others, for their conviction carries them forward, and in strength they see its consequences which would be certain political and cultural leanings, and in ugliness do they perceive for instance socialists or come to sense that, in order to be liberal, one must first be disgusting? But who gave us such thinking? Our observations lead us towards evil of a different kind, not prejudice, but knowledge that these prejudices confirm the rule more than the exception and with this do we must struggle. For if everything is mere repetition of these notions, what repeats itself, the knowledge or the outcome of such knowing? Must I always amount solely to strength? Never to a weakness different from my shell—a strong man’s philosophy, a younger breeds’ philosophy, must it always be cunning, must it always be sophists of Greece? What if one wishes to follow Aristotle but is a sophist? A nationalist on the outside, by decree, a liberal deep within by sentiments and anything between? What if one is a new beginning which is flawed and miserable, because it starts from nothing but a forgery? A gilded cathedral built by barbarian hands…?
LVII.
Exaggerations and sight: when your entire perspective is so far out of anything you would consider to be a proper perspective, when you glimpse that perhaps, for some reason, your reasoning in turn makes you appear unreasonable shall you attempt to overcome this flaw, only to discover it is not in your very nature to overcome it as it is you, as it is sight and in order to see you would have to turn yourself blind in a different sense. But what is this sense I couldn’t guess nor reason with for this is what overcoming a natural hurdle is like, a hurdle you aren’t meant to overcome as that which you are is formed through this limit and beyond this exaggeration begins a transformation you can’t even begin to comprehend, but still managing to see occasionally that you are stuck, on a stage of development which is almost biologically built-in and predestined… What to do if you are almost destined to be illogical to a point of determinism? What if that spiritedness, that barbaric spirit others long for tires you more than anything in the world…? What if you wish to see, for a single day, a world a great logician sees? Are we destined to be incomprehensible to each other and for what reason? Have I written a single word which is not an illusion of this mind? Am I blind to my character flaws perceiving them as strength? What if Nietzsche is right and I can only see a world my instincts allow me to see, a world of strong and weak? What if, if one had a choice, didn’t want to be any kind of Overman, a superior man, but something lesser, if that lesser man makes more sense? Do you see me as you see me?
Every single word I ever wrote…I come to deeply regret. No excuse for thinking…dusk greets me. I wish I never awoke!
***
For all installments of “Dusk: Thoughts on Moral Convictions — An Exercise in Submission, Forgery, and Petty Thinking,” click here.
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Edward Goodwin Moorcraft is a young man who likes to read simple horror stories and write them.
