West of The West

Who are to be informed?

The unformed, the shapeless, superficially differentiated but fundamentally undifferentiated mob, the post-modern blob, whose simulated identities are selected from pull down menu answers to pre-determined questions, void of any inherited identity, ignorant of any heritage, tradition, roots, values, value.

These are those Chesterton warns may become so open minded that their brains fall out, or who, given the absence of anything to believe in, will believe anything. These are creatures ripe for in-formation:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches and watches him.

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

This is the first page of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The child is formless. He knows not that his ancestors were known as hewers of wood and drawers of water and even if he did, he would not know the significance of this allusion to the ancient son, cursed for dishonoring his drunken, disgraced father. The child has a schoolmaster for a father who has neglected to teach him how to read. He lacks a knowledge of all things past, all things which created him. He knows not the names of Wordsworth or his own mother. Who will the child, the father of the man, grow to be? Who will form him, inform him?

These are quintessential American questions, especially the further one ventures west, further removed by not only time but physical space from the origin. Occidentalis ultimus. These, Captain White’s filibusters and the countless others of the formless, rootless archetype, have no business being on that land:

There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down an order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters.

They’ll stop you at the river, he says.

The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me?

At the river. Be told. They’ll jail you to a man.

Who will?

The United States Army. General Worth.

The hell they will.

Pray they will.

He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man?

Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye’ll not cross it back.

Don’t aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora.

What’s it to you, old man?

The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

Young, rootless, literally or figuratively illiterate men, recruited to “carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land” for want of anything else to do is a phenomenon foreseen by Nietzsche, observing in the midst of Old World decadence and on the brink of Europe’s collapse and self-destruction:

When I think of the craving to do something, which continually tickles and spurs those millions of young Europeans who cannot endure their boredom and themselves, then I realize that they must have a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deeds. Neediness is needed!” Hence the politicians clamor, hence the many false, fictitious, exaggerated “conditions of distress” of all sorts of classes and the blind readiness to believe in them. These young people demand that––not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster.

The Gay Science, Aphorism 56

Yet Nietzsche sees this demand for external enemies for what it really is: the unwillingness, above all else, to focus that vivacious energy within. Thus, he continues:

If these people who crave distress felt the strength inside themselves to benefit themselves and to do something for themselves internally, then they would also know how to create for themselves, internally, their very own authentic distress. Then their inventions might be more refined and their satisfactions might sound like good music, while at present they fill the world with their clamor about distress and all too often introduce into it the feeling of distress. They do not know what to do with themselves––and therefore paint the distress of others on the wall; they always need others! And continually other others! –Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

The Gay Science, Aphorism 56

Decades later, in truly Nietzschean fashion, Ernst Jünger lives out this rite of passage. After running away from his German bourgeoise home to join the Foreign Legion, Jünger  enlisted in the German army and served in the world’s first mechanized war. Emerging from that war a national hero and celebrity after the success of his memoir, Storm of Steel, he attempted to wrest Germany from both post-war nihilism and liberal mediocrity as a leader of the Konservative Revolution. After watching this movement degenerate into Nazism, Jünger turned his focus to cultivating an inner, impenetrable personal freedom, while also remaining a lucid observer of the final dismantling and destruction of the Old World and the technological forces emerging from America which were creating the new. His appraisal of the situation in America is startling:

Where automatism increases to the point of approaching perfection—such as in America—the panic is even further intensified. There it finds its best feeding grounds; and it is propagated through networks that operate that the speed of light. The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex. The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end—they provoke demonic contacts.

The Forest Passage

Jünger was particularly well situated to observe and report on the possibility of contacts between the restless, formless mob and the demonic. For it is precisely the demonic which moves in when the erstwhile edifice of meaning and truth has collapsed. It is precisely the demonic which emerges promising the meaning and significance to those who have been robbed of meaning and significance. This is Baudrillard’s recognition:

Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by  dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia),  can already be interpreted as the “irrational” excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a  “political aesthetic of death” at a  time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all  life, of the operationalization of all  social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in  the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn’t been a resistance to something much worse.  Fascism’s cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of  the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that.

Footnote to the essay History  in Simulacra and Simulation