web analytics
Categories
Axiology Catholic Church Christendom Deranged altruism Judaism Kali Yuga Kevin MacDonald Liberalism Neanderthalism New Testament Old Testament Porphyry of Tyre Psychology Revilo Oliver Universalism

Gospel Fictions

It seems to me that the etiology of Western malaise is more complicated than what the average nationalist has imagined. While reading MacDonald’s first trilogy study on Jewry I thought that the etiology was, at least, threefold.

First: the hardware. As MacDonald and many others have pointed out, whites “have some unique characteristics such as individualism, abstract idealism and universal moralism” that are apparently genetic (precisely the characteristics that presently are being exploited by the tribe).

Second: the software. If the above is a problem in the hardware (something like whites being wired the wrong way when dealing with other races), these hardware characteristics were augumented after a Catholic cult, which means “universal” including all ethnic groups in the world, took over the Roman Empire.

Third: the virus. Paradoxically, once Christianity starts to be abandoned by the white people, our universalist-individualist-idealistic frame of mind, taken to its ultimate logic naturally results in liberalism, a “virus” of the mind operating within the white psyche.

If our diagnosis of the West’s darkest hour is correct, then the Jewish Problem is an epiphenomenon of the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values. (Proof of it is that Muslims don’t allow the suicidal empowerment of Jews in their nations.) It also means that both our hardware wiring and our Judeo-Christian software must be understood before we can grasp the whys of the psycho-ethical structure that is preventing us from taking elemental action (e.g., disempowering the Jews). For the Christian that I was, and this is purely anecdotal (others may find different venues), the first step to understand the virus was starting to question the historicity of the gospel narratives.

Thus I typed many passages from Helms’ book in honor of Porphyry, the first man to write a prolegomena of what fifteen centuries later started to be called “higher criticism” of the Bible.

Categories
Ancient Greece Aryan beauty Beauty My pinacoteca

At the Gate of the Temple

Painting of the day:

John William Godward
The Priestess of Bacchus ~ 1898

Categories
American civil war Audios Blacks Conservatism Emigration / immigration Mainstream media

“Once Obama amnesties those wetbacks…”

Rarely do I follow the news in this blog. But the recent Supreme Court decisions against Arizona and for ObamaCare—the Old United States no longer exists: those decisions were the final nail in the coffin—remind me Harold Covington’s scolding of coward conservatives:


Note of May 12, 2015: The thoughtpolice at YouTube censored this clip.

Categories
Ancient Greece Beauty My pinacoteca

In the Days of Sappho

Painting of the day:

John William Godward
In the Days of Sappho ~ 1904

Categories
American civil war Christendom Deranged altruism Judeo-reductionism Kevin MacDonald Liberalism Slavery

“There is NOTHING wrong with us”

Monocausalism is the simplistic notion that all of our issues are to be laid on the feet of Jews, that “there is NOTHING wrong with us” as the commenter Helvena put it this year at Age of Treason.

The problem with those who advocate the single-cause hypothesis of our current predicament is that they have not done their homework. Who in the movement can be more knowledgeable about the Jewish Question than Professor Kevin MacDonald? At The Occidental Quarterly when this printed, scholarly journal was under the watch of Greg Johnson (Vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 2008), MacDonald wrote (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs):


Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism provides a valuable insight into a nineteenth-century leftist intellectual elite in the United States. This is of considerable interest because Transcendentalism was a movement entirely untouched by the predominantly Jewish milieu of the twentieth-century left in America. Rather, it was homegrown, and its story tells us much about the sensibility of an important group of white intellectuals and perhaps gives us hints about why in the twentieth century WASPs so easily capitulated to the Jewish onslaught on the intellectual establishment.

Both New England and East Anglia (the center of Puritanism in England) had the lowest relative rates of private crime (murder, theft, mayhem), but the highest rates of public violence—“the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches.” This record is entirely in keeping with Calvinist tendencies in Geneva.

The legal system was designed to enforce intellectual, political, and religious conformity as well as to control crime. Louis Taylor Merrill describes the “civil and religious strait-jacket that the Massachusetts theocrats applied to dissenters.” The authorities, backed by the clergy, controlled blasphemous statements and confiscated or burned books deemed to be offensive. Spying on one’s neighbors and relatives was encouraged. There were many convictions for criticizing magistrates, the governor, or the clergy. Unexcused absence from church was fined, with people searching the town for absentees. Those who fell asleep in church were also fined. Sabbath violations were punished as well. A man was even penalized for publicly kissing his wife as he greeted her on his doorstep upon his return from a three-year sea voyage.

Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.

Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins—perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as defined by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter. Altruistic punishment refers to punishing people even at a cost to oneself. Altruistic punishment is found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups, such as Jews, based on extended kinship.

Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. Puritan moral fervor and punitiveness are also evident in the call of the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York during the Second World War for “exterminating the German people… the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.”

It is interesting that the moral fervor the Puritans directed at ingroup and outgroup members strongly resembles that of the Old Testament prophets who railed against Jews who departed from God’s law, and against the uncleanness or even the inhumanity of non-Jews. Indeed, it has often been noted that the Puritans saw themselves as the true chosen people of the Bible. In the words of Samuel Wakeman, a prominent seventeenth-century Puritan preacher: “Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem. They had left Europe which was their ‘Egypt,’ their place of enslavement, and had gone out into the wilderness on a messianic journey, to found the New Jerusalem.”

Whereas Puritanism as a group evolutionary strategy crumbled when the Puritans lost control of Massachusetts, Diaspora Jews were able to maintain their group integrity even without control over a specific territory for well over 2,000 years. This attests to the greater ethnocentrism of Jews. But, although relatively less ethnocentric, the Puritans were certainly not lacking in moralistic aggression toward members of their ingroup, even when the boundaries of the ingroup were expanded to include all of America, or indeed all of humanity. And while the Puritans were easily swayed by moral critiques of white America, because of their stronger sense of ingroup identity, Jews have been remarkably resistant to moralistic critiques of Judaism.

With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America.

The lesson here is that in large part the problem confronting whites stems from the psychology of moralistic self-punishment exemplified at the extreme by the Puritans and their intellectual descendants, but also apparent in a great many other whites. As I have noted elsewhere:

Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms… are punished by altruistic aggression.

The Puritan legacy in American culture is indeed pernicious, especially since the bar of morally correct behavior has been continually raised to the point that any white group identification has been pathologized. As someone with considerable experience in the academic world, I can attest to feeling like a wayward heretic back in seventeenth-century Massachusetts when confronted, as I often am, by academic thought police. It’s the moral fervor of these people that stands out. The academic world has become a Puritan congregation of stifling thought control, enforced by moralistic condemnations that a seventeenth-century Puritan minister could scarcely surpass. In my experience, this thought control is far worse in the East coast colleges and universities founded by the Puritans than elsewhere in academia—a fitting reminder of the continuing influence of Puritanism in American life.

The main difference between the Puritan New Jerusalem and the present multicultural one is that the latter will lead to the demise of the very white people who are the mainstays of the current multicultural Zeitgeist. Unlike the Puritan New Jerusalem, the multicultural New Jerusalem will not be controlled by people like themselves, who in the long run will be a tiny, relatively powerless minority.

The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans won’t be around to witness it.


Postscript

At Occidental Dissent, today Hunter Wallace also liked MacDonald’s article:

Kevin MacDonald has an excellent essay on Counter-Currents about the Yankee Question. This is too good to pass up.

Note: MacDonald has never been a Single Jewish Causer. He could easily write an entire book on the radical utopian movements of the nineteenth century (abolitionism, civil rights, pacifism, “strongminded womanism,” Unitarianism, Free Loveism, Shakerism, Fourierism, Transcendentalism, etc.) that plunged America into racial and cultural decline and laid the foundation for their destructive successors in the twentieth century.

(Read MacDonald’s entire article here.)

Categories
Ancient Greece Beauty My pinacoteca

In the Peristyle

Painting of the day:

John William Waterhouse
In the Peristyle ~1874

Categories
Judeo-reductionism

An exchange at TOO on monocausalism

Luke said…

“Our problem is us, not the Jew. The Jew is weak in and of himself, for he is totally dependent on his White slaves performing outside their character. He has only the strength we give him.” —Franklin Ryckaert

This sounds suspiciously like a Jared Taylor style proclamation. May I suggest that the TOO [The Occidental Observer] readers, and Brother Ryckaert visit this link and peruse what the blogger Tanstaafl has coined “The Suicide Meme” and what Tanstaafl’s views are of those who push it?

http://age-of-treason.blogspot.com/2010/05/suicide-meme.html

Incidentally, I would be last White to try to deny that there exists an incredible amount of White racial cowardice throughout the vast majority of the non-White Nationalist, still asleep, White community. I have seen this disgusting cowardice up-close, and it is truly sickening to behold.

However, I do not support the idea of letting the jews off the hook for the mess we find ourselves in today. For those so inclined, would they also make excuses for a doctor whose patient just kept getting sicker and sicker, the longer the doctor handled the patient’s health care?

These “sick” and racially gutless Whites that most of us on TOO encounter in our lives—are the way they are, because of jewish media brainwashing, which is reinforced via academia, via our treasonous anti-White alien hijacked government and via just about every major area of our jewish corrupted society. Their only real fault was not being immune to jewish spider venom, the way most on TOO readers seem to be.

I encourage all TOO readers to review Tanstaafl’s “Suicide Meme” and absorb its implications and message. I found it to be excellent.

Franklin Ryckaert said…

Luke, this discussion about the question of “guilt” is going on Carolyn Yaeger’s new website The White Network in the comment section of the program “Are White Males Hooked on Weakness” with comments by me, Chechar and Tanstaafl himself. Tanstaafl blames everything on the Jews and even has asked Chechar whether he is himself a Jew or partly Jewish simply for suggesting that Whites might be partly responsible for their own predicament. On this latest developments, see Chechar’s website The West’s Darkest Hour article: “Are monocausalists Paranoid?”

My position is that Whites have some unique characteristics such as individualism, abstract idealism and universal moralism [emphasis added] that can be exploited by alien ethnocentric groups, especially in times of degeneration. This has to be understood by Whites themselves. Many however refuse to consider a change to White ethnocentrism. Of these Whites one could say that they are indeed suicidal. Even without Jews such Whites would fall victim to other ethnocentric groups. To fight the Jews we must be strong ourselves and that entails an honest taking stock of our own weaknesses.

Chechar said…

Re: “Our problem is us, not the Jew.” —Farnham O’Reilly

More important that the post you mention are my series of articles criticizing “monocausalism”. In one of them I advanced a definition of the JP: “The Jewish Problem is an epiphenomenon of the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values.”

Franklin Ryckaert said…

Chechar, Tanstaafl has reacted to your articles on his own blog Age of Treason on June 22, 2012. He seems not to understand.

The problem with Tanstaafl, who is definitely gifted in other respects, is that he is incapable to see the difference between guilt tripping (by Jews) and honest self-criticism (by Whites). He thinks that self-criticism by Whites is nothing but interiorized guilt tripping. Then he proceeds to proclaim the total innocence of Whites (as if that is possible): Jews are the only ones who are guilty of white decline, anyone who suggests that Whites have a responsibility of their own is telling a lie. He calls that the “suicide meme”.

Fact is that Jews cannot practise their destructive dominance without cooperation of Whites. Fact is also that Jews couldn’t exploit certain weaknesses of Whites if they didn’t have them in the first place. As for guilt tripping, Whites have committed crimes during their history. That cannot be denied. Only, their crimes are not unique to them.

Tanstaafl cannot think in terms of a combined causality, for him there can be only one cause: the Jews.

Chechar said…

I am afraid that you are right.

“There is NOTHING wrong with us”.

This is monocausalism in a nutshell: an actual quotation of a commenter in Tan’s site not long ago.

When you study the Whites’ ethno-suicidal tendencies in historical contexts sans Jews (e.g., how the Catholic Spaniards mongrelized their race in the Americas since the 16th century or how after Constantine the Romans destroyed the libraries of their Classic World—a “self-lobotomy” as Carl Sagan put it), we simply cannot claim that all of our issues are to be laid on the feet of Jews. I find it amazing that some people don’t want to see something so obvious.

Franklin Ryckaert said…

Yes, and people with such a self-righteous mindset tend to become paranoid. That is why he suspected you of being a Marrano. To his mind that could be the only explanation.

Carolyn Yeager said…

Franklin, you are misrepresenting Tanstaafl’s views. He is not a “monocausalist”. That is not his word or his position. That seems to be Chechar’s word for something he disagrees with. [Chechar’s note: In fact, Tanstaafl seems to subscribe to what commenter Helvena said in Tan’s blog: “There is NOTHING wrong with us”: a perfect definition of monocausalism by a “single Jewish causer” himself]

It would be correct to state that Tanstaafl’s main focus is on the Jews, not on white guilt or white faults. Tan has opened a lot of people’s eyes to the Jewish strategy and to Jewish interlopers. I can’t see that that has anything to do with paranoia.

Chechar, you quote Farnham O’Reilly as saying “Our problem is us, not the Jews.” That is supposed to solve everything? Because O’Reilly says it, it must be true? That is too simple. People are imperfect, including White people. Are Whites supposed to be perfect paragons of virtue, as you present yourself, in a way? Jews have taken advantage of White characteristics and right now hold ALL the power. White confidence needs to be built up, not torn down.

Franklin Ryckaert said…

Carolyn Yeager,

Tanstaafl may of course chose himself the subject he wants to concentrate upon. For him that is the JQ and he is doing a good job at that. I found especially his exposure of the insincere motives of so-called “pro-White” Jews like Lawrence Auster very clarifying.

But there are always two sides in a conflict. I never saw a conflict in which one side is totally “guilty” and the other side totally “innocent”. Whites do have their faults and weaknesses. They had better face it and try to mend their ways instead of always complaining being “victims”. That is not undermining self-confidence, it is strengthening of character.

Of course this is something different from the (mostly Jewish) “guilt tripping”, which is a psychological tactic to disarm Whites in order to make them accept their own dispossession. Guilt tripping, based on real, exaggerated or invented guilt is meant to destroy not to build.

Self-criticism is meant to restore. To point that out doesn’t mean that you are in the enemy’s camp.

Junghans said…

Very well stated Franklin, my sentiments as well. With all due respect to both Carolyn and Tanstaafl, (who I highly regard), the poisoning of the Anglo/White mindset is both internal and external, and that is what we need to recognize. This issue has been discussed before at this site, in an article by Kmac [Kevin MacDonald] about whether our genetic demise is ‘racial suicide’, or ‘assisted racial suicide’. The general consensus was that it was both. [emphasis added] The racial interlopers have discovered our foibles, and are ruthlessly compounding and exploiting them. The mega-question here is: finding the psychological key to unlocking these enigmatic, innate White racial character faults, and to come to grips with them.

Carolyn Yeager said…

“The racial interlopers have discovered our foibles, and are ruthlessly compounding and exploiting them.” —Junghans

That is exactly what I said.

“The mega-question here is: finding the psychological key to unlocking these enigmatic, innate White racial character faults, and to come to grips with them.”

This has already been done. But our White character is not something we need to, or can, change because Jews exploit it. We are good people and our character is important to who we are, and all that we have accomplished. What we should come to grips with is those who are exploiting this.

This “debate” over “monocausalism” as it’s being called, has only confirmed for me that we need to educate our people about the Jews much more than we need to blame ourselves and try to make ourselves better. I’m seeing that Tan is right when he says that this is just one more Jewish tactic to take attention off themselves.

You, for example, want to spend time and energy looking for a “psychological key” to unlock our faulty nature in order to fix ourselves. A fool’s errand. However, if you’re talking about ridding ourselves of homosexuality, pornography, alcoholism, drug addiction, sex addictions, and other such vices, I’m for that. But who injects these vices into our societies? Let’s start with getting rid of them.

Junghans said…

Carolyn Yeager: A Fool’s errand? Hardly. Please re-read what Franklin wisely wrote, and calm down a bit.

Studying our own people’s nature is essential in understanding who we are, how we think and how to enlighten and motivate our alienated folk. In my experience, considering the apathetic White people that I encounter daily, and the greater historical experience, I’d say that we face a titanic struggle in trying to save these credulous, intellectually toxified people from themselves. Why, indeed, have they foolishly let themselves become domesticated as a de facto Jewish colony? A Golem for Israel? And, worse yet, remain clueless about it! Where is their sense of critical analysis? Why have they let their weak racial radar become deactivated by the Jewish usurped media? Why, indeed, why? I believe that even Kmac recognizes this dilemma, is currently researching this White psychological enigma, and is likely to write another paper on it. [emphasis added]

Regarding Jewish culture distortion, revisionism and the JQ, I quite agree with you. By all means, keep the major focus on these critical problems. I never implied otherwise. By the way, Carolyn, I still like you and your outspoken grit, and do listen to your broadcasts. I wish that there were more ladies like you out there.

Chechar said…

This “debate” over “monocausalism” as it’s being called, has only confirmed for me that we need to educate our people about the Jews much more than we need to blame ourselves and try to make ourselves better. I’m seeing that Tan is right when he says that this is just one more Jewish tactic to take attention off themselves. —Carolyn

I don’t know what this means, since as a relatively newcomer to WN (by the end of 2009) I learnt everything about dismissing the single-cause hypothesis from well-known WN writers, who for obvious reasons cannot be accused of “one more Jewish tactic to take attention off themselves [the Jews]”.

Here’s a quotation from my June 21 blog entry that caused all of this debate (links omitted so that this comment doesn’t get stuck in the filter):

Niflson is not alone speaking out about the character flaws of present-day whites. If I wrote for this blog the articles criticizing monocausalism it’s because notable people moved my train of thought toward that direction after Michael O’Meara became disenchanted with the webzine Counter-Currents:

1) Tom Sunic for one has been openly dismissive of monocausalism in his radio podcasts.

2) Michael O’Meara’s best 2011 article at Counter-Currents dismissed monocausalism as something silly and quite stupid.

3) Many of Harold Covington’s radio rants convinced me that, although the subversive Jew must be named, something horribly wrong—“yellow dogs” is one term used by Covington—is going on within the character of today’s Whites.

4) Hunter Wallace has been contradicting monocausalism for at least two years at Occidental Dissent. Although I disagree with his claim that America is run by blacks (I believe that Jews are far more influential) I have quoted some of his recent pronouncements on monocausalism, which Wallace calls “single-cause hypothesis.”

5) The harshest diatribes against these degenerate whites I’ve read comes from the pen of William Pierce: one of the best minds that the movement produced in the continent.

6) Even Kevin MacDonald himself doesn’t seem to support strict monocausalism!

The heavyweights convinced me that strict monocausalism is silly, and that besides naming the Jew we must also note our flaws that empowered the tribe since the French Revolution.

Carolyn Yeager said…

Junghans, Why is it that so many men want to tell a woman to “calm down” when she is calm? What was not calm about what I said? A fool’s errand? Well, that is what you’re on, whether you and Franklin agree with me or not… I do not care.

Along with that, you advise me to listen to Franklin’s “wise counsel.” I’m surprised you didn’t add, “child.”

I have concurred we have to know ourselves, and there is plenty of information on who and how we are. Because every white person is not a paragon of virtue bothers you?

“We face a titanic struggle in trying to save these credulous, intellectually toxified people from themselves.”

Give me a break. Get rid of the Jews and you’ll see a transformation (after the worst of our lot go into work / rehabilitation camps). Mr. O’Reilly was referring in his article to WN leaders, not the average White man. Do you think you can take that on? Well, wait for KMac to write another paper on it; then you’ll know what to say.

I am a little fed up with what’s found on comment boards. I made clear points and you just take on a superior air.

fender said…

Chechar, It’s not about one cause or many, it’s about which cause is most destructive, and that’s the Jewish one.

Chechar said…

Which is, of course, a matter of opinion. The above debate with Carolyn comes from three other websites besides TOO (Carolyn’s, Tanstaafl’s and mine). If you follow the above linked pages you will hit an audio-reply by Severus Niflson to the position of Tanstaafl. Here’s my transcript of part of Niflson’s audio:

If I had to choose on these two sides, I’d go for Ben Klassen and say: it’s our fault… He was very clear that in reality it’s our fault… We are not victims… This type of thing that we are victimized by Jews, I think it’s erroneous, it has a very dark aspect… because it makes us into pathetic type of losers. They [the Jews] have a lot of power, but a lot of it is because we allowed them to, right? Therefore, if we turn the focus on ourselves I think we will do a lot better.

In that audio reply Niflson also mentions that the ancient Greeks brought non-whites into their lands and that it caused the first race replacement in Europe that, with centuries of miscegenation, destroyed that civilization. These ideas are found in scholarly form in Madison Grant’s great book, and I have also complained a lot about how the Spaniards and the Portuguese basically destroyed their ethnicity throughout the whole American subcontinent without the help of the Jews since the 16th century.

See my definition above of the JP. If that definition is right, then a substantial sector of the movement is, basically, blaming the white shark (the Jews) and sparing the megalodon (secular Christianity).

I agree with Niflson that if we turn the focus on ourselves—the megalodon—we will do a lot better.

♣

Excerpted from a discussion at The Occidental Observer.

Categories
Ancient Greece Beauty My pinacoteca

Diogenes

Painting of the day:

John William Waterhouse
Diogenes ~1882

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Christendom Hate Homosexuality Psychology

Against the Fourth Commandment

In the “Saturday Afternoon with Carolyn Yeager: Kairos on The German Character,” a man called to rebut the German blogger Kairos arguing that Christianity is good because of the Fourth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

What the caller ignored is that the Fourth Commandment is intrinsically intertwined with the Monsters from the Id that are destroying our civilization.

I don’t want to explain the subject at length. Suffice it to say that the late Alice Miller discussed how religion can contribute to the guilt that prevents us from being conscious adults. In The Body Never Lies Miller urges us to realize that the Fourth Commandment offers immunity to abusive parents, and argues it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in ruined adult lives.

Below, a page
about the poet Arthur Rimbaud from The Body Never Lies that I stole from Miller’s webpage:

Self-Hatred and Unfulfilled Love

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 and died of cancer in 1891, a few months after his right leg had been amputated. In other words, he only lived to be 37 years old. Yves Bonnefoy tells us that his mother was harsh and brutal, a fact on which all the available sources are unanimous.

Bonnefoy describes her as ambitious, proud, stubbornly self-opinionated, arid, and full of covert hatred. He calls her the classic case of someone fired by the pure energy derived from bigoted religiosity. The astonishing letters she wrote around 1900 reveal that she was enamored of death and destruction. She was fascinated by graveyards, and at the age of 75 she had gravediggers lower her into the grave she was later to share with her dead children Vitali and Arthur, so that she could have a foretaste of the eternal night that was to come.

What must it have been like for an intelligent and sensitive child to grow up in the care of a woman like this? We find the answer in Rimbaud’s poetry. Bonnefoy tells us that his mother did everything in her power to curb and thwart his development as a poet, albeit to no avail. Failing that, she nipped in the bud every desire for independence on his part, every premonition of liberty. The boy took to regarding himself as an orphan, and his relationship to his mother split up into hatred, on the one hand, and obsequious dependency on the other. From the fact that he received no token of affection Rimbaud concluded that he must be in some way guilty: “With all the strength of his innocence, he rebelled fiercely against the judgment passed on him by his mother.”

Rimbaud’s mother maintained total control over her children and called this control motherly love. Her acutely perceptive son saw through this lie. He realized that her constant concern for outward appearances had nothing to do with love. But he was unable to admit to this observation without reserve, because as a child he needed love, or at least the illusion of it. He could not hate his mother, particularly as she was so obviously concerned for him. So he hated himself instead, unconsciously convinced that in some obscure way he must have deserved such mendacity and coldness. Plagued by an ill-defined sense of disgust, he projected it onto the provincial town where he lived, onto the hypocrisy of the system of morality he grew up in (much like Nietzsche in this respect), and onto himself. All his life he strove to escape these feelings, resorting in the process to alcohol, hashish, absinth, opium, and extensive travels to faraway places. In his youth he made two attempts to run away from home but was caught and restored to his mother’s “care” on both occasions.

His poetry reflects not only his self-hatred but also his quest for the love so completely denied him in the early stages of his life. Later, at school, he was fortunate enough to encounter a kindly teacher who gave him the companionship and support he so desperately needed in the decisive years of puberty. His teacher’s affection and confidence enabled him to write and to develop his philosophical ideas. But his childhood retained its stifling grip on him. He attempted to combat his despair at the absence of love in his life by transforming it into philosophical observations on the nature of true love. But these ideas were no more than abstractions because despite his intellectual rejection of conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detestation for his mother was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child. Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself. This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal.

Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as Rimbaud are probably fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the presence of a kindred spirit in it. Rimbaud’s friendship with Paul Verlaine is a well-known fact of literary history. His longing for love and genuine communication initially appeared to find gratification in this friendship. But the mistrust rooted in his childhood gradually poisoned their intimacy, and this, coupled with Verlaine’s own difficult past, prevented the love between them from achieving any permanence. Ultimately, their recourse to drugs made it impossible for them to live the life of total honesty that they were in search of. Their relationship was crippled by the psychological injuries they inflicted on one another. In the last resort, Verlaine acted in just as destructive a way as Rimbaud’s mother, and the final crisis came when Rimbaud was shot twice by the drunken Verlaine, who was sentenced to two years in prison for his crime.

To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity, in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help him understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice, his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child that was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.


Verlaine (far left) and Rimbaud (second to left)
depicted in an 1872 painting
by Henri Fantin-Latour

Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as an attempt to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition. After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, both after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life, when he had finally sacrificed his creative gifts by giving up his writing to become a business man, thus indirectly fulfilling his mother’s expectations of him. Though Rimbaud spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Marseille, he had gone back to Roche immediately before, to be looked after by his mother and sister. The quest for his mother’s love ended in the prison of childhood.

♣

For those interested in the subject, I’ve written about why forgiving our parents may invoke those Monsters from the Unconscious that are destroying our civilization. In Fallen Leaves I mention the mental issues of a poor Michael Jackson that forgave his father:

“Solitude among millions of fans”

More to the point, a few years ago I analyzed a woman who hates the West as a result of transferring her repressed, parental rage onto substitutive objects:

“A Woman Chasing after her Revenge”

Categories
Ancient Greece Art Beauty My pinacoteca

Temple of Aesculapius

Painting of the day:

John William Waterhouse
Temple of Aesculapius ~1877