Once the supposed Romantic, Rousseau,
potted his noble savage, a new Marsyas,
and alter-ego Narcissus, a Saturnian Satyr,
in the soil of Catholic and decadent France,
it was just a matter of time before la Fin
du Siècle flicking into a sickle’s blade
would give bloody birth to murky realism,
the great heads’ leveling to the pits of Hell,
spawning the breeds of new barbarians
à la Zola or Nietzsche’s goose-step brutes,
whether blond or not, who, to borrow from
Queen Marguerite, “vegetate like plants,
or live, like brutes, according to lowly instinct,
and not as human creatures, piloted by thought”
(Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Letter I),
bringing in spirits’ dregs and dusts and trash
& laying the demonic that knows only of the tyrant
and the slave—in lieu of the daimonic which guards
and furthers the divine presence, indwelling in hearts.
Instead of the soul, Rousseau offers just like Locke
and Hobbes a soulless “natural animal”—the new
modern man—“who lives for himself, dependent
only on himself and on his like”—that’s according
to “nature’s law” proclaimed by proud Rousseau
who condemns the weak, the sick, the idle as useless
waste (and medicine is anti-natural and evil) and so
they must perish and leave the world—to the strong
who, like Achilles, must be “dunked in the Styx”—
since, in Rousseau’s mind, one can be only either
the master or the slave as “there is no middle
course” where “pain [and death] is the means
of [man’s] preservation,” and “man is born
to suffer” but better yet if he is born an orphan—
without any natural filial connections while
staying “content to be ignorant of truth”—and
if, for Hobbes, this new (modern) “natural man”
is a wicked strong child, for Rousseau, he’s good
because, in his mind, whoever is strong is good,
and only the weak are the wicked, evil ones—
such a new Saturnian child is one who “wants
to overturn everything … he breaks, he smashes;
he seizes a bird as he seizes a stone, and strangles it
without knowing what he is about … to make or
to destroy is all one to him, change is what he seeks…
if he seems to enjoy destructive activity it is only
it takes time to make things and very little time
to break them , so that the work of destruction
[and death ]accords better with his eagerness.”
He only lives for the love of power—power
which, instead of love, arouses and flatters
in him self-love only—as in Phaedrus’ Lysias,
that radical non-lover for whom and whose likes
many fall as enthralled flies dashing to a lamp
in this nihilists’ new world of a massive trance
where both the tyrant and the slaves are being
fashioned by the method of the Great Reset
to be ever “content of being ignorant of truth”
and where real philosophy and true medicine
are prescribed as evil by these powers that be
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book I).
For, verily, the noble savage and blond beast,
that’s Phaedrus’ Lysias or the Wolf as sensed
and smelled so well (while utterly misplaced)
by Robert M. Pirsig in his American Art of Zen
in the image of the tyrant of the coming age
for whom all children must be orphans
as Rousseau did to all his five infants
whom he abandoned to the state—
against the will of their mother,
Thérèse Levasseur, while preaching
and tending to his valued sentiments.
It is a world where fathers and mothers
are no longer fathers and mothers
but, and by their own will, unloving
masters of their newly refashioned slaves
from whom they demand self-defiling love.
For, as Rousseau says at the outset of Emile,
his “man forces one soil [read: humanity]
to yield the products of the other—to bear
the other’s fruit … mutilating his dog,
his horse, and his slave; he destroys
and defaces all things; he loves all
that is deformed and monstrous;
he will nothing as nature made it,
not even man himself … shaped
to his master’s taste like trees
[or a horse to saddle and ride].”
And so, Rousseau sets man
against God: “God makes all
good [including man himself?].
But man meddles in everything
and they become evil”—as he is,
according to Rousseau, part human
and part animal but then, he states,
“mankind cannot be made by two
halves”—and “facing two ways
at once achieves nothing”—either man
and the soulless or nature and God
must lose and give in—to form
new whole like Aristophanes’
spider-man in Plato’s Symposium
from the half severed from the rest.
But till then man is for Rousseau
but a mere “numerator of a fraction
whose value depends on its denominator”
—the state or society—unless he comes
to depend solely on his new architects
like Rousseau for whom “all the children
are equally alike” and have the same value
that consists of their unreserved obedience
to their anti-God Makers and Controllers.
In reaction to the Enlightenment, the reverse
and re-enslavement of mankind brought
on the marching boots of the Nazi brutes
installs instead of the humans the savages
and beasts and their ‘noble’ oxymorons—
the Underworld Gygeses—Zola’s Buteaus,
the Bêtes, the death-like, nihilistic beasts
as humanity is a species generally pronged:
into those who are loving what’s alive
and those who hate to death that others live—
the sociopaths, the narcissists, the tyrants,
or Nezval’s Absolute Gravedigger,
the “Surrealists”—the new Cadmuses—
who are sowing putridity and degradation—
their own diabolical, cadaveric decomposition—
and who is “crushing swallows’ brains
with his fingers’ cracking snap”—
or his “Great and Shameless Whores
(milking mankind) phenomenally adroit
at making love with utmost cynicism,”
“giving birth to eyeless infants
bound to fall at the end of the rope
on the slippery slope right to
the jaws of an awful swine,
waddling through the blood
and ruptured hearts of mothers
in whose eyes the suns just died”—
all this made to “create the greatest
genius of universal madness
moving through the mire of hazard”—
“at the bottom of the abyss
with the exhausted light
and toppled female idols”—
the new barbaric cannibals,
dreaming of the Golden Age with Slaves
when there is no more any true poetry
if there’s in it no more true love.
And how can there be a true love
if there’s no soul within?
And how could there be
without any of them
any wisdom still?
Except as a wish, a dream
once in her Memoirs coined
by Marguerite, Queen of Navarre,
“to take a pride in being captured
by the hand of a master
so true and able—in love?”
