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?”
