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    Such defiance was, purposely, unforgivable. Jung hurled it at Freud in an era when the distance between leader and led still remained sacral. In 1913 the Austrian Court Gazette still used routinely the phrase "by All-Highest Decision" because direct reference to the Emperor might compromise his transcendence. In 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm's anniversaries were still celebrated by subjects shouting "Hurrah!" while falling to their knees. In 1913 Russian film theaters showing a newsreel of the Tsar required the audience to stand at attention with heads bared; after the imperial image had departed the lights would go on, the anthem would be sung, and only then could the audience sit and the lights dim again to let ordinary shadows inhabit the screen.
    ......................

    The new power did not wait for proclamations from governments. It needed no galvanizing by propaganda, no goading from the press (which was by no means uniformly militant in the principal countries). The new power had already divided the world into Allies-until-Victory and Enemies-unto-Death. This new power had gathered thousands along the shores of the Danube where they sang, fervently, "The Watch on the Rhine" against France. The new power burned German flags in Paris while cafe orchestras along the Champs Elysees played "God Save the King." The new power raised a sea of fists against the Russian Embassy in Vienna, against the German Embassy in Paris, and its stones shattered eleven windows of the British Embassy in Berlin. Even restaurants felt the fingers of the new power. "Menu cards here in Vienna," Karl Kraus wrote to his beloved Sidonie, "now have their English and French translations crossed out. Things are getting more and more idiotic.. "

    But Kraus himself knew better. It wasn't mere idiocy that was governing things now. It was something far more formidable. Sarajevo had only been a flash point of its strength.

    Our politicians [Kraus said in Die Fackel of July 1914] are unconsciously right in their suspicion that "behind this schoolboy… who killed the Archduke and his wife stand others who cannot be apprehended and who are responsible for the weapon used." No less a force than progress stands behind this deed-progress and education unmoored from God…

    A key sentence on the century's key moment as nations were turning themselves into regiments. Kraus did not amplify here on the God from whom progress had severed mankind so fatally. He had done that earlier elsewhere, in his poem "The Dying Man." There God meant the Presence in the pristine garden that was both "source and destination." But now men had paved over His soil and their souls. Concrete had strangled the "source." They had lost their sense of origin and of final purpose. Therefore they must claw from the barrenness a new "destination"-an angrier destiny. Under the oppressiveness of a loss, the new power had been forged.

    It had forged the life of Gavrilo Princip, modernity's foremost assassin, who had triggered the crisis. The family of "this schoolboy" had lived for centuries in an approximation, however imperfect, of Kraus's garden. As a zadruga, that is, as a tight-knit, farm-based Bosnian clan, the Princips had raised their own corn, milled their own flour, baked their own loaves, and worshipped a God close enough to their roof to be their very own protector.

    Progress had broken all that apart. Princip's father could no longer create bread from his earth. He could no longer live his livelihood. He must earn it with the estranged, endless trudgings of a postman. His son Gavrilo, more educated than his father, more sensitive, more starved for the wholeness that is holiness and thus more resentful of the ruins all about him, had to seek another garden. He sought something that would satisfy his disorientation and his anger; something which, as his readings of Nietzsche suggested, would restore the valor of the vital principle that his race had lost. He found it in the Black Hand. It conjured "the earth that nourishes… the sun that warms." It was part of the new power. It offered him the cohesion, the communal fortitude and faith of the shattered zadruga.

    Progress had shattered numberless zadrugas by hundreds of other ethnic names, from the hamlet of Predappio in Italy's Romagna where a blacksmith named Mussolini had a son named Benito, to the village of Didi-Lilo in Russia's Transcaucasia where a cobbler named Dzhugashvili sired a boy later called Stalin. The Stalins, Mussolinis, Нitlers, Princips were the monsters of progress. Progress had abused and bruised them, but they could turn the sting outward and avenge the injury. There were many millions like them with less fury in their bafflement, less steel in their deprivation: the lumpen-proletariat on whose backs Europe rode toward the marvels of the new century. Their anonymous pain fermented the new power.

    A year before Sarajevo, Vienna's Arbeiter Zeitung published a survey documenting that it was always the most rapidly industrializing areas which produced among the poor the highest rate of alcoholism, of syphilis and tuberculosis, of emotional pathology, and by far the highest rate of suicide. Their sickbeds and their graves marked the trail of "progress unmoored from God." But now Princip's deed was inspiriting its live and able-bodied victims. With two shots he had set in motion a firestorm that was to burn meaning into the numbest slums.

    Instead of beating their heads against the prison of their class, instead of deadening themselves with toil or liquor, the masses now had something to kill for. Before Sarajevo, hundreds of thousands had been on strike in Russia. Not long afterwards the factories hummed again all day. At night, toilers massed before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg with torches and holy ensigns, acclaiming the Tsar as their defender. "Wonderful times…" said a British diplomat who saw the spectacle. "Russia seems to have been completely transformed."

    In Vienna the transformation was just as wonderful. On May Day 1914, workers had marched on the Ringstrasse with the chant "Frieden, Brot, and Freiheit!" ("Peace, Bread, and Freedom!"). On August 1, many of the same crowd marched again with "Alle Serben mussen sterben!" ("All Serbs must die!"). "The patriotic enthusiasm of the masses in Austria-Hungary seemed especially surprising," Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. "I strode along the main street of the familiar Vienna and watched the most amazing crowd fill the fashionable Ring, a crowd in which hopes had been awakened… What was it that drew them to the square in front of the War Ministry?… Would it have been possible at any other time for porters, laundresses, shoemakers, apprentices to feel themselves masters of the Ring?… In their demonstrations for the glory of Habsburg arms, I detected something familiar to me from the October days of 1905 [when Trotsky had led a shortlived insurrection]. No wonder that in history war has so often been the mother of revolution."

    In Paris workers had sung the "Internationale" on May Day before returning to their tenements. Now their throats rang with the "Marseillaise" while the Kaiser's effigy went up in flames. Everywhere life leaped from lonely gray grind to grand national adventure. Hurrah!

    But the poor weren't the only ones grateful for the zest provided by the crisis. The middle classes, too, felt exhausted and baffled. Progress had fed them well. Yet the more meat on their table, the less tang was there to each morsel, the more intolerable the superior cut of somebody else's steak. No doubt they were dining well. Were they still eating together? They consumed as they produced: aggressively against each other. When worshipping, they knelt on velvet in churches unmoored from a common God. Their mansions brimmed, but they did not feel sheltered. They promenaded in spats and top hats-where from? To what end?

    Germany's most popular almanac for 1913 featured a poem by the writer Alfred Walter Heymel. It was called "Eine Sehnsucht aus der Zeit" ("A Longing in Our Times").

    Im Friedensreichtum wird uns toedlich bang.
    Wir kennen Muessen nicht noch Koennen oder Sollen
    Und Sehnen uns und schereien nach dem Kriege.
    (In the wealth of peace we feel the deadliest dread.
    We are bereft of prewess, mission, or direction,
    And long and cry for war.)

    Hurrah!

    The cry came, as the British poet Rupert Brooke phrased it, from "a world grown old and cold and weary." It came from "this foul peace which drags on and on. " as General Conrad wrote to his mistress Gina von Reininghaus. For worker or burgher or poet or Chief of Staff, Mars was the God of Liberation. "A crisis had entered Western culture," a high Habsburg official would write later, "and many of its representative citizens had been oversaturated into desperation. Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer's sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring." Their longing for thunder was the new power.

    The thunderstorm with its mortal flash-this image shivers ubiquitously through the whole period. In the summer of 1914, Europe's musical sensation was still Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered a year earlier in Paris, where Nijinsky's "lightning leaps" celebrated the theme of the ballet, namely the enchantments of death.

    In painting, a dominant mode was Futurism, which anticipated the lightning-like strokes of stroboscopic photography; the Futurist manifesto exalted war because it would blast away the stultification of present concepts and structures; as though defining lightning's lethal beauty, the manifesto proclaimed that "movement and light must destroy the substance of objects."

    "The sense of approaching catastrophe," wrote a Futurist who didn't know he was one, in his book Mein Kampf, "turned at last to longing: Let heaven finally give reign to the fate that could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed, and with the thunder of heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries."

    "The war," said German Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg in his book on the subject, "would be a thunderstorm to clear the air."

    "The palpable beginnings of the European crisis reach back a number of years," wrote Count Ottokar Czernin who would succeed Count von Berchtold as Habsburg Foreign Minister, "… certain dynamics must take their course before a thunderstorm discharges its lightning and thunder."

    "I am convinced the storm is coming," French President Raymond Poincare remarked to a friend in July of 1914. "Where and when the storm will break I cannot say."

    "There is a crisis in the air," Freud had written Lou Andreas-Salome as 1913 turned to 1914, referring to Jung yet articulating much more than psychoanalytic weather. "May it soon explode so that the air is cleared!"

    The shots of Sarajevo sounded like an answer to many prayers in many nations. Afterwards some tried in vain to push back the bolt that came down from the blue-for example, in Paris on the sudden death of Jean Jaures, the French Socialist leader and Europe's most eloquent voice against war. On July 31, as he sat in the Cafe du Croissant, a nationalist zealot gunned him down. His comrades organized a pacifist parade around his body. They were swamped by a mob of conscripts. Brand-new lieutenants graduated from St. Cyr led the warriors, shouting, "We'll go into battle with white plumes on our kepis and with white gloves on our hands!" Behind them young men roared by the happy thousands. The French General Staff planned for 87 percent of called-up reservists to appear at induction centers; 98.5 percent did. Hurrah!

    In Austria, where Viktor Adler had groomed the worker to be a thinker and a doer, the proletariat accomplished not a single thoughtful act to halt disaster. Adler himself, though, did intervene in history without knowing it. During the anti-Russian hysteria in Austria, Habsburg constables in Galicia arrested Lenin "as a Tsarist spy" on August 8. In response to an appeal from Lenin's wife, Adler went to the headquarters of the political police in Vienna, cited their own sponsorship of this useful Bolshevik as an enemy of the Tsar and thus as a friend of Austria (Hurrah!), and obtained Lenin's release and safe passage first to Vienna, then to Switzerland. A few days later he helped usher Trotsky across the Swiss border. In other words, Adler put into place the preliminaries of the Russian Revolution three years later.

    He also couldn't help collaborating in the genesis of its most important preliminary, namely that of the Great War. No matter that his Arbeiter-Zeitung had published many warnings against the threat of international slaughter. On August 5, the day before Austria issued its first declaration of war against a major power-Russia-this same Arbeiter Zeitung intoned, "However the fates decide, we hope they will decide for the holy cause of the German people." Hurrah! Two days earlier Adler's paper had reported that his German comrades, the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag in Berlin, had joined the other parties in voting the government the war credits it needed. This action marked, said the Arbeiter-Zeitung, "… the proudest and loftiest exaltation of the German spirit." Hurrah!

    Two men made dogged, last-ditch attempts against that inexorable hurrah. They were Nicky and Willy. That was how the two Emperors signed their respective cables, which started jittering, on the night of July 29, between the palace of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg and the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Potsdam. Nicky "in the name of our old friendship" begged Willy to stop his Austrian ally from going too far. Willy, in turn, declaring himself to be Nicky's "sincere and devoted friend and cousin," said he was sure that Nicky as a fellow monarch wanted to see the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince duly punished. Nicky thanked Willy for "the conciliatory and fraternal" message but in view of it voiced astonishment at the ominous tone of the note just delivered by Willy's ambassador to his, Nicky's, Foreign Minister. Willy answered that just because Nicky shared so cordially the wish for peace, he hoped Nicky would agree to remain "in a spectator role" in the Vienna-Belgrade conflict, for only by localizing the matter and by not taking Russian military measures could Nicky avoid "involving Europe in the most horrible war ever witnessed." In reply, Nicky, "grateful for the speed of your answer," assured Willy that all Russian military measures were purely precautionary with no offensive intent and should therefore not interfere with Willy's "much-valued role as mediator with Vienna." Willy's response regretted that he could not mediate in Vienna while Russia persisted in mobilizing. To which Nicky answered that it was "technically impossible" to stop Russian military preparations but that since, like Willy, he was very far from wishing war, he gave Willy his solemn words that "my troops shall not commit any provocative action." Whereupon Willy thanked Nicky for his telegram but said that "only immediate, clear, unmistakable, and affirmative answer from your government can avoid endless misery." And he begged Nicky to order his troops "on no account to commit the slightest act of trespassing over our frontiers."

    This cable, ending the series, leaped from Berlin to St. Petersburg on August 1, at 10:30 P.M. Three and a half hours earlier, at 7 P.M., the Kaiser's ambassador had presented the German Government's declaration of war to the Russian Foreign Minister.

    It was no longer important what Willy said to Nicky when. Quite aptly the two Emperors had reduced themselves to diminutives: two sashed little figurines raising toy scepters against the storm. The storm paid little attention. All over the continent young men filed into barracks in clockwork fulfillment of mobilization plans. Troop trains kept hurtling toward frontiers.

    The martial hurrah of multitudes kept echoing on the square before Wilhelm's palace. Through his Lord Chamberlain the Kaiser thanked his subjects for this show of loyalty but asked them to disperse "so that His Majesty can attend undisturbed to the challenges of leadership." The hurrahs continued.

    Less than twenty-four hours after Willy's final telegram to Nicky, Willy rose from his desk in the Star Room of his palace. It was a desk made from the wood of Lord Nelson's flagship Victory-a gift from Willy's grandmother Queen Victoria. On this desk he had just signed the order that let his soldiers flood across the borders of Luxembourg and then of Belgium. "Gentlemen," he said hoarsely to the military dignitaries assembled around him, "you will live to regret this."

    Shortly afterward he sent a note to the British ambassador: Let King George of England be informed that he, Wilhelm, would never ever, as long as he lived, wear again the uniform of a British Field Marshal. Coming from the Kaiser, this signified ultimate bitterness. As usual, his statesmanship became a matter of epaulettes. From now on his role would be to gesticulate. Others commanded.

    In these commanders the new power now began to manifest itself quite nakedly. They were the ones who controlled the final libretto, Libretto D, the libretto of Kraus's progress crescendoing toward a titanic fusillade. The spotlight, after shifting from the futility of Excellencies to the helplessness of Majesties, now came to rest on the supremacy of generals.
    On July 31, German Chief of Staff von Moltke sent his Austrian counterpart a cable whose imperatives bluntly bypassed the Ministers of War in Vienna and in Berlin; a telegram which ignored both Emperors, theoretically the All-Highest decision-makers. "Stand firm!" von Moltke cabled Conrad. "Austria must fully mobilize at once!"

    "How odd," Foreign Minister von Berchtold said when Conrad showed him the message. It contradicted the tenor of two other cables, one from the German Chancellor to himself, the other from Wilhelm to Franz Joseph. "Who rules in Berlin?"

    He might just as well have asked: "Who rules in Vienna?" By then his own cables were following almost verbatim General Conrad's proposals.

    Who ruled in Russia? "I shall smash my telephone," the Russian Chief of Staff General Janushkevich told the Russian Foreign Minister. By which he meant that he would refuse to do
    again what he had done the day before, namely to rescind mobilization on telephoned orders from the Tsar. His pressure forced the Tsar to renew the order. "Now you can smash your telephone," said the Foreign Minister meekly.

    Who ruled in France? Not Rene Viviani, though he was Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister. His problem: He was a Socialist and peace-seeker. He had wept at the bier of the great pacifist Jean Jaures slain on July 31. He had given his arm to the widow walking behind the coffin on the way to the grave. Therefore it didn't matter that he was the Chief Executive of the Republic while Raymond Poincare as President was only the symbol of state. It did matter that Poincare had been born in Lorraine, the province lost by France to Germany in the War of 1870 and which must be won back again. It mattered that Poincare had a stake in the war to come. Hurrah!

    Under Poincare's secret manipulation, the French Embassy in St. Petersburg stopped being an instrument of Foreign Minister Viviani and became a tool of General Joseph Joffre, Chief of the French General Staff. The French ambassador withheld from his Foreign Minister news of the martial intentions of the Russian General Staff. But he did convey General Joffre's encouragement to his Russian colleagues "to commence an offensive against East Prussia soonest." The ambassador deliberately delayed Viviani's very different, moderating words to St. Petersburg until it was too late.

    "Russian troops," Poincare announced to the French cabinet on August 2, "will be in Berlin by All Saints' Day." Hurrah! The Zeitgeist vested in him the power withheld by the French constitution.

    Who ruled in Britain? On July 29, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill wrote his wife that he would "do my best for peace and nothing would induce me to wrongfully strike the first blow." Yet the same letter confessed that "war preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity." Two days later he mobilized the fleet, against the explicit decision of the British cabinet. "Winston," said Prime Minister Asquith indulgently, "has his war paint on." "The lamps are going out all over Europe," said Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. "We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." The shores darkened. Churchill's dreadnoughts fanned out across the North Sea. Hurrah!

    ***
    Who ruled the world? In Habsburg's Prague, the insurance official Franz Kafka was just developing some notions on the subject. At another time he was to refer to himself ruefully as "the nerve end of humanity." Right now, on July 29, 1914, the day after Austria's declaration of War on Serbia, two days before Germany's ultimatum to Russia, the name "Josef K" appears for the first time in Kafka's journal. That week he began to sketch out ideas for The Trial"[6]-the novel registering in a personal compass an evil erupting internationally: some incalculable force, insidious, inexorable, operating beyond all normal jurisdictions, closing in on its victims.

    With what phrases did such power enter history? This was the time when ambassador after ambassador appeared before Foreign Minister after Foreign Minister to declare that he had the honor to inform His Excellency that his government, in order to protect the security and integrity of its realm, was forced to consider itself at war.

    Honor? Security? Integrity? Excellency?

    On August 9, 1914, while such words were still being intoned, Ludwig Wittgenstein began to ruminate systematically about the disjunction between language and truth. On that day he began the notebook that led to his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. The Tractatus, purging language of its routine shams, was born on the grandest proscenium of such shams, Imperial Habsburg. Flourish, not fact, held the realm together; flourish painted the mirage of dynastic communality between crown and people. Progress was corroding all things communal, but flourish painted over the corrosion. In the Empire of the flourish, Wittgenstein developed the philosophy that punctured, on the deepest modernist level, the theatrics of style. And here Kafka wrote the paradigmatic modernist novel, steeped in the angst underlying our daily charades.

    Meanwhile great charades of state lit up the horizon. On August 4, the Kaiser stood on the balcony of his Berlin palace. He had not wept, like the Tsar, when the declaration of war had been published. But his face (in Grand Admiral von Tirpitz's description) "looked ravaged and tragic." The thousands who had come to hear him didn't notice. They only saw that their sovereign wore a spiked helmet under which his mouth shouted its mustachioed duty from the speech text handed him: "We draw the sword with a clean conscience and clean hands… from now on I no longer know parties. I only know Germans!"

    Hurrah!

    The masses cheered. They cheered him and their own relief. Hurrah! Here in Berlin as well as in Paris, in London, in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, war had freed them from politics, from partisanship, from all apartness. Until now they had been mutually separated. Competition had driven them against each other. Or poverty had marooned them. Or they had been isolated in their cocoon of envy and alienation. Now it was all marvelously different. Now the worn-down unemployed, the trodden-under scullion, the unfulfilled genius, the bored coupon-clipper, the jaded boulevadier-they could all link arms and walk forward together in the same electrifying adventure, against the enemy. Now they were Germans together, Frenchmen together, Englishmen together, Russians together and-most astounding-ethnically motley Habsburg subjects together. The enemy made it possible for them to break through to one another. Now the same patriot warmth embosomed them all. "Hurrah!" they all cried with one voice. "Hurrah!"

    The most inveterate outsiders joined this surge. In Munich, Adolf Нitler had been living without a friend, without a lover, without even the bleak commonalty of Vienna's Mannher- heim. "The war," he says in Mein Kampf, "liberated me from the painful feelings of my youth… I fell down on my knees and thanked heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune to be alive at that time." Hurrah!

    Dr. Sigmund Freud, outcast from his city's medical establishment, grim practitioner of the Viennese affectation of despising Vienna-this same Freud now said, "for the first time in thirty years I feel myself to be an Austrian"; that England (hitherto his favorite country) was "a hypocrite" for supporting "Serbia's impudence"; that "all my libido goes to Austria-Hungary." Now the war with Jung fell away. Freud hurried from Carlsbad back to Vienna, where his sons Martin and Ernst joined the colors "for the noble cause" to which the over-age Freud himself made a contribution: He refused to give male patients of conscription age Certificates of Nervous Disability; he would not help them evade service to their country. Hurrah!

    Ludwig Wittgenstein was medically exempt from war service, having undergone a double hernia operation in July. He should have been immune to the war spirit since he was a recluse, a maverick, a deviant from norms sexual, semantic, or financial (he had just given away most of the vast fortune left him by his industrialist father). On August 9, he started his notebook exploring the deceptions of language. On August 7, he showed that he was at one with the deceived crowd. He enlisted. Hurrah!

    Years earlier Arnold Schonberg had gone abroad because the Austrian capital grated on him as much as his music grated on it. In the summer of 1914, he returned and joined Vienna's own regiment, the Deutschmeister. The atonal heretic began to compose military marches for Austria's glory. Hurrah!

    Oskar Kokoschka made the same fast transition from enfant terrible to waver of flag. Before Savajevo he had spoken of "the personal misery of living in Vienna, utterly alone, without a friend," and sought opportunities as distant as possible from the Danube, ". perhaps a commission for a fresco in America." After Sarajevo he sold his most valuable painting, The Tempest (showing him with Alma Mahler), to a Hamburg pharmacist. With the proceeds he bought a horse and a cavalry uniform-a light blue tunic with white facings, bright red breeches, and a brass helmet. Now he could volunteer for the 15th Imperial Dragoons who prized war so much that they shaved before each battle. Now Kokoschka's fellow rebel, the architect Adolf Loos, could print a photograph of the helmeted painter as a postcard publicizing Kokoschka's hurrah!

    What about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke? Born in Habsburg Bohemia, he was an itinerant solitary, a free-floating mystic who considered Austria and Germany countries to which he was attached "only by language." In the summer of 1914, he reattached himself with a vengeance. He rhapsodized along with the throngs in German and Austrian streets. His Five Cantos / August 1914 celebrate the War God:

    … the Lord of Battle has suddenly seized us Hurling the torch: and over a heart filled with homeland His reddened sky, where He reigns in His rage, is now screaming.

    Hurrah!

    "To be torn out of a dull capitalistic peace was good for many Germans," said Hermann Hesse. "I esteem the moral values of war on the whole rather highly." For Thomas Mann, war was "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers." Hurrah!

    It was a clamorous, resonant, exultant summer, this summer of "progress unmoored from God." It was a summer catapulting men from their separate vacations into a much higher, gallant, and collective holiday. "We saw war," Freud would write some months later "as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of mankind in communal feeling… a chivalrous crusade."

    "What is progress in my sense?" asked Nietzsche, "I, too, speak of a 'return to nature,' although it is not really a going back but a progress forward-an ascent up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, where great tasks are something one plays with… Napoleon was a piece of 'return to nature.' "

    Nietzsche had written this twenty-five years earlier, but he was the patron saint of the summer of 1914. That summer millions began to ascend not to Kraus's garden of pristine repose but to Nietzsche's jungled Napoleonic proving ground. It embowered and empowered them. It delivered them from soot, squalor, impotence, loneliness. Here they found what Gavrilo Princip-assassin of the Archduke, disciple of Nietzsche-had invoked when he swore the Black Hand oath: "the sun that warms… the earth that nourishes…"

    ***
    And the sun shone on, over Bad Ischl with its hills and parks but no longer with its Emperor Franz Joseph. On July 27 he settled down to the last official act he was to perform in his Alpine villa. He revised the "Manifesto to My Peoples" written in his name. From a phrase characterizing Serbia he deleted "blind insolence." He struck the words "inspired by traditions of a glorious past" from a sentence describing the Empire's armed forces. The same day he had said to General Conrad: "If the monarchy goes under, let it go under with dignity." If war must be proclaimed to his peoples, let it be a proclamation without bathos.

    Karl Kraus, the scourge of verbiage, was awed by the proclamation. He called it, "An august statement… a poem."

    To the end Franz Joseph remained the steward of Imperial taste. Now the end was close.

    On the morning of July 29, he left Ischl for Vienna, never to return. On August 6, when war was declared between Austria and Russia, he quietly removed from his uniform a decoration he had worn for sixty-five years: the Cross of St. George, Third Class, conferred on him in 1849 by Tsar Nicholas I. For the twenty-six months that were left of his life, he never stirred from Schonbrunn Palace.

    The disorder he had sought to cure after Sarajevo had lapsed yet further into an unforeseen disarray, into a derangement whose wild pyrotechnics dazzled Europe. The librettos of his Foreign Minister had been exploded; the populace applauded the glow of the fragments. Machine guns were beginning to perforate the bows and hand-kisses of the stage Franz Joseph had commanded for two thirds of a century. But the bowers of bows and the kissers of hands did not know yet that they were bleeding. All they felt was a thrill and a tingle.

    Franz Joseph felt something more final. A change in the Emperor's will detailed how his descendants would receive his fortune, should the family lose the crown. The last principal of the Habsburg drama prepared to retreat into the wings.

    His retirement was partial and discreet. Other exits had official character. Sir Maurice de Bunsen, British Ambassador to Austria, turned out to be the last Western diplomat to leave the capital. On August 12, he made this sad statement to Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold: "As of twelve o'clock tonight, Great Britain and Austria will be in a state of war." Berchtold, ever the gentleman, bowed and assured His Excellency that "though Austria must accept this challenge, the two states are still associated politically and morally by tradition and sympathies and common interests."

    Two days later, on August 14, the Ambassador and his wife left their residence for the West Railroad Terminal where Berchtold had arranged a private salon train for them, bound for neutral Switzerland.

    Much of the town's anti-Allied anger had dissipated, though it had not lost its patriotic exhilaration. The de Bunsens encountered no hostility. They were accompanied by police in dress uniform, resembling an honor guard, and by their own wistful thoughts. It was hard to say good-bye to this city. Eight months ago they had taken up their posts, in December of 1913, during the swirl of the social season. They had leased a castle from Count Hoyos, "a dream of beauty," according to Lady de Bunsen's diary. The whole Danubian ambiance had enchanted them, especially Vienna's carnival, which had begun shortly after their arrival. "The mise-en-scene," Lady de Bunsen had mused of these revels, "was wonderful."

    And now, as they departed, the mise-en-scene maintained its wonder. On the way to their train they met an artillery regiment also en route to a railway station. Green sprigs bounced from the kepis of the soldiers, roses garlanded the cannons, a band lilted the "Radetzky March," the march that is more polka than march. Housewives waved kerchiefs from windows, children skipped along, girls popped sweets into the recruits' pockets, all prancing and laughing and never missing a single musical beat. It was an alfresco dance, festive with sun, sporting happy masks.

    Of course similar scenes enlivened other capitals as well. They sparkled on the Champs Elysees, at Picadilly Circus, along the Nevsky Prospekt, and up and down the Wilhelmstrasse. But Vienna-origin of this great international midsummer frolic-Vienna out-waltzed friend and foe alike in celebration.

    The World War had come to the city by the Danube, dressed as a ball. Tra-la… Hurrah!..

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    "Sometimes ideas stick despite our best efforts to stop them. In 1946, Leo Durocher was the coach of the Dodgers. His club was leading the National League, while the team’s traditional archrival, the New York Giants, was languishing in the bottom of the standings.

    During a game between the Dodgers and the Giants, Durocher was mocking the Giants in front of a group of sportswriters. One of the sportswriters teased Durocher, “Why don’t you be a nice guy for a change?” Durocher pointed at the Giants’ dugout and said, “Nice guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than [Giants’ manager] Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world! And where are they? In seventh place!”

    As recounted by Ralph Keyes in his book on misquotations, Nice Guys Finish Seventh, the metamorphosis of Durocher’s quote began a year later. The Baseball Digest quoted Durocher as saying, “Nice guys finish in last place in the second division.” Before long, as his quip was passed along from one person to another, it evolved, becoming simpler and more universal, until it emerged as a cynical comment on life: “Nice guys finish last.” No more reference to the Giants, no more reference to seventh place—in fact, no more reference to baseball at all. Nice guys finish last.

    This quote, polished by the marketplace of ideas, irked Durocher. For years, he denied saying the phrase (and, of course, he was right), but eventually he gave up. Nice Guys Finish Last was the title of his autobiography."

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    "May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and having for the time being become as fierce as what he is reading, should, without being led astray, find his rugged and treacherous way across the desolate swamps of these sombre and poison-filled pages; for, unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar. It is not right that everyone should savour this bitter fruit with impunity. Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands. Listen well to what I say: turn on your heels and go back, not forward, like the eyes of a son respectfully averted form the august contemplation of his mother’s face; or rather like a formation of very meditative cranes, stretching out of sight, whose sensitive bodies flee the chill of winter, when, their wings fully extended, they fly powerfully through silence to a precise point on the horizon, from which suddenly a strange strong wind blows, precursor of the storm. The oldest crane, flying on alone ahead of the others, shakes his head like a reasonable person on seeing this, making at the same time a clack with his beak, and he is troubled (as I, too, would be, if I were he); all the time his scrawny and featherless neck, which has seen three generations of cranes, is moving in irritated undulations which foretoken the quickly-gathering storm. Having calmly looked in all directions with his experienced eyes, the crane prudently (ahead of all the others, for he has the privilege of showing his tail-feathers to his less intelligent fellows) gyrates to change the direction of the geometric figure (perhaps it is a triangle, but one cannot see the third side which these curious birds of passage form in space) either to port or to starboard, like a skilled captain; uttering as he does to his vigilant cry, like that of a melancholy sentry, to repulse the common enemy. Then, maneuvering with wings which seem no bigger than a starling’s, because he is no fool, he takes another philosophic and surer line of flight."

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    HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE J’S

    Let’s consider what happens when two people fall in love. Common sense tells us that their ardor grows from any number of seeds, including life circumstances, a sense of understanding, sexual attraction, and mutual admiration. Surely the covert machinery of the unconscious is not implicated in who you choose as a mate. Or isn’t it?

    Imagine you run into your friend Joel, and he tells you that he has found the love of his life, a woman named Jenny. That’s funny, you consider, because your friend Alex just married Amy, and Donny is crazy for Daisy. Is there something going on with these letter pairings? Is like attracted to like? That’s crazy, you conclude: important life decisions—such as who to spend your life with—can’t be influenced by something as capricious as the first letter of a name. Perhaps all these alliterative alliances are just an accident.

    But they’re not an accident. In 2004, psychologist John Jones and his colleagues examined fifteen thousand public marriage records from Walker County, Georgia, and Liberty County, Florida. They found that, indeed, people more often get married to others with the same first letter of their first name than would be expected by chance.

    But why? It’s not about the letters, exactly—instead it’s about the fact that those mates somehow remind their spouses of themselves. People tend to love reflections of themselves in others. Psychologists interpret this as an unconscious self-love, or perhaps a comfort level with things that are familiar —and they term this implicit egotism.

    Implicit egotism is not just about life partners—it also influences the products you prefer and purchase. In one study, subjects were presented with two (fictional) brands of tea to taste-test. One of the brand names of the teas happened to share its first three letters with the subject’s name; that is, Tommy might be sampling teas named Tomeva and Lauler. Subjects would taste the teas, smack their lips, consider both carefully, and almost always decide that they preferred the tea whose name happened to match the first letters of their name. Not surprisingly, a subject named Laura would choose the tea named Lauler. They weren’t explicitly aware of the connection with the letters; they simply believed the tea tasted better. As it turns out, both cups of tea had been poured from the same teapot.

    The power of implicit egotism goes beyond your name to other arbitrary features of yourself, such as your birthday. In a university study, students were given an essay to read about the Russian monk Rasputin. For half the students, Rasputin’s birthday was mentioned in the essay—and it was gimmicked so that it “happened” to be the same as the reader’s own birthday. For the other half of the students, a birthday different from their own was used; otherwise the essays were identical. At the end of the reading, the students were asked to answer several questions covering what they thought of Rasputin as a person. Those who believed they shared a birthday with Rasputin gave him more generous ratings. They simply liked him more, without having any conscious access as to why.

    The magnetic power of unconscious self-love goes beyond what and whom you prefer. Incredibly, it can subtly influence where you live and what you do, as well. Psychologist Brett Pelham and his colleagues plumbed public records and found that people with birthdays on February 2 (2/2) are disproportionately likely to move to cities with a reference to the number two in their names, such as Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. People born on 3/3 are statistically overrepresented in places like Three Forks, Montana, as are people born on 6/6 in places like Six Mile, South Carolina, and so on for all the birthdays and cities the authors could find. Consider how amazing that is: associations with the numbers in people’s arbitrary birth dates can be influential enough to sway their residential choices, however slightly. Again, it’s unconscious.

    Implicit egotism can also influence what you chose to do with your life. By analyzing professional membership directories, Pelham and his colleagues found that people named Denise or Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, while people named Laura or Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers, and people with names like George or Georgina to become geologists. They also found that owners of roofing companies are more likely to have a first initial of R instead of H, while hardware store owners are more likely to have names beginning with H instead of R. A different study mined freely available online professional databases to find that physicians have disproportionately more surnames that include doc, dok, or med, while lawyers are more likely to have law, lau, or att in their surnames.

    As crazy as it sounds, all these findings passed the statistical thresholds for significance. The effects are not large, but they’re verifiable. We are influenced by drives to which we have little access, and which we never would have believed had not the statistics laid them bare.
    .

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    Contemporary art’s shortcomings are increasingly evident, hence the continued efforts to escape art as we know it: the now-familiar emphases on public participation, non-art, smuggling, deterritorialisation, inbetween-ness, eventhood, indeterminacy…. Yet these efforts simply perpetuate and entrench the very limitations of art they seek to overcome.

    In his closely-argued book, Suhail Malik documents how, as the expanded field of contemporary art became increasingly attractive to those seeking egress from conventional power structures, it also developed into an apparatus that systematically deprives its actors of any real agency in the world.

    In order for art to have substantial and credible traction on anything beyond or larger than itself, it is necessary decisively to exit contemporary art—and therefore to renounce contemporary art’s logic of escape.

    But what could this art other to contemporary art’s paradigm of escape be? What new kinds of social structure and distributions of power would support it? On the basis of a forceful analysis of the deadlock in contemporary art today, this book sets out the parameters for a new conceptualization of art’s agency in the world of tomorrow

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    "To the 'Change after office, and received my watch from the watch-maker, and a very fine one it is, given me by Briggs, the scrivener. But, Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs upon me still, that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand, in the coach, all this afternoon, and seeing what o'clock it is one hundred times, and am apt to think with myself, how could I be so long without one, though I remember, since, I had one and found it a trouble, and resolved to carry one no more about me while I lived." ~ Samuel Pepys, 13 May 1665

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    “Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."

    "I see." The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.

    "There's the First Law of Kipple," he said. "'Kipple drives out nonkipple.' Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody here to fight the kipple."

    "So it has taken over completely," the girl finished. She nodded. "Now I understand."

    "Your place, here," he said, "this apartment you've picked--it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apts. But--" He broke off.

    "But what?"

    Isidore said, "We can't win."

    "Why not?" [...]

    "No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

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    Self esteem is sold to you as an inalienable right, not something to be earned; and if you don't have self-esteem it's because fake society made you feel bad about yourself. But fake society also made you feel good about yourself, it propped you up. The reason you got an A and not an F and believed it is because you actually believe you are an A kind of guy, Math, English, History, Science, PE, and Lunch notwithstanding. A, not F. But if everyone deserves it, it has no value. Which is why getting it is unsatisfying.
    Projection is ordinary. Person A projects at person B, hoping tovalidate something about person A by the response of person B. However, person B, not wanting to be an obejct of someone elses ego and guarding against existential terror constructs a personality which protects his ego and maintain a certain sense of a robust and real self that is different and separate from person A. Sadly, this robust and real self, cut off by defenses of character from the rest of the world, is quite vulnerable and fragile given that it is imaginary and propped up through external feed back. Person B is dimly aware of this and defends against it all the more, even desperately projecting his anxieties back onto person A, with the hope of shoring up his ego with salubrious validation. All of this happens without A or B acknowledging it, of course. Because to face up to it consciously is shocking, in that this is all anybody is doing or can do and it seems absurd when you realize how pathetic it is.

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    The Mithras worshipers called themselves “those united by the handshake.”
    .

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    “I know who I am,” replied Don Quixote, “and I know that I may be not only those I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and even all the Nine Worthies, since my achievements surpass all that they have done all together and each of them on his own account.”
    .

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  15. #95
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    "Baywatch supports impossible standards that women are pressured to follow."

    Everyone knows these women were selected because they are hot, that's the point. They represent ideals of a certain kind. How badly will "regular" women's self-esteem be mangled if they can't be ideals? I think they'll be fine.

    Will more women want to dye their hair blonde? Get implants? Probably. Will this end up destroying America? Probably not. Will it set impossible standards for women, turn men impotent when confronted by A cups? No. Why would Baywatch do it if pornography can't?

    Pamela Anderson isn't the problem. CJ is the problem. She doesn't exist.

    It's conceivable that with the right supplies, you could look like Pamela Anderson. This won't destroy society. What women can't do is look and live like CJ on a lifeguard's income.

    But Baywatch convinces people that there is a certain level of ordinary materialism that everyone can have. "This is what it $20,000 a year looks like."

    That's what's going to destroy America.
    Projection is ordinary. Person A projects at person B, hoping tovalidate something about person A by the response of person B. However, person B, not wanting to be an obejct of someone elses ego and guarding against existential terror constructs a personality which protects his ego and maintain a certain sense of a robust and real self that is different and separate from person A. Sadly, this robust and real self, cut off by defenses of character from the rest of the world, is quite vulnerable and fragile given that it is imaginary and propped up through external feed back. Person B is dimly aware of this and defends against it all the more, even desperately projecting his anxieties back onto person A, with the hope of shoring up his ego with salubrious validation. All of this happens without A or B acknowledging it, of course. Because to face up to it consciously is shocking, in that this is all anybody is doing or can do and it seems absurd when you realize how pathetic it is.

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    So widespread was slavery in the Mediterranean and the Arabic world that even today regular greetings reference human trafficking. All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, “schiavo,” from a Venetian dialect. “Ciao,” as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean “hello”; it means “I am your slave.”.
    .

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  18. #98
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    "Yet no true mystic will ever make his experiences in dreams the basis of any authoritative account of the higher world. Such dreams must be merely considered as providing the first hint of a higher development. Very soon and as a further result, the student's dreams will no longer remain beyond the reach of intellectual guidance as heretofore, but on the contrary, will be mentally controlled and supervised like the impressions and conceptions of waking consciousness. The difference between dream and waking consciousness grows ever smaller. The dreamer remains awake in the fullest sense of the word during his dream life; that is, he is aware of his mastery and control over his own vivid mental activity.

    During our dreams we are actually in a world other than that of our senses; but with undeveloped spiritual organs we can form none other than the confused conceptions of it described above. It is only in so far present for us as, for instance, the world of sense could be for a being equipped with no more than rudimentary eyes. That is why we can see nothing in this world but counterfeits and reflections of daily life. The latter are perceptible to us because our own soul paints its daily experiences in pictorial form into the substance of which that other world consists. It must be clearly understood that in addition to our ordinary conscious work-a-day life we lead a second, unconscious life in that other world. We engrave in it all our thoughts and perceptions. These tracings only become visible when the lotus flowers are developed. Now, in every human being there are slender rudiments of these lotus flowers. We cannot perceive by means of them during waking consciousness because the impressions made on them are very faint. We cannot see the stars during the daytime for a similar reason: their visibility is extinguished by the mighty glare of the sun. Thus, too, the faint spiritual impressions cannot make themselves felt in the face of the powerful impressions received through the senses.

    Now, when the gate of the senses is closed during sleep, these other impressions begin to emerge confusedly, and the dreamer becomes aware of experiences in another world. But as already explained, these experiences consist at first merely of pictures engraved in the spiritual world by our mental activity attached to the physical senses. Only developed lotus flowers make it possible for manifestations not derived from the physical world to be imprinted in the same way. And then the etheric body, when developed, brings full knowledge concerning these engraved impressions derived from other worlds.

    This is the beginning of life and activity in a new world, and at this point esoteric training must set the student a twofold task. To begin with, he must learn to take stock of everything he observes in his dreams, exactly as though he were awake. Then, if successful in this, he is led to make the same observations during ordinary waking consciousness. He will so train his attention and receptivity for these spiritual impressions that they need no longer vanish in the face of the physical impressions, but will always be at hand for him and reach him in addition to the others."

    --Rudolf Steiner

    http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/...010_index.html

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

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    I've decided to give you an hour of modem literature . . .

    - And now here is a discourse in prose on the future of poetry:

    All ancient poetry culminated in Greek poetry, harmonious Life.

    - From Greece to the romantic movement - in the Middle Ages - there are men of letters, versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it's all rhymed prose, a game, the enfeeblement and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is the pure, strong, great man - If his rhymes had been effaced, and his hemistitches got mixed up, today the Divine Fool would be as unknown as any old author of Origins. After Racine the game gets crumby. It has been going on for two thousand years!

    Neither joke nor paradox. My reason inspires me with more certitude on this subject than any Young-France ever had with rage. Besides, newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors: one is at home, and there's plenty of time.

    Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The Critics!! The Romantics? who proved so clearly that the song is very seldom the work, that is to say, the idea sung and intended by the singer.

    For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs on to the stage.

    If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming themselves to be the authors of them!

    In Greece, I say, verses and lyres give rhythm to action. After that, music and rhymes are a game, a pastime. The curious are charmed with the study of this past: many of them delight in reviving these antiquities - that's their affair Universal mind has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men would pick up a part of these fruits of the brain: they acted through them, they wrote books through them: and so things went on, since man did not work on himself, either not yet being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Writers, civil servants - author, creator, poet, that man never existed!

    The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, puts it to the test, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every brain a natural development takes place; so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; there are plenty of others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! - But the soul has to be made monstrous, that's the point: after the fashion of the comprachicos, if you like! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.

    I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.

    The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself,he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed - the great learned one! - among men. - For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul - which was rich to begin with - more than any other man! He reaches the unknown, and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed! . . .

    - To continue:

    So, then, the poet really is the thief of fire.

    He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he must see to it that his inventions can be smelt, felt, heard. If what he brings back from down there has form, he brings forth form; if it is formless, he brings forth formlessness. A language has to be found-tor that matter, every word being an idea, the time of the universal languages will come! One has to be an academician - deader than a fossil - to finish a dictionary of any language. Weak-minded people, beginning by thinking about the first letter of the alphabet, would soon rush into madness!

    This [new] language would be of the soul, for the soul, containing everything smells, sounds, colours; thought latching on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time: he would produce more than the formulation of his thought or the measurement of his march towards Progress! An enormity who has become normal, absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplier of progress!

    This future will, as you see, be materialistic - Always filled with Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to endure. Essentially, it will be Greek poetry again, in a way.

    Eternal art will have its function, since poets are citizens. Poetry will no longer rhyme with action; it will be ahead of it!

    Poets like this will exist! When the unending servitude of woman is broken, when she lives by and for herself, when man - hitherto abominable - has given her her freedom, she too will be a poet! Woman will discover part of the unknown! Will her world of ideas be different from ours? She will discover things strange and unfathomable, repulsive and delicious. We shall take them unto ourselves, we shall understand them.

    Meanwhile let us ask the poet for the new - in ideas and in forms. All the bright boys will imagine they can soon satisfy this demand: - is not so!

    The first romantics were seers without quite realizing it: the cultivation of their souls began accidentally: abandoned locomotives, but with their fires still alight, which the rails still carry along for a while. - Sometimes Lamartine is a seer, but strangled by the old form. Hugo, who is too ham, really has VISION in his last works: Les Miserables is a real poem. I have Les Chatiments with me; Stella shows the limit of Hugo's vision. Too many Belmontets and Lamennais, Jehovahs and columns, old cracked enormities.

    Musset is fourteen times execrable to us suffering generations carried away by visions - to whom his angelic cloth is an insult! O! the insipid tales and proverbs! O the Nuits! O Rolla, O Namouna, O the Chalice! it is all French, that is, detestable to the highest degree; French, not Parisian! More work of the evil genius that inspired Rabelais, Voltaire, Jean La Fontaine, with M. Taine's commentary! Springlike, the wit of Musset! Charming, his love! There's ename painting and solid poetry for you! French poetry will be enjoyed for a long time - but in France. Every grocer's boy can reel off a Rollaesque speech, every budding priest has the five hundred rhymes hidden away in the secrecy of a notebook. At fifteen, these outbursts of passion make boys lecherous, at sixteen they are already content to recite them with feeling; at eighteen, even at seventeen, every schoolboy who has the ability does a Rolla, writes a Rolla! Perhaps some still die of it. Musset could not do anything: there were visions behind the gauze of the curtains he closed his eyes. French, sloppy, dragged from barroom to schoolroom desk, the fine corpse is dead, and henceforth let us not even bother to awaken it with our execrations!

    The second Romantics are very seeing: Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle Théodore de Banville. But because examining the invisible and hearing the un-heard-of is quite different from recapturing the spirit of dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer, king of poets,a real God! Unluckily he lived in too artistic a circle; and the form which is so much praised in him is trivial. Inventions from the unknown demand new forms.

    Broken-in to the old forms, among the simpletons, A. Renaud - has done his Rolla - L. Grandet - has done his Rolla; the Gauls and the Mussets, G. Lafenestre, Coran, Cl. Popelin, Soulary, L. Salles; the scholars, Marc, Aicard, Theuriet; the dead and the imbeciles, Autran, Barbier, L. Pichat, Lemoyne, the Deschamps, the Des Essarts; the journalists, L. Cladel, Robert Luzarches, X. de Ricard; the fantasists, C. Mendès; the bohemians; the women; the talents, Léon Dierx and SuIly-Prudhomme, Coppée - the new school, called Parnassian, possesses two seers: Albert Merat and Paul Verlaine, a real poet. - So there you are. Thus I am working to make myself a seer.
    .

  20. #100

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    ''Once, when I was living in Paris, I locked myself out of my apartment by mistake when bleach-blonding my hair for a trashy holiday in Mykonos. I’d come to meet the postman and the door closed behind me. I only had my wallet in one hand, and was wearing boxer shorts, a tank top, and nothing else, not even shoes. I remember walking down the stairs, my hair burning with bleach, and running across the small square facing my apartment, and dunking my head in the ornamental fountain to save my scalp. The terrace was full of well-coiffed Parisians drinking their (bad) coffee, all faced outward, graced with the spectacle of a man in his underclothes washing his hair under the 19th-century statuary. I think everyone found it incredibly inelegant. It looked bad. I ended up having to board the subway in this state, half-drenched, to pick up the extra keys in another part of the city. I remember the stares and the laughs and buzz of conversation around me––I had created again a spectacle. I certainly wasn’t dressed to go out en ville.''

    .....''Last night, I stood in a packed Kreuzberg bar festive with young voices from every part of Europe, and the feeling of having escaped from something arrested me––I was full of the awareness that beautiful places don’t, on their own, make you happy. Nor do ones where you are jostled along by the crowd without a moment to breathe and think. What makes for happiness is to be somewhere which is still very much in a process of transformation, where the paint hasn’t yet dried, where the codes for judgment and appraisal are not yet fixed. It also needs to be a place where there’s plenty of creative thought and good conversation. A few days pass in Berlin and you get used to the ugliness, and you’re left with something much more valuable––a reprieve, at least for now, from the grind of appearances and accumulation.''

  21. #101
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    Default From Direction For Our Times, Volume 7

    Words of St. Daniel, in Heaven, to us, about Heaven"

    "My brothers and sisters have difficulty separating from their earthly lives. You must begin to see your soul as a separate entity from this world. Your body, your life here, these are the vehicles with which your soul is sanctified. So your life is really a means to an end. You are here to gain eternity. You are here to serve God during your exile from heaven. You have been told you are to earn heaven here and that is true. But dear friends, let me assure you, having been in both places, we, none of us, merit heaven. When you live for Christ, earth is a joyful place to be. When you serve Christ on earth and come to heaven? There are no words. I cannot convey it to you except to say that every one of your greatest, most beyond belief hopes for heaven will be satisfied and your experience here will so far exceed that expectation that you will not believe you ever harbored hopes so low. Imagine being able to fly with no assistance except your will. You could fly as high, as low, as fast, as slow, and as often as you liked. You could go anywhere. The wind on your face would fill you with rejoicing. You would laugh aloud for the joy of it. You would delight in the joy of others who also experienced this perfect ability.* Imagine never feeling too cold or too hot. Always you feel perfectly balanced with the elements, unless you suddenly crave warmth or cold. Then it is there for your enjoyment. I am probably making a mistake by trying to convey to you the smallest portion of heaven because it is impossible. Yet I feel I must give you some idea of why you are to be selfless for a small time. Imagine being with the people you loved, but always with the most perfect understanding of each other. What adventures you will share.
    Dear brothers and sisters, never worry about death. Please. Death is the greatest liberation you can imagine. God has the day of your death already established. It will come. And you will be ready if you serve Christ. You will have no regrets. You would not want to surrender your body to Jesus and feel as though you missed the whole point of your life. Serve, my beloved friends. Serve. Serve Jesus. Serve each other. Serve strangers. Serve."

    _____________________________
    [all of Volume Seven that this is from can be read, here.]
    Also, clicking on "Languages" on this page, at top, it's available to read online free in these languages:
    Spanish
    Chinese
    Hrvatski (Croatian)
    Danish
    Dutch
    French
    Magyar (Hungarian)
    Italian
    Indonesian
    Lietuvos (Lithuanian)
    Norsk (Norwegian)
    Polish
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    Rysyjski (Russian)
    juːˈkreɪniən (Ukrainian)

    ____________________
    *I have had a recurring dream of this, flying like that, including recently.
    "A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope."
    ........ G. ........... K. ............... C ........ H ........ E ...... S ........ T ...... E ........ R ........ T ........ O ........ N ........


    "Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along
    by every wind of teaching, looks like the only
    attitude acceptable to today's standards."
    - Pope Benedict the XVI, "The Dictatorship of Relativism"

    .
    .
    .


  22. #102
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    Be then his love accursed, since love or hate,
    To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
    Nay, cursed be thou; since against his thy will
    Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
    Me miserable! which way shall I fly
    Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
    Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
    And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
    Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
    To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
    O, then, at last relent: Is there no place
    Left for repentance, none for pardon left?
    None left but by submission; and that word
    Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
    Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced
    With other promises and other vaunts
    Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
    The Omnipotent. Ay me! they little know
    How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
    Under what torments inwardly I groan,
    While they adore me on the throne of Hell.
    With diadem and scepter high advanced,
    The lower still I fall, only supreme
    In misery: Such joy ambition finds.
    But say I could repent, and could obtain,
    By act of grace, my former state; how soon
    Would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay
    What feigned submission swore? Ease would recant
    Vows made in pain, as violent and void.
    For never can true reconcilement grow,
    Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep:
    Which would but lead me to a worse relapse
    And heavier fall: so should I purchase dear
    Short intermission bought with double smart.
    This knows my Punisher; therefore as far
    From granting he, as I from begging, peace;

    -- Milton

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

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    Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself. There was an intrenchment on the summit, and going down into the fosse I walked round it slowly to recover breath. On the south-western side there was a spot where the outer bank had partially slipped, leaving a gap. There the view was over a broad plain, beautiful with wheat, and inclosed by a perfect amphitheatre of green hills. Through these hills there was one narrow groove, or pass, southwards, where the white clouds seemed to close in the horizon. Woods hid the scattered hamlets and farmhouses, so that I was quite alone.

    I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness–I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air–its pureness, which is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke to the sea: though so far, in my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory. Then I addressed the sun, desiring the soul equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, for pure colour is rest of heart. By all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it, and the word is a rude sign to the feeling, but I know no other.

    By the blue heaven, by the rolling sun bursting through untrodden space, a new ocean of ether every day unveiled. By the fresh and wandering air encompassing the world; by the sea sounding on the shore–the green sea white-flecked at the margin and the deep ocean; by the strong earth under me. Then, returning, I prayed by the sweet thyme, whose little flowers I touched with my hand; by the slender grass; by the crumble of dry chalky earth I took up and let fall through my fingers. Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass, the thyme flower, breathing the earth-encircling air, thinking of the sea and the sky, holding out my hand for the sunbeams to touch it, prone on the sward in token of deep reverence, thus I prayed that I might touch to the unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity.
    .

  25. #105

  26. #106
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    The traditionalist is one who is afraid, who takes cover, who doesn't face up to his responsibilities, who remembers wistfully, who takes his ideas from the most prudent daily papers, who doesn't dare question his son about his obvious gonorrhea, who thinks he can curb the sprightly sexuality of his sixteen year-old daughter by locking her inside the house with the heavy chains of his paternal doting.

    While he goes of—hypocritically—to smoke his pipe in a brothel and tell the Homeric tale of his wife's failings upon the pillow of some prostitute or other, his daughter, shut in the house, throws the window and her legs open to the student who, from the window opposite, explains to her what Latin virtue really means. — F.T. Marinetti, Critical Writings

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    " TEN DAYS LATER -- She accuses ME of being the cause of our disaster! She says, with apparent sincerity and truth, that the Serpent assured her that the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts. I said I was innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts. She said the Serpent informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative term meaning an aged and moldy joke. I turned pale at that, for I have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them could have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed that they were new when I made them. She asked me if I had made one just at the time of the catastrophe. I was obliged to admit that I had made one to myself, though not aloud. It was this. I was thinking about the Falls, and I said to myself, "How wonderful it is to see that vast body of water tumble down there!" Then in an instant a bright thought flashed into my head, and I let it fly, saying, "It would be a deal more wonderful to see it tumble UP there!" -- and I was just about to kill myself with laughing at it when all nature broke loose in war and death and I had to flee for my life. "There," she said, with triumph, "that is just it; the Serpent mentioned that very jest, and called it the First Chestnut, and said it was coeval with the creation." Alas, I am indeed to blame. Would that I were not witty; oh, that I had never had that radiant thought!"

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
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    One June evening in 1843 a young woman, Jane O’Meara, was travelling to London on the recently constructed Great Western Railway through a terrifying storm. Thunder roared and lightning flashed across the countryside, while torrents of sheeting rain attacked the windows – so Jane was surprised when one of the elderly gentlemen travelling in her First Class carriage asked if she would mind him putting the rain-blurred window down. He wanted to take a look outside.

    Politely consenting, Jane was still more surprised when her travelling companion thrust his head and shoulders out into the storm and kept them resolutely there for nearly nine minutes. The old man was evidently engrossed by what he saw, and when he finally drew back in, drenched, the young woman could not resist the temptation to put her own head out of the window– to be astonished by a blurred cacophony of sound and brightness. The train was standing at that moment in Bristol Temple Meads Station, and the mingled impression of steam, sulphurous smoke and the flickering glow from the engine’s firebox overwhelmed her – ‘such a chaos of elemental and artificial lights and noises,’ she later wrote, ‘I never saw or heard, or expect to see or hear.’

    Almost a year later, going to look at the new pictures being hung in that summer’s Royal Academy exhibition, Jane O’Meara suddenly realised who the eccentric traveller must have been. For hanging on the gallery wall, depicted in swirling and unconventional swathes of paint, was the same scary yet compelling vortex of light and turbulence that she had seen from her GWR carriage window – Rain, Steam & Speed by J.M.W.Turner.

    By 1844 Joseph Mallord William Turner was a renowned, controversial and highly successful artist. He was born sixty-nine years earlier to a poor barber-wigmaker near London’s Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, and a mentally fragile mother who ended her days in the Bethlehem hospital for lunatics– ‘Bedlam’. Turner retained his gruff Cockney accent all his life, along with a shrewd commercial spirit that dated back to the days when he exhibited his first paintings in his father’s shop window at one shilling (5p) each.

    Turner’s wild, tumultuous and almost abstract paintings were denounced as ‘mad’ by many Victorians. But the French painters Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Degas would later pay tribute to the ‘the illustrious Turner’ as the artist whose interest in ‘the fugitive effects of light’ inspired their own great revolution in ways of seeing – Impressionism. Monet came to London as a young artist to study Rain, Steam & Speed which, from the moment of its first hanging in the Royal Academy, was acknowledged by both its admirers and its detractors to be an extraordinary creation. ‘The world has never seen anything like this picture,’ declared the novelist William Thackeray.

    The central feature of the picture was the glowing ‘chaos’ of light and energy that had shocked Jane O’Meara in Temple Meads Station – transposed by Turner to Brunel’s famous bridge at Maidenhead in the Thames Valley, one of the artist’s favourite locales for sketching. Enveloped in smoke and mist, the dark and sinister funnel of the locomotive is dashing forwards out of the canvas, a black stovepipe cutting ferociously through the slanting rain, while in front of the careering train– only visible if you step up to the canvas and peer closely– runs a terrified little brown hare,the creature that used to symbolise speed in the age before machines.

    Rain, Steam & Speed now hangs in the National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square. Standing back from its foaming confusion of colours and textures, you cannot help but be struck by the majesty of the world’s first great railway painting. You can also recapture the excitement of Jane O’Meara, putting her head out into the storm to see what had caught the visionary eye of Joseph Mallord William Turner.

  29. #109
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    Though social psychologist Elaine Hatfield is one of the nicest people you could ever meet, her life has been filled with controversy, mostly because of her independent streak. When she was a young professor at the University of Minnesota in 1963, there were two rules. Women were not allowed to hang their coats in the faculty cloak room. Women were not allowed to dine at the Faculty Club. One Monday evening, Hatfield decided to challenge the rules. She and fellow psychologist Ellen Berscheid approached the table where their male colleagues were sitting. When we walked into the Faculty Club and chorused: “May we sit down?” our six colleagues couldn’t have been more courtly. “Of course! Do sit down.” But, Colleague #1 glanced at his watch and declared, “Oh, do excuse me I have to run.” Colleague #2 shifted uneasily, then remembered that his wife was picking him up. Colleague #3 snatched up a dinner roll and said that he better walk out with his friend. The remaining men realized that they’d better be going, too. Within minutes Ellen and I were sitting alone at the elegant table, surrounded by six heaping plates. Shamed but undeterred, they kept returning to the Faculty Club until they finally obtained their own table. Eventually, Hatfield became a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she pioneered research into the psychology of falling in love.
    .

  30. #110

  31. #111
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    "I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone. For at the last it came to Marion that she was parting from me for ever. That overbore all other things, had turned our last hour to anguish. She forgot for a time the prospect of moving into a new house, she forgot the outrage on her proprietorship and pride. For the first time in her life she really showed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time, perhaps, they really came to her. She began to weep slow, reluctant tears. I came into her room, and found her asprawl on the bed, weeping.“I didn’t know,” she cried. “Oh! I didn’t understand!”

    “I’ve been a fool. All my life is a wreck!

    “I shall be alone!...MUTNEY! Mutney, don’t leave me! Oh! Mutney! I didn’t understand.”

    I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments in those last hours together that at last, too late, the longed—for thing had happened and Marion had come alive. A new—born hunger for me lit her eyes.

    “Don’t leave me!” she said, “don’t leave me!” She clung to me; she kissed me with tear—salt lips.

    I was promised now and pledged, and I hardened my heart against this impossible dawn. Yet it seems to me that there were moments when it needed but a cry, but one word to have united us again for all our lives. Could we have united again? Would that passage have enlightened us for ever or should we have fallen back in a week or so into the old estrangement, the old temperamental opposition?

    Of that there is now no telling. Our own resolve carried us on our predestined way. We behaved more and more like separating lovers, parting inexorably, but all the preparations we had set going worked on like a machine, and we made no attempt to stop them. My trunks and boxes went to the station. I packed my bag with Marion standing before me. We were like children who had hurt each other horribly in sheer stupidity, who didn’t know now how to remedy it. We belonged to each other immensely–immensely. The cab came to the little iron gate.

    “Good—bye!” I said.

    “Good—bye.”

    For a moment we held one another in each other’s arms and kissed–incredibly without malice. We heard our little servant in the passage going to open the door. For the last time we pressed ourselves to one another. We were not lovers nor enemies, but two human souls in a frank community of pain. I tore myself from her.

    “Go away,” I said to the servant, seeing that Marion had followed me down.

    I felt her standing behind me as I spoke to the cab man.

    I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it started jumped up, craned out and looked at the door.

    It was wide open, but she had disappeared....

    I wonder–I suppose she ran upstairs.

    X

    So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie, who was waiting for me in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform, a bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walk over the fields in the twilight. I had expected an immense sense of relief where at last the stresses of separation were over, but now I found I was beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the profoundest persuasion of irreparable error. The dusk and somber Marion were so alike, her sorrow seemed to be all about me. I had to hold myself to my own plans, to remember that I must keep faith with Effie, with Effie who had made no terms, exacted no guarantees, but flung herself into my hands.

    We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of deepening gold and purple, and Effie was close beside me always, very close, glancing up ever and again at my face.

    Certainly she knew I grieved for Marion, that ours was now no joyful reunion. But she showed no resentment and no jealousy. Extraordinarily, she did not compete against Marion. Never once in all our time together did she say an adverse word of Marion....

    She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me with the same instinctive skill that some women will show with the trouble of a child. She made herself my glad and pretty slave and handmaid; she forced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet at the back of it all Marion remained, stupid and tearful and infinitely distressful, so that I was almost intolerably unhappy for her–for her and the dead body of my married love."

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
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    "What is it that you wish to contribute and to experience as our species, and as each of us individually, makes the evolutionary transition from the five-sensory perception of the Universe to the multisensory, from evolution through the five-sensory exploration of physical reality to evolution through responsible choice with the guidance and assistance of nonphysical guides and Teachers? Are you comfortable with the thought that the Universe is alien and dead and no more than your five senses can detect? How does your heart respond to the thought that the Universe is alive and compassionate and that with it and with other souls of great power and Light you learn through the process of cocreating the reality that you experience?Look at the probable futures that are unfolding before our world that is built upon the energy of the personality, and the probable futures that would unfold before a world that is built upon the energy of the soul. Which do you choose?"

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
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    Meanwhile, back in Medina, an altogether more dangerous adversary had been biding his time. Ibn al-Zubayr, as grim and austere as ever, had very publicly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new Amir. As a result, he, rather than any relative of Ali, had emerged as the most prominent opponent of the Umayyads. Tempers in Medina were not helped by the fact that Yazid’s representative in the oasis was none other than the fabulously venal and slippery Marwan. The locals’ mistrust of their new governor ran particularly deep. Rumours abounded that it was he, back in the last calamitous days of Uthman’s rule, who had advised his uncle to double-cross the Egyptian war band that had come to visit the Amir, and thereby goaded it into becoming a lynch-mob. Nothing Marwan had done since, during all the years of his tenure as governor of the Hijaz, had helped to improve his reputation for double-dealing. Negotiations between Ibn al-Zubayr and the Umayyads grew increasingly fractious. By 683 they had broken down for good. Ibn al-Zubayr damned the new Amir as a usurper. As Marwan fled Medina for Syria, Yazid sent a task force in the opposite direction. The rebels made frantic efforts to gird their oasis with fortifications, but their defiance was doomed to prove no more effective than had been that of Husayn at Karbala. Despite some brave resistance, Yazid’s army stormed the makeshift ditches and ramparts, wiped out the defenders, and seized the city. The stories of what happened next grew ever more blood-bolstered with the telling. The City of the Prophet, it is said, was put to the sword for three days; and nine months on from the sack, over a thousand babies were born.

    Ibn al-Zubayr, however, was not among the dead. Implacable in his piety, and “full of threats against the Syrians, whom he claimed were transgressors of the law,” he had resolved to make a stand that would truly challenge his opponents to do their worst. Accordingly, rather than wait in Medina to confront Yazid’s strike-force, he had headed for a spot that was even more redolent of holiness: the “House of God.” Muslim historians, writing more than a century after the fact, would take for granted, of course, that such a sanctuary was to be identified with Mecca; but nowhere in the writings of contemporaries is this actually said. Instead, all is studied indeterminacy. “He came to a certain locality in the South where their sanctuary was, and lived there.” So wrote one Christian chronicler about Ibn al-Zubayr. Evidently, then, the precise location of the Arabs’ desert shrine remained as much a puzzle to outsiders as it had ever been. Nevertheless, there were certain suggestive clues. It was noted by one bishop, for instance, that the Muhajirun of Iraq, when they bowed to pray, did so towards the West—“towards the Ka’ba, the primordial wellspring of their race”—while those in Alexandria turned to the East. Muslim tradition too, rather startlingly, recorded something very similar. The founder of the first mosque in Kufa, so it was said, had fired an arrow to determine the qibla—the direction of prayer—and it had landed not to the south of the mosque, in a line with Mecca, but somewhere to its west. So, although no contemporary tells us explicitly where Ibn al-Zubayr took refuge, the weight of evidence would suggest a location to the north of the Hijaz, midway between Kufa and Alexandria. Since this is precisely the region with which Muhammad himself appears to have been most familiar, and since Ibn al-Zubayr was consciously aiming to defend the Prophet’s legacy, the likelihood must surely be that the House of God in which he barricaded himself stood not in Mecca but between Medina and Palestine: in that “blessed place” named by the Prophet himself as Bakka.

    Yet whether all the Arabs, a full half-century on from his death, would necessarily have revered it is another matter. The notion inherited from Jews and Christians—that a single shrine might be possessed of a holiness so awesome as to merit pilgrimage from every corner of the world—competed in their minds with a radically opposed tradition. All very helpful of a bishop to identify the sanctuary of the Muhajirun as “the Ka’ba”—except, of course, that there were Ka’bas reaching from Nabataea to Najran. To glimpse the sacred in a feature even as relatively mundane as a spring, or a well, or an oddly coloured stone was a time-hallowed instinct among the Arabs; and yet, while this indisputably spoke of a sensitivity to the numinous, it also betrayed a certain cavalier attitude towards the status of specific shrines. Over the course of the generations, sanctuaries had repeatedly been staked out as hallowed—haram—and then just as abruptly been abandoned. Even the Prophet, while trying to define the direction in which his followers should pray, had been capable of the occasional volte-face: “The foolish people will say, ‘What has turned them away from the prayer direction they used to face?’*” What the original qibla might have been, and what its replacement, the Prophet had not thought to specify—but that one sanctuary had been promoted, and at the expense of another, was clear enough.a No wonder then, descending upon the House of God, that Ibn al-Zubayr should have been concerned to make “his voice heard from a distance.” After all, with time passing by, with those who could remember the Prophet slipping into oblivion, and with the double-dealing Umayyads preening themselves amid the magnificent and seductive monuments of Christian Jerusalem, who was to say how long the memory—let alone the primacy—of Bakka could be kept alive?

    In the event, two accidents would serve to boost Ibn al-Zubayr in his ambitions for the site. The first of these, paradoxically, might have seemed to spell its doom. In the summer of 683, with Yazid’s army camped out before the House of God, the Ka’ba, it is said, caught fire and burned to the ground. Some blamed this calamity on torches hurled by the Syrians, others on Ibn al-Zubayr’s own clumsiness; but all are agreed on the ruinous extent of the damage. And so, perhaps, the sanctuary might well have been left, as nothing but blackened rubble—had not the second accident then intervened. Yazid, back in Syria, keeled over and died. The news, when it reached the task force, left them abruptly shiftless. With Yazid’s death, they felt themselves doubly bereft: not only of their imam but of the favour of God. Not so Ibn al-Zubayr, of course. He, with his great enemy dead, could now feel even more soaringly justified in all his pretensions. When Yazid’s army, scouting around for a new Amir, promised him their loyalty if he would only accompany them to Syria, Ibn al-Zubayr indignantly refused. He had higher things by far on his mind.

    As the Syrians drifted aimlessly away from their siege, Ibn al-Zubayr set about constructing a sanctuary that could serve, without any further compromise or ambiguity, as a fit object for the veneration of all the Faithful. Taking a pick in his own hands, it is said, he levelled what remained of the incinerated shrine and raised an entirely new one in its place. The whiff of paradox in this was palpable, even by the standards of the Arabs—a people who traditionally had always been perfectly content to abandon sanctuaries with barely a second thought. A question as obvious as it was unsettling shadowed Ibn al-Zubayr’s labours: how precisely could his new House of God be reckoned timeless when it had only just been erected? His propagandists, it would appear, had not stinted in providing answers. Centuries on from Ibn al-Zubayr’s great building project, fantastical stories of the discoveries that were made during the course of the excavations would still be lovingly repeated. It was said that the original foundations, laid down by Abraham, had been miraculously brought to light. A mysterious text had been found, guaranteeing divine favour for all who visited the sanctuary. Most sensationally of all, when a black stone had been dug up, the whole sanctuary had begun to tremble. On this stone, so some reported, had been stamped the very name and title of God: “I am Allah, the Lord of Bakka.”

    And as with the House of God, so with the great empire beyond: Ibn al-Zubayr aimed to set it on new foundations. Just as fire had left the Ka’ba a crumbling ruin, fitna had come to ravage the world. In Syria, Yazid had been succeeded by his son—an infant so sickly that he had died after only a couple of months on the throne. Amid the resulting power vacuum, the Arabs had once again begun to turn upon themselves. Partisans of Ali, in mourning for Husayn, vented their sense of mingled grief and shame upon the garrisons of the hated Umayyads. Kharijite war bands, fanning out across southern Iraq, renewed their campaign of shadowy and calculated terror. In Kufa, a charismatic figure whom posterity would damn as “Mukhtar the Deceiver” seized the city’s treasury, distributed its entire reserve of nine million coins to the poor, and urged a revolution in which all men were to be equal, “claiming he was a prophet.” He provoked particular excitement by parading a brocade-draped chair, which his enemies ridiculed as a piece of junk looted from Ali’s attic, but which enthusiasts, taking a leaf out of a thoroughly Jewish book, hailed as a manifestation of the presence of God Himself: the Shekhinah. The presence of this fabulous totem on campaign, either carried on a grey donkey or borne aloft into battle by litter-bearers, proved, not surprisingly, a potent boost to Mukhtar’s record as both a general and a prophet. It helped as well that Mukhtar himself, whenever he charged his enemies, was said to be accompanied by a bodyguard of angels mounted on horses of flame.

    In the face of such wild and competing enthusiasms, the frameworks of governance just lately restored by Mu’awiya began once again to buckle. The antagonisms unleashed by the fitna proved relentless, the hatreds bewildering, the violence exhausting and savage. Much, after all, was at stake. To the venerable thrill of tribal rivalries—still potent as these were among the various Arab emigrants—had been added whole new dimensions of chauvinism. Factionalists, when they chose an imam or a prophet to follow, were choosing as well what their fate in the next world was to be—and so it was, when they fought, that they would invariably do so to the death. Once again, as in the time of the great war between Heraclius and Khusrow, or that of the first coming of the Arabs, the sense was palpable of a conflict in which more, very much more, was at stake than mere earthly ambitions.

    Even those whose fate it was to cower as impotent bystanders before the agonies of the age were alert to this. War was far from being the only expression of God’s anger. Plague too had returned to Iraq, strewing roads with the dead and polluting the canals and rivers with corpses. Pestilence, in turn, led to famine: children with limbs “like dry sticks of wood” would graze on withered grass, while mothers, it was darkly rumoured, might feed on their own babies. “Worst of all were the looters, from whom no one could escape—for they wandered about everywhere, following their prey like gleaners, hauling them out of hidden places and stripping them of their belongings, and leaving them naked.” It could be hard to tell the difference between such bandits, the Kharijites and Mukhtar’s “cudgel-bearers.” Humanity, like monsters of the deep, was preying on itself. Events, once again, appeared to be portending the end of days.

    Certainly, whether such an eventuality were imminent or not, it was the divinely appointed duty of Ibn al-Zubayr, as Commander of the Faithful, to prepare the world for it. “Nearer to mankind their reckoning draws, and yet in heedlessness they turn away.” So the Prophet had lamented. Ibn al-Zubayr, in harkening to this ominous warning, made sure to take decisive steps. Doing as Umar and Uthman had done, and directing the affairs of the world from the depths of the desert, he sent his brother, Mus’ab, to bring order to Iraq. Mus’ab undertook this seemingly thankless commission with efficiency and relish. Mukhtar, that preacher of an unsettlingly radical egalitarianism, was briskly defeated, cornered in the governor’s palace, and put to death. His severed hand, a trophy for the faithful to admire on their way to prayers, was nailed to the side of Kufa’s mosque, while his holy chair was consigned to a bonfire. Simultaneously, across the south of Iraq, the far bloodier and more exhausting task of suppressing the Kharijites inspired Mus’ab to launch a troop surge that reached as far as the Persian uplands.

    It was not only through a counter-insurgency campaign, however, that Ibn al-Zubayr aimed to bring order to a tottering world. Not every message was to be delivered on the point of a sword. “Judgement,” so the Kharijite slogan ran, “belongs to God alone.” Ibn al-Zubayr and his lieutenants, while certainly not disputing this message, aimed to refine it: by stating with the utmost clarity just how and when it was that the judgement of God had been made known. So it was, in either 685 or 686, as the fitna continued to rage in Iraq, that one of his lieutenants minted a coin in Persia with a novel and fateful message. “Bismallah Muhammad rasul Allah,” it ran—“In the name of God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

    The potency of this slogan, amid the carnage and confusion of the times, was self-evident. Ibn al-Zubayr’s genius was to recognise, as Constantine had recognised long before him, that any lord of a great empire who claimed God’s favour must ensure that the basis of that favour stood rock solid. Military action alone would never serve to bring the fitna to an end. Only a framework of doctrines that all the combatants could accept as authentic and bestowed of God had any hope of achieving that. Hence the supreme value of the example of the Prophet. Whereas Constantine at Nicaea had been obliged to depend upon fractious and fallible bishops to stamp a particular brand of his chosen faith as orthodox, Ibn al-Zubayr had identified a far less troublesome sanction: for not only had Muhammad claimed to be a medium for divine revelation, but he was also safely dead. Ram home the point that he had authentically been a Messenger of God, and anything that could be attributed to him would perforce have to be accepted by the faithful as a truth descended from heaven. “Those who offend the Prophet,” so it had been revealed to Muhammad, “are cursed by God in this life and in the hereafter.” Here, for any warlord looking to damn his enemies, was a literal godsend. This was why, with Ibn al-Zubayr and his henchmen increasingly alert to its potential, they made ever more play with their new message: that Muhammad had truly been the Prophet of God. Far more effectively than any troop surge in Iraq, it seemed to promise them the rule of the world.

    There was, however, a problem. Ibn al-Zubayr was not the only self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful to have spotted the uses to which such a slogan might be put. Widely though he had established his authority, across Arabia, Iraq and Persia, Syria still stood defiant. There, the Umayyad cause, though scotched, had not been killed. Conditions in the wake of Yazid’s death, chaotic as they were, had been ideally suited to the talents of a schemer such as Marwan. At a tribal assembly convened at the old Ghassanid capital of Jabiya in the summer of 684, held to debate whether Ibn al-Zubayr should be acknowledged as Amir, he proposed putting the whole issue to a vote—and so finessed the proceedings that, to much astonishment, “it was his own name that came up.” Marwan, a man grown old in his pursuit of power, would have only nine months to enjoy his triumph; but already, by the time he died in the spring of 685, he had done enough to ensure that Syria, at any rate, would remain Umayyad. His successor, hailed enthusiastically by the Syrians as Amir, was also his son: a man in his forties, notorious for his golden dentures and the foul quality of his halitosis, named Abd al-Malik.

    The new Amir had talents that extended far beyond an ability to slay flies with a single breath. Abd al-Malik was very much a chip off the Umayyad block. Brutality was seamlessly fused in him with ambition, intelligence and vision. The same man who could leash a political rival, lead him around like a dog and then straddle his chest to hack off his head was also a man who could swallow his own pride sufficiently to pay tribute to the Romans in an effort to secure his northern border, and lurk patiently in Syria, leaving it to Mus’ab to crush the Kharijites and the Shi’a. Only in 689, four years after he had succeeded his father as Amir, did Abd al-Malik finally go on the offensive, doing as Julian had done long before him, and snatching after global empire by invading northern Iraq. Unlike Julian, however, he was to secure fabulous success. In early 691, beneath fluttering banners and swirling dust, he succeeded in bringing Mus’ab to defeat and death:

    The tribesman saw clearly
    the error of their ways,
    And he straightened out the smirk
    upon their faces.


    Yet Abd al-Malik, even as he trampled down the corpse of his rival, did not neglect to heed the lessons of Mus’ab’s earlier triumphs in Iraq. Smirks had to be straightened out—but so too, if the conquerors of the far-flung empire were ever to be unified as a single people, did their sense of what they owed to God. Abd al-Malik, having wrenched Iraq from Ibn al-Zubayr’s grasp, did not hesitate to purloin his slogan as well. Even as the last embers of opposition to Umayyad rule were being stamped out in Basra, new coins were starting to circulate in the city: “In the name of God,” they proclaimed, “Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

    The assertion was no less potent for appearing on the coins of an Umayyad. Startling though the sudden emphasis on the Prophet’s role must have appeared to those in the markets and counting-houses of Basra, there is no reason to doubt Abd al-Malik’s personal sincerity. Not only had he grown up in Medina—where memories of Muhammad were uniquely vivid and cherished—but his reputation for austere godliness rivalled that of Ibn al-Zubayr. Nevertheless, it is clear as well that his abrupt parading of Muhammad’s name—something that no other member of his dynasty had ever thought to do—was prompted by self-interest as well as piety. Concerned as Abd al-Malik was to spike Ibn al-Zubayr’s pretensions, he also had an eye fixed on a second adversary. Despite the expediency of the tribute that he had paid to Constantinople, it still rankled as a bitter humiliation, and one that he aimed to wipe clean. What better way, then, than by striking directly at the heart of Roman conceit? Mu’awiya, despite his unwearying appetite for dyeing the Christian empire with blood, had never thought to dispute with his adversaries the truth of their faith. Abd al-Malik, however, suffered from no such inhibition. Not for him a respectful pilgrimage to Golgotha. Rather than soothing Christian sensibilities by professing a vague brand of monotheism, he sought to rub Roman noses in the obvious inferiority of their superstitions. As surely as Mu’awiya had sought the annihilation of Constantinople’s worldly power, Abd al-Malik aimed to shred her claim to a special relationship with God. A radical—and far from easy—step to take. Just as the strategy of challenging the Romans by sea had required the building of entire fleets from scratch, disputing the highway to heaven with them would demand truly formidable feats of innovation. Out of the scattered flotsam and jetsam of beliefs left scattered by the great floodtide of Arab conquests, something coherent—something manifestly God-stamped—would have to be fashioned: in short, a religion.

    And if the enshrining of Muhammad as its founder was a start, then it was only that—a start. No better way to appreciate the full scale of what remained to be done than to visit the city where Abd al-Malik, like Mu’awiya before him, had first been saluted as Amir: Jerusalem. There, where the radiance of candles in the churches burned so bright that, by night, the entire city and the hills that surrounded it appeared as one great dazzling blaze of light, the splendour of Christianity, and the heft of its antiquity, remained intimidating things. Well might Abd al-Malik, “noting the scale of the dome of the Church of the Resurrection and its magnificence, have been moved lest it dazzle the minds of the Faithful.” Yet the possession of Jerusalem, although certainly a challenge, presented an opportunity, too. Even as Abd al-Malik was leading his armies to victory in Iraq, workmen on the Temple Mount were busy labouring to secure him an equally brilliant triumph. The ramshackle mosque sniffed at so disdainfully by Arculf had been demolished, and was now being replaced in sumptuous style. A wall was being built around the limits of the rock, to mark it out as haram, and gates set in the wall opened on to upgraded roads. Most stupefying of all, however, and most wondrously beautiful too, was an octagonal building of such prominence as to put even the Church of the Resurrection in the shade. That this was a deliberate ploy could hardly have been made any more emphatic. Not only did the dimensions of the new structure exactly replicate those of Constantine’s great church, but its piers were to be surmounted, when completed, by a vast gilded cupola. Yet, what really served to fling back in the teeth of Christians all their arrogance and their pretensions was the deliberate positioning of this same “Dome of the Rock.” Enclosed within it, its surface unadorned and bare, was the perforated expanse of stone over which the Roman authorities had permitted a ragbag of sobbing Jews to blow their rams’ horns each year. Just as the rabbis had identified this spot with the Shekhinah—the immanence of the divine on earth—Abd al-Malik and his architects attributed to it a no less awesome role. At the beginning of time, they believed, with the universe just completed, God had stood upon the rock and then ascended into heaven—leaving behind an imprint of His foot.b The end of time too would see the rock transfigured: for on the Day of Judgement all the faithful, and all the mosques across the world, and even the Ka’ba itself, were destined to travel to Jerusalem, “so that the people will cry, ‘Hail to you, who come as pilgrims, and hail to her to whom the pilgrimage is made.’*”

    Perhaps, given the seeming imminence of the End Days, it was only to be expected that Abd al-Malik should have wished to raise a monument appropriate to the climactic role in them that the Rock was destined to play. Only to be expected as well—with the “House of God” still in the hands of Ibn al-Zubayr—that he should have been reluctant to wait for the Day of Judgement before promoting it as a site of pilgrimage. He even went so far as to furnish it with souvenirs of Abraham. As a result, the local Muhajirun had no need to travel into the desert to wonder at relics of their august forefather. Instead, they could journey to the Dome of the Rock and see hanging there the desiccated horns of the ram that Abraham had supposedly offered up in sacrifice on the very spot. Sure enough, among his immediate subjects, Abd al-Malik’s grand projet proved a quite stunning success. “All the rough Arabs of Syria,” so a Kharijite sneered, “go to it on pilgrimage.” What was the Dome of the Rock, so locals might boast, if not “the holiest spot on earth”?

    Yet there was in this same vaunt a nagging irony. Flattering to Abd al-Malik it may have been—but it also had the potential to be lethal to the broader sweep of his ambitions. It was all very well for inscriptions repeated across the Dome of the Rock to echo the slogan on his coins and proclaim that Muhammad was the “Messenger of God”—but it begged a most awkward question. Since the Prophet had never stepped foot in Jerusalem, how could any notion of the Temple Mount as “the holiest spot on earth” be squared with Abd al-Malik’s simultaneous promotion of Muhammad as the founder of his infant religion? Inexorably though the years had slipped by, and hazy though memories of the Prophet had become, yet there could be no forgetting that he had dwelt beyond the limits of Palestine. Clearly, then, Abd al-Malik could not afford to do as the Roman and Persian authorities had done, and simply leave the depths of the desert well alone. He had no option but to go after Ibn al-Zubayr. His rival’s continued hold upon the holy places where the Prophet had received his revelations affronted not only Abd al-Malik’s authority but that of the heavens themselves. Jerusalem on its own would never be adequate to the full purposes of his mission. He urgently needed Arabia as well. Otherwise, without it, what prospect of fashioning what Abd al-Malik devoutly believed himself set on earth to complete: the authentic “Religion of Truth”?


    In the autumn of 691, an army of some two thousand men duly set off from Kufa into the desert. Abd al-Malik, whose eye for talent was not a whit inferior to all his many other capabilities, had appointed his most trusted servant as its commander: a youthful former schoolteacher by the name of Al-Hajjaj. Not for nothing was this brilliantly able young man known as “Little Dog”; ugly and diminutive he may have been, but his nose for a scent was outstanding, and his teeth were razor sharp. By the spring of 692, he had cornered his quarry. Once again, Ibn al-Zubayr found himself holed up inside a “house of worship.” This time, though, there was to be no reprieve. Al-Hajjaj blockaded the old man for six months, pulverising his defences with catapults to such lethal effect that by autumn the entire sanctuary had once again been reduced to rubble and left littered with corpses—one of which was Ibn al-Zubayr’s. The whole of Arabia was finally Abd al-Malik’s.

    Two years later, the Amir himself journeyed through the desert on an ostentatious pilgrimage. Already lord of the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock had been completed in the same year as the defeat of Ibn al-Zubayr, he now also claimed dominion over a site equally awesome and sacred. “To us,” as a court poet wrote in celebration of his glittering achievement, “belong two Houses: the House of God, of which we are the governors, and the revered House on the mount of Jerusalem.”
    Yet here, once again, was a telling ambiguity. No mystery as to the location of the Dome of the Rock, of course—but where precisely was the enigmatic “House of God”? The poet did not think to specify. Nor did any of his contemporaries. Perhaps, however, this was only to be expected. Literate people, after all, did not tend to live in the desert—or visit it either. Even if the habit of going on pilgrimage to Arabia had become well established before the time of Abd al-Malik—and there is no evidence that it had—then the mounting anarchy of the times would surely have halted the practice. As a result, among those believers sufficiently educated to put pen to parchment, the precise details of the distant desert sanctuary, even down to its very name, appear to have been a blur. The surest pointers to its location were to be found, not in poetry, or in chronicles, or in gazetteers, but in stone. The years that followed Abd al-Malik’s pilgrimage to Arabia saw workmen tinkering with the layout of numerous mosques. From the busiest stretch of the Nile to the loneliest corner of the Negev, qiblas that had previously pointed east were painstakingly reoriented to the south. Meanwhile, in Kufa, the west-facing qibla was carefully angled in an identical direction. The House of God no longer seemed to stand where it had previously—between Medina and Palestine. Rather, if the calculations of the mosque renovators were to be trusted, it lay much further to the south, at a site in the depths of the Hijaz. A site that can only have been the one place: Mecca.

    Naturally, such a change did not go unnoted. There were opponents of Abd al-Malik, a full sixty years on, who still damned him as the man who had “destroyed the sacred House of God.” Already, however, even in the immediate aftermath of his conquest of Arabia, confusion as to what might actually have happened, and what constituted “the sacred House of God,” was rife, and escalating. Umayyad propagandists, while not denying the destruction wrought by Al-Hajjaj, insisted that the true vandal had been Ibn al-Zubayr, and that Abd al-Malik had merely restored the Ka’ba to its original, pristine condition. Few Arabs thought to dispute this claim: the conviction that a sanctuary might be demolished and reconstructed, not once but several times, and still somehow remain numinously the same, was widely held. In due course, Abd al-Malik and Ibn al-Zubayr would take their places on a long list of people who had supposedly either repaired the House of God or rebuilt it from scratch: luminaries as heavyweight as Muhammad, Abraham and Adam. The future of the Ka’ba was one that would see it enshrined as both a marker of Adam’s tomb and the pivot of the cosmos itself. If there was an echo, in this sensational array of attributes, of the traditions that Christians, in the wake of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, had attributed to the rock of Golgotha, then that was surely no coincidence. Just as it had taken Constantine to establish, once and for all, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, so likewise, perhaps, had it needed a ruler such as Abd al-Malik—an autocrat no less visionary, self-confident or domineering—to define for his own religion the eternal heartbeat of the world.

    None of which, of course, solves the mystery of why an obscure and barren spot a thousand miles from the centre of Umayyad power should have been chosen for such an honour. Clearly, though, Abd al-Malik must have had reasons that far transcended the merely opportunistic. Just as he would never have promoted Muhammad as the founder of his religion without truly believing that the Prophet had been an authentic medium for the words of God, so would he never have gone on pilgrimage to a site that lacked any aura of the sacred. Long before his arrival there, a Ka’ba must surely have stood on the spot. Perhaps, like the one at Bakka, it also had some association with Muhammad. If not, then the Umayyads would certainly have had both motive and opportunity for promoting it as the shrine named in the Prophet’s revelations as Mecca. Mu’awiya, based as he had been throughout his reign in Syria, had made a conscious effort to tighten his grip on Arabia. Any plot of land capable of supporting crops had been ruthlessly appropriated; its water supplies diverted; its settlements commandeered. In Medina, the intrusion of Umayyad henchmen into the oasis had only compounded the family’s unpopularity and precipitated Ibn al-Zubayr’s coup. But further south, in the Hijaz, the policy had reaped notably greater success. Indeed, Mu’awiya’s investment in the region had been so substantial that its summer capital, a flourishing oasis named Ta’if, was said to have migrated there from Palestine. Abd al-Malik’s links to the town were probably even closer. Not only had his father, Marwan, served as its governor, but his most trusted lieutenant, Al-Hajjaj, had grown up in the oasis. Both, then, would surely have been intimately familiar with the shrine that stood a mere sixty miles to the north-west, behind a wall of wind-scoured, black-baked mountain, and which Abd al-Malik himself, in 694, made a point of honouring as the House of God: the shrine that posterity would commemorate as the Ka’ba of Mecca.

    So it was that a second sanctuary—paired with the Dome of the Rock—came to be enshrined once and for all as a fit object of pilgrimage for the faithful. This much seems clear enough. Beyond that, however, everything is obscurity and murk. Was Abd al-Malik the first Amir to renovate the site, or did he follow in the footsteps of Ibn al-Zubayr? Where had the sanctuary demolished by Al-Hajjaj stood—at Bakka or at Mecca? What had it been more important for the victor to establish—continuity with the past or a clean break? Certainly, more than a century after the time of Abd al-Malik, a vague sense still lingered that the House of God might not always have stood rooted to the spot in Mecca. “At the time of the Prophet, may God save him and give him peace, our faces were all turned in one direction—but after the death of the Prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither.” So one Muslim scholar would recall. Others, in the reports given of Mecca itself, might betray similar anxieties. It was not only the Ka’ba, in these stories, that was forever being demolished and rebuilt—so too was the mosque that enclosed it. A sacred well was lost and then miraculously rediscovered on no less than two separate occasions. Most bewildering of all, perhaps, was the sheer range of sacred stones associated with the holy site, and which were forever being shifted or discovered. There was the Maqam Ibrahim, for instance, which had been carried along by a flood. Then there was the rock uncovered by Ibn al-Zubayr, and which had been stamped with the name of God. Finally, and perhaps most enigmatically of all, there was the much-venerated “Black Stone,” which enjoyed a prominent position in the wall of the Ka’ba. Some claimed that Adam had found it, whereupon it had gobbled up the parchment on which was written his contract with God. Others insisted that it was Abraham who had excavated it, and that he and Ishmael had then lugged it all the way to Mecca. Still others claimed that Ibn al-Zubayr had placed it in an ark, of the kind used by Moses to transport the Torah around the desert. The Black Stone, it seemed, was not only fabulously ancient—it was surprisingly mobile as well.
    .

  34. #114
    Queen of the Damned Aylen's Avatar
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    "Next she began to whirl frantically around the table where Antipas the tetrarch was seated. He leaned towards the flying figure, and in a voice half choked with the voluptuous sighs of a mad desire, he sighed: "Come to me! Come!" But she whirled on, while the music of dulcimers swelled louder and the excited spectators roared their applause.

    The tetrarch called again, louder than before: "Come to me! Come! Thou shalt have Capernaum, the plains of Tiberias! my citadels! yea, the half of my kingdom!"

    Again the dancer paused; then, like a flash, she threw herself upon the palms of her hands, while her feet rose straight up into the air. In this bizarre pose she moved about upon the floor like a gigantic beetle; then stood motionless.

    The nape of her neck formed a right angle with her vertebrae. The full silken skirts of pale hues that enveloped her limbs when she stood erect, now fell to her shoulders and surrounded her face like a rainbow. Her lips were tinted a deep crimson, her arched eyebrows were black as jet, her glowing eyes had an almost terrible radiance; and the tiny drops of perspiration on her forehead looked like dew upon white marble.

    She made no sound; and the burning gaze of that multitude of men was concentrated upon her.

    A sound like the snapping of fingers came from the gallery over the pavilion. Instantly, with one of her movements of bird-like swiftness, Salome stood erect. The next moment she rapidly passed up a flight of steps leading to the gallery, and coming to the front of it she leaned over, smiled upon the tetrarch, and, with an air of almost childlike naivete, pronounced these words:

    "I ask my lord to give me, placed upon a charger, the head of--" She hesitated, as if not certain of the name; then said: "The head of Iaokanann!""

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

  35. #115
    Queen of the Damned Aylen's Avatar
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    "With pride wax wanton, and, when caught, refuse
    Tough lash to brook or jagged curb obey.
    But no device so fortifies their power
    As love's blind stings of passion to forefend,
    Whether on steed or steer thy choice be set.
    Ay, therefore 'tis they banish bulls afar
    To solitary pastures, or behind
    Some mountain-barrier, or broad streams beyond,
    Or else in plenteous stalls pen fast at home.
    For, even through sight of her, the female wastes
    His strength with smouldering fire, till he forget
    Both grass and woodland. She indeed full oft
    With her sweet charms can lovers proud compel
    To battle for the conquest horn to horn.
    In Sila's forest feeds the heifer fair,
    While each on each the furious rivals run;
    Wound follows wound; the black blood laves their limbs;
    Horns push and strive against opposing horns,
    With mighty groaning; all the forest-side
    And far Olympus bellow back the roar.
    Nor wont the champions in one stall to couch;
    But he that's worsted hies him to strange climes
    Far off, an exile, moaning much the shame,
    The blows of that proud conqueror, then love's loss
    Avenged not; with one glance toward the byre,
    His ancient royalties behind him lie.
    So with all heed his strength he practiseth,
    And nightlong makes the hard bare stones his bed,
    And feeds on prickly leaf and pointed rush,
    And proves himself, and butting at a tree
    Learns to fling wrath into his horns, with blows
    Provokes the air, and scattering clouds of sand
    Makes prelude of the battle; afterward,
    With strength repaired and gathered might breaks camp,
    And hurls him headlong on the unthinking foe:
    As in mid ocean when a wave far of
    Begins to whiten, mustering from the main
    Its rounded breast, and, onward rolled to land
    Falls with prodigious roar among the rocks,
    Huge as a very mountain: but the depths
    Upseethe in swirling eddies, and disgorge
    The murky sand-lees from their sunken bed.
    Nay, every race on earth of men, and beasts,
    And ocean-folk, and flocks, and painted birds,
    Rush to the raging fire: love sways them all.
    Never than then more fiercely o'er the plain
    Prowls heedless of her whelps the lioness:
    Nor monstrous bears such wide-spread havoc-doom
    Deal through the forests; then the boar is fierce,
    Most deadly then the tigress: then, alack!"

    http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/...&lang=original

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

  36. #116

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    No Guts, No Belief

    To accord with the practitioner’s ethos, the rule in this book is as follows: I eat my own cooking. I have only written, in every line I have composed in my professional life, about things I have done, and the risks I have recommended that others take or avoid were risks I have been taking or avoiding myself. I will be the first to be hurt if I am wrong. When I warned about the fragility of the banking system in The Black Swan, I was betting on its collapse (particularly when my message went unheeded); otherwise I felt it would not have been ethical to write about it. That personal stricture applies to every domain, including medicine, technical innovation, and simple matters in life. It does not mean that one’s personal experiences constitute a sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about an idea; it is just that one’s personal experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of opinion. Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called “observational,” ones in which the researcher finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data, can therefore fall into the trap of an invented narrative.

    Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter—it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea. Students pay to write essays on topics for which they have to derive knowledge from a library as a self-enhancement exercise; a professional who is compensated to write and is taken seriously by others should use a more potent filter. Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable—and those that come from reality. It is time to revive the not well-known philosophical notion of
    doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal risks.
    from Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  37. #117
    back for the time being Chae's Avatar
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    The monk wouldn’t meet with me to train unless I called him a minimum of three times. I hated this part. I used to call and call and he would never answer. But this is how life is. How many times do you have to call or email someone to get something done in the real world? It’s usually several times.
    Most of us blame ourselves when we try once to do something and fail. At the time, I hated this part of the training, but now I think it was the most important life lesson.
    There’s a Taoist proverb that says, “Cotton on the outside, steel on the inside.”
    It reminds us to be compassionate, but not weak.

    ----

    At first, it’s hard to sit at a restaurant by yourself. You’re constantly worrying, thinking that people probably think you’re a loser because you’re sitting by yourself. But the reality is, you will never be happy if you care about what people think you!

    Prior to starting meditation, I’d get upset over just about anything. Now, nothing really bothers me. Recently, I was in the airport and there was a several hour delay on my flight. I just used that time to do meditation. Ten years ago, I would have become extremely upset. An airplane delay would have ruined my day.
    When you let go of your ego needs, it’s easier to accept and even benefit from whatever comes at you.

  38. #118
    Exodus's Avatar
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    Lightbulb TIME-INFORMATION DUALITY

    Quote Originally Posted by Vaughan Pratt
    The states of a computing system bear information and change time,
    while its events bear time and change information.

    ...

    The behavior of an automaton is to alternately wait in a state and perform
    a transition or event. We may think of the state as bearing information
    representing the “knowledge” of the automaton when in that state,
    and the event as modifying that information. At the same time we may
    think of the event as taking place at a moment in time, and the state as
    modifying or whiling away time.
    .

  39. #119
    Landlord of the Dog and Duck Subteigh's Avatar
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    "The air is soft and delicious. The men are sensible and intelligent. Many of them are learned. They know their classics, and so accurately that I have lost little in not going to Italy. The English girls are divinely pretty and they have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on a visit, the girls kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away. They kiss you when you return. Once you have tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you could spend your life there."
    ~ Erasmus

  40. #120
    Landlord of the Dog and Duck Subteigh's Avatar
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    "But what was being done here? For what, and for whom? Very likely the conductor was tired out, like the workman I passed in the vaults; it was even evident that he was; but who made him tire himself? And for what was he tiring himself? The opera he was rehearsing was one of the most ordinary of operas for people who are accustomed to them, but also one of the most gigantic absurdities that could possibly be devised. An Indian king wants to marry; they bring him a bride; he disguises himself as a minstrel; the bride falls in love with the minstrel and is in despair, but afterwards discovers that the minstrel is the king, and everyone is highly delighted.

    That there never were, or could be, such Indians, and that they were not only unlike Indians, but that what they were doing was unlike anything on earth except other operas, was beyond all manner of doubt; that people do not converse in such a way as recitative, and do not place themselves at fixed distances in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions; that nowhere, except in theatres, do people walk about in such a manner, in pairs, with tinfoil halberds and in slippers; that no one ever gets angry in such a way, or cries in such a way; and that no one on earth can be moved by such performances—all this is beyond the possibility of doubt.

    Instinctively the question presents itself: For whom is this being done? Whom can it please? If there are, occasionally, good melodies in the opera to which it is pleasant to listen, they could have been sung simply, without these stupid costumes and all the processions and recitatives and handwavings."

    ~ Leo Tolstoy

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