The Absolute Collective, Henry Miller
The Absolute Collective*
“WE CAN no longer live to live, but to create the new. That is the hymn of modernity; that is the new need. But how came the new need?
It came because star and fire, rose and tiger died within us . . .
Should our time grasp this, it would be a spiritual revolution which would lead right into the midst of the new time.”
This, from an essay called “World Conquest” which appeared in Purpose back in 1932, is reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence.
Like Lawrence, Gutkind is of the line of Akhenaton, Hermes Trismegistus, Plotinus, Paracelsus, Blake, Nietzsche: he is a visionary, a prophet, a man ahead of his time.
And yet, like all these figures, a man supremely of his time too. No man is born out of time! But the men who are most representative of their time, those who situate themselves in the creative flux, are always and inevitably rejected, if not crucified.
For such men are of sidereal time, which is the poet’s chronology and not the astronomer’s. The visionary predicts the stars and the planets which will be discovered, for he is of the stars as well as of the earth.
Gutkind is obsessed, in a superbly healthy way, by the new world which is in the making. He is obsessed too by the possibility of the miraculous which the birth of a new world-condition always engenders.
The miracle this time, in Gutkind’s opinion, is the birth of man. As a philosopher and diagnostician he has strong affinities with Nietzsche, Spengler and Lawrence: he too has had his vision of the end.
But he has also a clear vision of the future, an absolute faith in the new world-condition, which is not to be merely a new cultural cycle but a complete new integration marked by a polarity which will establish the vertical axis of man. Man will come into his own by establishing a cosmic relationship with the universe, that is Gutkind’s idea.
It is a very old and tenacious idea, this, one which has been given us repeatedly from the most varied sources. It comes now with new force because even the dullest professor, even the philosopher, is aware that the dissolution of our world is certain.
In the grip of a paralysis such as the world has never known before, filled with a premonitory dread such as perhaps only the Atlanteans experienced, we live from day to day, from hour to hour, awaiting the debacle.
In our very midst a great people is preparing the execution of the most revolting part of this program of annihilation. The world watches indignantly and fascinatedly, too bewildered perhaps or too deeply aware of the significance of this activity to do anything to counteract it.
Before our very eyes the Germans are creating the bomb which will destroy what is called our “civilization.” With it they will destroy themselves, that is certain. Even the Germans are aware of that, hence their fervor and exaltation, their arrogance and recklessness.
In another part of the world the Japanese are educating the Chinese in our footsteps, paving the way to make their enemy the masters of the Oriental world and in turn to destroy it. These are patent facts which only the stern misguided “realists” refuse to see.
Gutkind, who is a German Jew (now in exile), because perhaps of the situation in which he was placed, is able to “violently demand that we may bodily experience the abysses instead of only philosophizing thereon.”
It is a refreshing antidote to the apostasy of Freud, who tried to erect a metaphysics on the recognition of fear, creating a gray realism of scientific hue instead of a Dantesque reality of black and white.
Gutkind, living in the midst of the Teutonic world of technic, becomes an out-and-out Jew, a Jew of the Essenes stamp such as Christ was, a realist of the first water, as was Christ again, able to recognize the world for what it is and to embrace it for what it is in process of becoming.
In the midst of the non-human world he proclaims the human world, proclaims the transcendent in man which will not only free him from murder and death but enable him to live completely in the present.
For the world of man, he says, is the world that is completely alive! In such a world there is no place for murder, nor can there be a human world until murder is eliminated from man’s consciousness. How is such a world possible?
The question cannot be settled forthwith, he answers. “We are only beginning to open the world, for we have never yet lived in an unbroken state . . . The opener of man is Reality . . . Everything can be both itself and a means to something else.”
The world we are now living in is what Gutkind calls the Mamser world of confusion, idols, ghosts, the world of things, oriented towards death, a world in which man is nothing but an object waiting for redemption.
It is a world in which there is nothing but a dreary sequence of predictable events. God becomes an empty concept, man an isolated individual, the world a collection of things. It is the very picture of evil, with the most hideous of all punishment as penalty: death in life.
Against this false worldliness, in which all nations of the earth alike are guilty of living, Gutkind opposes a real “worldliness.” Man’s roots do not lie in consciousness, he asserts, but in reality.
He goes on again to speak of death, stating that death is not an essential part of man, that he can separate himself from it as from an accident. “In the midst of life,” he writes, “we are filled with death, and to die will bring us no release . . . Immortality does not yet exist.
Immortality follows from the complete aliveness of man when, purged of Tuma, the original corruption, he has been changed from a being locked up in himself to one that is opened and can speak . . . The isolated individual cannot, by dying, work himself free of the world of death.
We are all inextricably bound together. So long as one still belongs to death all will belong.” And then he speaks of the Hebrew meaning of the word “eternity,” which is that of victory rather than duration. “To die means to be cut off, it does not mean to cease.
One who is bound to others is free from the fear of death, for fear has its roots in separation. Where there is fear it is quickly followed by the flight to possessions. Far deadlier than any bodily decay,” he concludes, “is the insidious principle of death within our souls.”
It is impossible to overstress the importance of this theme. Death is the paramount obsession of our time, and it is the knowledge of death which is destroying us. The great exponents of reality today—of a false worldliness, that is—are all advocates of murder.
Even the pacifists are murderers at heart. The world is divided into idealistic camps, and not one ideal is proclaimed but means death to the other, death to all concerned. Men are fanatically ready, it would seem, to kill and to be killed. Never was a whole world so devoted to the cause of death and destruction.
Nowhere in the whole world is there a people exempt from reproach. Even the neutral countries, through their heartless profiteering, through their supine indifference, contribute to the death racket. This is the supreme reality of our death-like world, and this is a horror which must be faced by every individual, and not by legislatures and governments alone. But where are the individuals? Who is an individual?
Who has the courage to say No at the crucial moment—or even to meet the challenge in advance with a No! It is not to the men of this order and generation, I feel, that Gutkind’s book is addressed. Gutkind, like Lawrence, is a man of the transition stage, the double-faced “hero-metaphysician” who looks backward with deep understanding and forward with exultation.
He is the Pluto-Janus type of which the German astrologers have been talking ever since the discovery of that new planet. Only, whereas the German people have identified themselves with the hero-death impulse, Gutkind identifies himself with the daring metaphysician, the man of the future whose face is set towards the established kingdom of man.
The keynote of this coming type of man is totality, integration, oneness. The man of today, the man of the transition period, split and straddled as he is between two worlds, pregnant with the germ of the future, is veritably crucified by his duality.
The great exploration of the Unconscious which was begun by Dostoievski, and subsequently pursued systematically by Freud and his disciples, bears a curious resemblance to the exploration and development of the New World in the time of the Renaissance. The expansion of the known universe always entails a split in the consciousness. We know how the Renaissance faded out—in an orgy of megalomania.
The “modern” nations today—Japan, Germany, America—are going mad in a similar way. No more wonderful examples of schizophrenia are to be found than in these “progressive” countries. The fury and enormity of their activity is the symbol of their impotence, their inability to bridge the split. This stupendous activity, disguised as progress and enlightenment, is only a means of spreading the death which they carry within them.
It is the function of such peoples to make the egg rotten through and through, to sever the bondage of the womb in order that the real
