Epic Experience

“Reading poetry does not generate poetry.”

Its another day as usual—you go to work, or to school. People are passing by on either side, people talk to one another on cell phones, there is a level of background conversation which gradually gets higher as you enter the more crowded streets. And you think over whatever theoretical problem you’ve been kicking around in your head—more or less indifferent to your surroundings, perceiving almost none of what goes on around you. Daily life has a dream-like quality about it.

Imagine a combat scenario, an armed group settling a vendetta in a mid-sized town in the Caucasus. You’re the object of the vendetta. The presence of two known enemy gang-members approaching you sets you off that what you’ve long waited for has finally come to pass: they are coming to kill you. You look up, aware that the two of them probably haven’t come alone. Scanning the streets, you make out at least two other unknown men who could be in their employment. Suddenly every detail becomes extremely important—the two men are 20 meters away. The street between you and the two men is crowded with market stalls, which will slow them down. You notice a man on top of a nearby house, he could easily be in their employ, set up for the event that you evade them, to send out the final bullet. You note the angle from which he would be shooting at you, and the likelihood of evading him by taking cover under a veranda.

One inevitable outcome of evolutionary history is that the primary metric of significance for us humans is survival value. In a safe, known environment, we can walk with eyes wide open and notice almost nothing. In an unsafe environment, under the influence of fear and adrenaline, one notes details which otherwise would never have entered one’s mind. Suddenly the details of that particular street corner, and that particular crowd of people, become crucially important—and they take precedence in your mind over all other concerns. The lethality of the situation has made these details significant.

Now a personal anecdote. Once upon a time, a guy high on cocaine decided to beat me up for talking to his girlfriend. Because he was high, he had no sense of control. He beat me and strangled me, and all the while I was thinking ‘he can’t be serious.’ Like I said he had just woken up, so he wasn’t really doing enormous damage at first, but every punch got harder and harder and at one point he had his hands around my neck. After two minutes of wrestling, I at last comprehended that he was fighting without control, not even joking, not even trying to just ‘kick my ass’. I thought “this guy is going to kill me right here with his hands if I let him.” He kept pursuing me and had me in a stranglehold, throwing me against furniture while he strangled me. Anyway, when that thought came, it was like a bullet, and I felt an adrenaline rush. I threw him to the ground, threw him against some furniture, and left his house saying “I’m leaving, I’m leaving!” Then I ran to a nearby train station and realized: I had shit my pants! So I discarded my underpants in the train station and went to the platform. I felt so great, waiting for the train, so pumped up and full of life, that I began singing while the commuters looked at me. It was one of the best feelings I ever had.

That’s my experience of an adrenaline rush—most of you will have had some similar experience, probably. For the clarity, the mental clarity, that comes at that moment, the superhuman sense of power and exhilaration—adrenaline can’t be beat. One really does feel twice as alive, and trying to recapture the boisterous, jovial, laughing, superbly confident moments you had under the influence of adrenaline—is futile. You will never be that dashing, happy person in your quieter moments. At least I won’t.

The state of extreme alacrity and super-awareness contrasts strangely with the dream-like stupor in which I see alot of my fellow whites living. I think its fair to characterize this apparently last stage of Western culture before the Fall, with the word ‘sleepy’. Men play video games or watch television, and women read magazines and shop. One criterium which you could feasibly apply to a civilization would be this: “How much adrenaline does your civilization produce?” Really, I mean it. How much adrenaline do we experience, and how much did the ancients experience, how much did the Minoans experience, etc. Its a valid point. How much adrenaline does our generation experience in comparison with the Vikings in 800? It would be great if we had actual data.

It occurs to me that the experience of life-or-death scenarios force an evaluation of one’s life which otherwise may not ever take place. Death is, evolutionarily speaking, the ultimate penalty, and in a life-or-death situation, Life is the ultimate reward. So in that particular scenario, one experiences the whole surge of power which evolution has programmed into us—one realizes perhaps for the first time one’s existence as an organism, and the need to survive is for the first time felt as a need: prior to this it had always been satisfied. Like a man who doesn’t know what hunger is, because he was always reliably fed every day. The strength of a value dichotomy is felt in its utmost possible force—the good is the strongest good we can feel, the bad the strongest bad. Inasfar as our will is a tool for pursuing positive value and avoiding negative value, this can be a real impetus for the development of the will, because one sees the evolutionarily ultimate bad contrasted with the evolutionarily ultimate good. That’s why so many epiphanies spring from war scenarios and conflict scenarios—a fact which any war narrative will serve to remind you of.

And slowly I come to the thesis: “Reading poetry does not generate poetry.” When men fight for their lives, they see their actions as extremely significant, whereas when they do not, they can hardly be persuaded to view their actions as truly significant. Beyond just a moments adrenalin rush, people engaged in a struggle know what it is to have big hopes: because if a group of people is to share one common hope, and to share it intensely, it can only be this: the hope to survive. No other hope can unite people intensely: the philosopher’s dreams and Utopias are too abstract and give way to bickering, other things are too petty. The hope to survive and prevail is an enormous one and it animates entire peoples during periods of struggle. He who knows hope, also knows euphoria, elation, and disappointment—really grand emotions, and the person most susceptible to them is the person whose life hangs in the balance. They are hoping for the most important thing!

And when an entire people is animated by this feeling, the individual experiences it even more intensely than if it were just his own affair, because he sees it mirrored in the faces of all his fellows. This is the stuff which makes epic literature—stories which are not only significant, but significant to entire groups of people. Groups of people who share enormous emotions like hope, determination, fear, disappointment, elation, euphoria. That’s what makes epic literature, for all its humbleness, tacitly superior to the writings of later geniuses: one senses that the story being told is spun out of the life-or-death stories of an entire people. In that sense, Beowulf, the Iliad, and others, have a resonance that seems deeper and more important than Shakespeare’s nuances, which is a creation for the intellectual, individual man.

So thats what Epic experience is, in my opinion—you can understand it if you consider how important your own life-or-death experiences were, and imagine that lived on the level of an entire people. Because during times of group conflict, the lives of entire peoples are in danger.

And insofar as we have achieved technological progress and comfort, we live less epically, less on the tight-wire of life over the abyss of death, and more in the realm of indistinct, middle-of-the-road emotions. So we are even a step removed from Shakespeare, and live less epically than him, who was in turn a step removed from Beowulf. Because perceptive readers sense the grandness and significance of Beowulf and Shakespeare and Homer, and because these same people sense their own insignificance, related to the lack of epic emotion in their lives, they establish a historical caste-system built into the literary tradition, by which everyone closer to the date of Epic experience of the people (For the English, 400 to 1100) is granted immediate superiority over those who come later. A genius born nearer to the Epic experience of his people is deemed by this rubric more of a genius than a later born person of similar talent, insofar as he gives voice to these emotions of greater weight and potency.

Everyone betrays what he thinks of the significance of his story, and we all have only a few stories to tell, or maybe only one. In Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Bean describes his life as a drug-fueled Kalashnikov-wielding anti-rebel warrior in the jungles of Sierra Leone. He obviously believes he has a great story to tell, and he does: it runs the gamut of all possible emotions. It is epic because it takes place between life and death. Literary late-comers, such as ourselves, inheritors to the States which have resulted from the Epic contests of peoples, grow up imbibing culture and living comfortably, and innately sense that their lives contain less epic emotion than those that came before them. They approach ‘the altar of culture’ with this motto in their mouths:

“I know that my life is less interesting, but in the meantime I have stroked my beard and developed no end of categories, niceties, anecdotes, vignettes, pungent means of expression, jokes, cute sayings, and interesting perspectives. Also, I always acknowledge my betters—no one respects Shakespeare and Homer more than I do, no one. I will out-praise the foolhardiest praiser, I will build a mountain of praise, and set on it a likeness of my forebears, who were better men than myself. In all my works I will acknowledge my superiors, and my inability to reach the limits they have set.”

And so they affirm their eagerness to enter into the caste-system on the lowest level, and perhaps, as a critic, to punish everyone who doesn’t maintain the standards and forms of bygone eras. Everything was better then, including men, you damn idiot.

It’s not so much that we can’t experience the Viking invasion of England, it’s more the fact that we can’t live in a society that recently experienced it, which is our true poverty. If we could, we would see a world full of interesting characters—because these experiences bring out a multitude of interesting admirable qualities in people and cement them together in bonds of shared emotion. It’s a process which we continually experience the opposite of: the shrinking of emotion and the loss of it’s shared component, both of which inevitably presage the death of our ‘Civilization’. Adventures breed dashing, larger-than-life men, because thats precisely what adventures demand. Suffering and food-shortages breed supportive, self-sacrificing men and women, who help one another, rather than bickering. And these things self-influence and the son of a strong man, who was himself humble, might be proud by virtue of his relation to his strong father: and there you have generated pride from humble strength and fortitude. Every member of a pre-modern Comitatus has to justify his existence through some valuable skill or contribution, because food is hard to come by: so a large number of them are inevitably interesting, with unique experiences. Our mass culture of adventureless free bread predictably breeds dullards.

The problem with the historical literary caste-system is that those who maintain it always work under the assumption that epic story-telling can replace epic experience as the guide to man’s life and the foundation of culture. Clearly it cannot. Teaching boys Shakespeare lets a few disparate intellects among them take flight. It doesn’t teach them what its like to sail a ship, conquer a city, woo a woman, win a competition, start a company, prepare them for a profession, or anything that makes a man—in that sense, it really literally fails to give their lives meaning. It also doesn’t necessarily give them access to the shared epic emotions of a people—if they want this, they have to go to the frontier, if I can borrow a term from James Bowery. At the frontier, there is usually conflict, and where there is conflict, there is room for epic emotions.

“Look at this man’s face—thats the Bard! I want you all to become the well-read inferiors of this man! Do you hear me??!!”

The attempt to stir epic emotions through epic literature, amongst those lacking the underlying experience which this literature describes, is subject to the law of diminishing returns, as it becomes harder and harder for people to recreate in their minds the vast dimensions that these experiences have. Thats why Nietzsche, writing in Zarathustra, said the Last Man was infertile, and that he didn’t have any ribs. The reference is to the story of Adam and Eve, where Eve is made from Adam’s rib, and means: Modern man can appreciate in retrospect but himself cannot generate, he is himself sterile, cannot bring forth great works.

It may be that Africans are forever living in something like an Epic age, because they cannot successfully build those risk-removal mechanisms of State and civil Society which white people create to remove themselves from danger. So blacks are, since independence and civil-rights, always on the knife’s edge, principally because of stupidity and impulsiveness. The War Nerd recognized this when he drew the comparison between Congolese warfare and the Illiad:

There’s this term for what’s going on in the Congo: “Primitive Warfare.” It doesn’t mean simple weapons or illiterate soldiers. It means the way people fought before there were any nation states. It’s not pretty. It means avoiding combat, slinking around looking for unguarded villages, and then going in and killing everybody in the place, except a few you think you can sell at the nearest slave market.

“Ethnic cleansing” is just a soft word for primitive warfare. It’s always been the way people fight. I once took a first-year course in “World Literature” at SCS—it was required—and I pissed off the professor good when he had us read a piece of the Iliad. It was about Achilles fighting with Agamemnon about a slave girl, and I just said, “Hey, that’s just the way they fight in Africa right now!” He made me pay for that, the PC bastard. Naturally he was white, and naturally he made a big speech that had “racism” in it about a hundred times—you know, looking around at all the “people of color” in the room to make sure nobody was going to turn him in.

But I wasn’t being racist at all, he was. And I still say if people thought about Congo when they were reading “Classics” they’d understand it better. Achilles raids a village, grabs the best-looking girl, moves on to ambush another village. In the meantime one of Achilles’s friends, some other ganja-smoking kid with an AK, decides he wants the girl instead. They settle it out in the bush somewhere. Boom: that’s the Iliad. But damn it, the one thing people don’t want to do is connect the Classics with war, Congo style-“primitive warfare.”

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this parallel, but I thought it important to bring up.

Sometimes reading poetry generates poetry, A.D. Lang wrote these great paragraphs which might motivate a person to study Homer:

Homer, thy song men liken to the sea
With all the notes of music in its tone,
With tides that wash the dim dominion
Of Hades, and light waves that laugh in glee
Around the isles enchanted; nay, to me
Thy verse seems as the River of source unknown
That glasses Egypt’s temples overthrown
In his sky-nurtured stream, eternally.

No wiser we than men of heretofore
To find thy sacred fountains guarded fast;
Enough, thy flood makes green our human shore,
As Nilus Egypt, rolling down his vast
His fertile flood, that murmurs evermore
Of gods dethroned, and empires of the past.

My thesis is that nothing can replace the loss of Epic experience and the subsequent blunting, dulling and shrinking of character that results from it, except epic experience. The ‘sacred fountains guarded fast’ from which Homer received his verse, were probably the epic experience of the proto-Hellenes, crafted over time and elaborated on by successive authors in Epic tradition. Reading about these events is not the same as experiencing them, so the extent to which literature can form and inform culture is limited. The future of European peoples seems posed either to end or to enter a second epic phase.

Posted by Potential Frolic on Saturday, August 18, 2007 at 11:06 AM in
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