Douglas Mercer
January 5 2025
Continued From Empyrean (Part Sixteen)
PAX GERMANICA
During the war Hitler was discussing man’s recent technological progress and he said that he was impressed—but not that impressed. And that it was well to remember that one thing goes wrong and all of it will fall like a house of cards—right back to nothingness.
From this vantage in time I feel that I am in a very penultimate mood—it is nearing Yuletide in the year 1980 and my sources tell me that the great Works on the Northern Plain are very nearly reaching their completion, whether it be for a takeoff or a touchdown, no one really knows for sure, though perhaps that is just a false dichotomy, they being one and the same thing. We are now in the second most sacred season of our calendar, now that more and more we turn to the ancient festivals of our people, and the Old Fighters and the blood banners and the memories of the Cathedral of light rightly begin to take on a somewhat lesser function, as if we know instinctually that in the return to the beginning, and the efflorescence of it in our world of the future, what we have done must deemphasized so that it can take its place in the larger cycle of our people. For since the Aryans first began to stir on the Pontic Steppe and that noble, beautiful nomadic pastoralist milking drinking race began first to fan out through the world the most important thing has been that we are a sun worshipping people, the very energy of which we have now harnessed to what after all remains (technically at any rate) unspecified purposes. In the long history of our people it was the Jewish people who parasited on our holidays like the monkey on our back as if they were an extraneous rider on our line and hijacked our values and inverted them. The long recrudescence (which began circa 1500) is now complete and we have done that most wonderful thing: come into our own. Some 1800 years ago, the Roman Emperor Aurelian first declared 25 December to be a state holiday, commemorating the Solstice — the rebirth of what he called Sol Invictus or the Unconquerable Sun. This is something that had long been sacred to Aryan peoples of many nations; Aurelian chose a specific date and made it official. He did this in hopes of establishing a new religious unity among Roman citizens. Aurelian strengthened the position of the Sun god Sol Invictus as the main divinity of the Roman pantheon. His intention was to give to all the peoples of the Empire, civilian or soldiers, easterners or westerners, a single god they could believe in without betraying their own gods. The center of the cult was a new temple built in 274 and dedicated on December 25 of that year in the Campus Agrippae in Rome, with great decorations Aurelian followed the principle of one faith, one empire. He bears the title deus et dominus natus (God and born ruler) on some of his coins. Had he had enough time he would have outlawed all other gods but it was to be Julian of course who was his ideological successor---but he had not enough time either, and the world fell into its long spiral of struggle from which at the last possible moment we extricated it from. Now of course we no longer live on borrowed time, we have all the time in the world on our hands—space as well—and the usurper has been dethroned, and the rightful homecoming is slated to occur—when, presumably, we leave our home forever. Long is the time the Poet said and the truth it comes to pass—comes to pass us by. We have attended the word faithfully—and German song is in accord with this. So to the returning king, the Sun King—we now raise a toast, a toast in your honor. When German history reaches its Zenith, its culmination, all you have to do is step outside and you will desire to see nothing else. The flames we stir, as has been said are those of the will and the will only.
A German Peace—is there anything more gentle, kind, or sweet? Make no mistake we still have our Sparta—as if we were in the Barracks with Frederick but at night we retire to the rococo Sans Souci to contemplate what has been achieved. To travel in the Reich is a privilege—we guard our border zealously, but in truth few would have the heart to try to pierce our armor. The Reich Proper extends from Normandy and the North Sea down to Gibraltar and all the way East across to the Urals—that is where our law is the rule. As for the rest, for Africa, and the further East, it is a Universal Protectorate run by several select committees and I can tell you that no thought of rebellion is on anyone’s mind. Who would rebel against prosperity? Who against order? Who against peace? It was Hitler in the 1920s who would tell anyone who would listen that his goal was simplicity itself, to secure the future of the German people and to do so for all time. For historical vacillation leads to a kind of hysteria of the peoples, and man’s destiny can not bear its fruition for long among chaos and self seeking carving. Many foreigners travel through our lands and they all return home as if with minds on fire, for we leapt on the worlds stage in all our armor. They speak of a reposed people and of vast building projects which seem to grow out of the earth itself. By conquering our sweet green and blue earth we have turned what had been a growing wasteland into a paradisiacal garden of our own making and called it---what else?---victory.
In his book The Republic Plato laid down the strictures of his ideal society. Most famously he banned all art---for what is art but artifice, wisps of evaporating reality when what we see before us now are the first wisps of a never-ending reality. Art is building, construct, projection, but we now know that the cornerstone was laid a long time ago and when the ceiling is in place it will be blown away, perhaps by a flying buttress. Art is a protest against reality, a clue that something is wrong, and however beautiful it is transitory and anything temporary will be demolished in the end. And when realty has been fine-tuned no one will fight against it with anything as inconsequential as an artificial god. Plato also laid down the precepts for a regular society and a perfect people. We have now the keys to life, we know how to clone, we have brought eugenics to its apotheosis, we know how to create life in a test tube, we can take eggs and sperm and we can do it with surrogacy—but what is a surrogate but a way of vicarious living? Vicarious is to live through another---to be a cuckoo!---and this technology we rejected out of hand. We do create monsters but no Frankensteins for we recalled Nietzsche’s precept—be true to the earth! Be true to life! That these were only models or intimations of how the god works—and ersatz means to create life which we now held in our hands but refused its use lest we become and ersatz people. We had out Lebensborn—indeed, after the war there were great ideological debates and battles, Goebbels among other arguing for a kind of polyamory where each man had several wives. Thankfully our upper echelons of elites saw reason on this issue and while they refused to endorse the lopsided cult of the mother saw that for our people male and female needed to be balanced and the family remain the basic unit. For once we had segregated the foreign strains of alien genes from our life pool we had the cornerstone of the family provided it was always viewed as but a part of the whole. By 1948 that wise teacher Heinrich Himmler had stipulated that at the age of five children would begin to reside at the schools there to live and be supervised by the Teachers; naturally the studies were based in the German Language and German History; and in music; and physical fitness and in the arts of war; and in science; when the children reached their tenth year the ones who were destined for Science were set apart and soon got by the time they were fourteen what might have been a university education in earlier ages; the ones destined for the Arts equally so; though both sections naturally had great communication and intercourse with the other; a third cohort were earmarked for the practical disciplines such as the building trades or to become clerks in state buildings. Three times out of the year for three weeks the charges were spirited home; it is not true to say that the state is their parent, but it was inculcated in all that their family was all of their people stretching back millennia and transcending onwards down to the furthest of their descendants. Foreigners who see our schools invariably marvel at how free is the study, how flexible and focused and open; so unlike the hive mind of the Chinese or the Japanese or the somewhat unseemly slovenliness of the Americans. While studying physics a teacher might play a bit of Beethoven for a moment for seemingly no reason at all; and everyone agreed that there was no drill or drudge involved but a cheerful and irrepressible people committed only to excellence. Neither Athens nor Sparta then; but Germany always. It was indeed an education of warriors but a joyful one for we made our future the old-fashioned way—we turned it, shaped it, and set up the ideal as our reality.
By 1961 we were sending satellites into space alongside our partners and soon after we created that most portentous of things, our carbon computers. We had our intensive road system and our practical automobiles both suited eminently to the natural locale Global communication via telephone and computers took some time more but soon we had our vast living intelligence system which spanned the globe; but we never took this (as the Americans did) in its trivial aspect; the fact that we could project images on a planetary scale seemed to us something to consider gravely and what was allowed to be seen was closely monitored and done so with great prudence; with all respects we made it clear to our Anglo cousins that we did not want the free flow of their images to pollute the minds of our people and I can say over time this permanent moratorium has had a great effect on them (or at last the best among them) and lessened the random trivia they put on the air; but even still any young traveler of our people who goes to the New World is bemused at what he sees; but strengthened by his firm upbringing no rancor attends it, just wide eyed bewilderment that any people as great as that should need so much (it seemed) to be distracted and amused by such utter and complete nonsense. The general understanding on our part is that taste varies—some have it and some don’t.
As for energy and biology the great leaps forward have been astounding—we live longer and we live better and are much more comely than our ancestors. We have gone to the heart of the small and the large—we know the secrets of genetics and the stars but as always we try to keep this in perspective. We see each new facet or fact as only a stepping stone, a puzzle piece to hang on our shelf and to be learned from in turn; and indeed from the early 1970s there was much debate as to whether material knowledge could lead to ultimate knowledge. Ascendant then were those who believed there would forever be gaps or lacunae in the record, black holes of the mind, which meant it would be one long and permanent wild goose chase; and that to know was always better than not and that if we led a sleeker and more sound existence that was enough. But from what I can glean now in the Blue Building the former naysayers to what had become too much of a dogma have more than made up the ground; the idea that the material world is but information and that as such it can be manipulated seems to hold sway. But as always the wise ones wait and abide and do it empirically; and we have our computers still cranking out Pi to see if one day we might glean a pattern. Naturally too we have peered backwards into the abysm of time and we think that we have our biological history settled and in tow, the spellbinding account of the prodigious proliferation of speciation of the Homin line as niches were filled up still holds us in awe, for experimental nature was and is always testing the mettle of people so that one day that Great Leap Forward can come to pass. And as always in the anthropological sciences, the study of races, we were required to transpose our timelines ever further back to accommodate reality.
Certainly what is noticed first by visitors with a cultural or intellectual bent is how few books we publish. Naturally yearly we put out our almanac of events, and from time to time a trenchant idea comes about that has not been expressed before and is allowed to see the light of day. And the old books are of course in standard routine editions that anyone now can access in their home or at the libraries. Indeed for the young we encourage this but only so they can get up to speed quickly; in this great merit is given the ones who culminate and encapsulate and abridge past information so that one can gloss over, say, the emergence of rationalism in the 17th century in a week or so, knowing the knowledge is vast and wise and that while no one wants a superficial understanding of anything that tarrying in the depths for the sake of the depths or from pure aesthetic pleasure is to be trapped in one location on The Path. There are those antiquarians (antediluvians we joke) who still have their piles of books but we do not celebrate it and indeed once understood we discourage such musty and unhealthy endeavors. It is sure that some want to savor the prose of Descartes and his set pieces like his dream visions are still highlighted. But where we differ from the English and the Americans is that they view history and literature as a sensual experience or as artistic domain; whereas we see them as but the manifestation of forces and relations which need to be calibrated in order to be woven into the fabric of the whole of The Concept. One is very wise to read the five-page synopsis of Magic Mountain but the tome itself needed someone to take a great good whack at it and pulped it surely makes some garden grow. Unbelievably the Americans still produce novels, of all things at this late date; true, not as many as they used to but still even the grocery stores will have their rack of pulp to divert; when I was there last I was given a book called The Clan Of The Cave Bear (1979) an all in all decent rendition of our pre-history; but the depths of characterization (meant to set the mind on fire) was so extraneous to the matter and so superfluous that it only appeals to the lost; as I leafed through it I realized that though it was well written and had worthwhile insights here and there like all novels it presupposed some fabricated mystery in order to lure the reader on; we do the subject justice in one or two monographs for we know that whenever someone’s nose is on a screen or a book that time is wasting; as for the novels of contemporary social morays these are beyond contempt; we too note trends and speak of them but no fads or manias circulate among us; and as for the science fiction they seem to pride themselves on a short day with us would cure them of their belief in the powers of their prognostications and beggar their beliefs. But then for all the brisk travel here among their elites they say that Germany is now a bit of a mystery. When I show them around I tell them that it is surely not so; that what they see as uniformity is nothing of the sort; and when they meet our happy people, so unburdened by the neurotic and the alienation that plagues them so, when they see how natural and uninhibited we are in all our relations, some of them at least almost believe it.
The one great exception this is music. When Wagner began his flight he knew nothing about making music—he never could carry a tune—but that did not bother him a bit. He just learned it by the numbers and boasted that all of us could do it. It was just math or chess translated into a different domain, and certainly a metronome can take the part of any conductor. Indeed, as I began to move closer to the people working with the computers they promised me that one day the machines would produce symphonies to rival our best. They cautioned me that the chess masters we produce were now getting beat by the machines and that one such master had dogmatically asserted that they could just crunch out the spaces—but there was a bold, slashing, angular, oblique human species of move, moves that the machine never could make. But by his testimony in a formal match the machine made a move he considered to be just that kind of intuitive play and said that the hair stood up on his head, for what was he looking at? Is there a human element? We have done enough to throw over the retarding concept of the “human” to either be wary of this question or to dismiss it as meaningless—the experience is all that matters in the end. All I can say is I have heard some very nice songs generated mechanically but nothing which fascinated me like ours. But then again it is always well to remember that when it comes to these machines of ours we and they are neophytes—having just started.
As for the other arts except music we too are deemed to have a paucity of them, though the pejorative judgment is misguided. Poems for music—which are just song cues in the human voice—yes, but poems proper or novels, and paintings, and sculpture—of these we have had our surfeit. It is true that when the great white monolithic building projects went up in the East statues and sculpture were the mania---but over time even that waned and any pictorial or physical or verbal manifestation was soon deemed to be extraneous to our path and purpose; our buildings and homes I say have not progressed much since the 1960s when a kind of Bauhaus tasteful and light and open modular chic came about---as if we were in the vestibule of a particularly engaging eternity—and so be it, one must live in a calm and open space filled with as much light as possible but to elaborate and ornament let alone fetishize the architect in any way ---for individual expression—well, as the French say it simply is not the done thing among a sane and decent people.
But however this is Germany has always been and remains a music mad country. For music by the gods—music is different---and it is music that can make a man lose his head. All of our young must master at least one instrument and all must sing--the idea that anyone cannot sing tolerably well is rubbish and nonsense—one must learn to speak first of course. And all of our young learn the rudiments of composing, of melody and its opposite, dissonance, of basic chord structure and to read sheet music—but most of all to experience it and to enjoy it. As we have turned off the radio except for messages that the community requires now each home has its orchestra, and each town plays its festivals, and on the great occasions always some new and thrilling piece of music is played. I myself am more than a hobbyist and when I saw that my daughter was apt in this domain I encouraged it—and when a piece she had produced was exhibited at one of our intermittent gatherings I was very proud. The reason that music is so important is that it alone of the arts surpasses the tangible and is a purely spiritual exercise—words are conveyors of reflection and pictures or objects just frozen images but sound is the art of the moving mind’s eye---one supposes that film comes closest to the kind of dream trance of music—but still it is the reproduction or the imaging of something tangible—where with music it comes from---well, who really knows where.
As for society I am happy to say that strictly speaking we don’t have a society at least like the Americans do—with its status and its niches and its subcultures and its pecking orders and its---and here one blanches---its celebrities and its fame. These are all sure signs of decadence, to be parasited by someone one does not know in a face-to-face encounter is to be fortune’s slave. And we don’t have artists really, even the music is more or less anonymous and each piece is listened to as but part and parcel of a body of work which belongs to no one in particular but is a communal inheritance. No, what we have is not anything as deracinated as a society, what we have is a race, a people, a community, indeed, the best way to put it is that we are not a public people but a very private people—not struck by passing fancies nor struck by stars—and we are really a leaderless people. So solid is the state of our community that we have been able to devolve authority to the smallest possible unit and so everything in terms of activity has become quite understated and natural and organic. In any local community of course there will arise prominent men or women but the idea that one or another is more important is very alien to us. No, what we are is happy people, a people infinitely inquisitive, a people who know all of the latest developments from what we call white papers. Indeed, one of the things which intrigued us was an idea that circulated among the Bohemia of New York in the 1960s—namely, Concept Art, the idea that no material manifestation was every required for an artwork but rather a simple description and manual for its theoretical framework but never to be actualized by reification. How German! A creator contemplating itself in pure thought and never deigning to have sullied intercourse with the external world. So fascinated and taken by this were we that the term White Paper itself became a term of art for any memorandum or communiqué which sought to give a précis of any subject, the more laconic and the more terse the better—clarity, concision and comprehensiveness being the earmarks of communication. And so when any event (we dislike the American term incident with its redolence of incidental even as we eschew the word news) occurs one of our clerks will be tasked with committing promptly to paper the essentials to the people—not in what they call broadcasts but in simple promulgation and dissemination. And yet by all accounts we indubitably remain the best and most cogently informed people on earth by far to say the least. For without vanity and without deception and without wandering attention the mind is laid bare. Ideas like alienation are not known to us; no sociologists or psychotherapists plumb the interstices of our people like a pack of whores. We were amused when a man named Toffler predicated his absurd notion of future shock, as if man had laid himself upon a procrustean bed which would forcibly make him longer or shorter as the case may be. This is the effluvia of a degraded people, that somehow structural changes which we created would become ill-suited to the creators themselves. The idea that the people would be bogged and worn down by “informational overload” while at the same time they peruse a cooking show! No, we saw these vile trends by the 1950s and headed them off at the pass. They say that Nietzsche broke from Wagner because he was plagued by an inner feeling that this music was dangerous to him, that it was leading him down some unspecified garden path where he would be sent headlong down from the precipitous and vertiginous heights into the dizzying depth of the abyss below and—my god!—he became infatuated by Bizet. It is difficult to credit such a lapse of strong taste in one so great for when it comes to music falling uncontrollably is the whole point, but as to our society the calm and measured and even placid alcove that the philosopher found in Carmen holds true. For as a people we move slowly and with deliberation, we rush into nothing but act with repose and equanimity—to be hurried for us is to be harried and harassed and nothing good comes from a diseased state of mind. We are a people of trust and good will and we know that the Americans are wrong to say that variety is the spice of life—it is the splice of life. And the intractable search for novelty or distraction is a corruption for one wants nothing but a metronomic regularity in the external world when the blinding heights are within.
I plan now to take a months long hiatus from completing this manuscript, I have only one more part to go and it will be just an “index on the endex” so to speak and I want to approach it in a long and desultory and circuitous fashion. I plan to travel to the East and I plan to speak to a few people who have updated information that I may require. But mostly I will go the Great Forests of our people, for those are my Cathedrals, and visit a few locations that I haunted as a child; and see my family. For a penultimate mood is one thing, but as we are set to banish all the ghosts from the machine we must first cure ourselves of attachment and of anything human---and memory and nostalgia must be the first ones to go.
To my amusement I am considered by the younger cohort in my department something of, if not a relic, not nearly willing enough to entertain the outlandish. Not true I say, I as much as anyone await the results and agree with the man who said that the only surefire criteria for truth is that it be wildly peculiar. Still they think that my unwillingness to speculate holds me back. It may be so and it may not be so but it is best do everything empirically and I fully expect that when the future actually shocks us it will be downright bizarre. Which is why as a people we have approached it with such sympathy and curiosity for the only way to earn the future is to do it the old-fashioned way---to burn it.
Continued at Empyrean (Part Eighteen)
