Since that day in Eden when Adam and Eve were deceived by the slogan eritis sicut Dei, their progeny have tirelessly fallen for slogans of similar formulation. Each of them conceals the futile promise: you shall be like gods. One of the strongest urges in man, carefully disguised behind the masks of other urges, is the urge to be god, to be omnisciently omnipotent. Such an elevated aspiration certainly does not come from man; if it were from him, it would surely end up on the junk pile, there where all “elevated” human ideas end up. God intended, our old Grand Masters said, for man to become like a god. Where did the misunderstanding arise? The paradox is only illusory. Adam stopped along the way of the vertical ascent to God (and here we arrive at the very essence of the mystery of evil — to the boundary). By thinking: I am now like God, Adam fell away from God because he juxtaposed his subjectivity to God’s subjectivity; by becoming aware of himself, he separated himself from God and thus became — instead of an independent subject — an object controlled by external elements and death; an absurd, mortal-immortal being, simultaneously mindful and mindless.
Every city, as you know, echoes with an unbearable clamor. At first glance, a lot of different things are being talked about, but all of that can be reduced to one simple sentence: solus ipse sum. That is exactly how the mystics describe hell. For, Gehenna is not some other city, as blessed Augustine teaches — it is every city. Just as the Kingdom of God is within us, so hell is within us as well. That is the solipsism. The evil of the world is the projection of our internal evil, a projection which, reflected back from the apathy of the external, returns amplified a hundred times and destroys the subject.
Bicyclists, evil seems to be omnipotent, but things are not really that way. Evil is destined to failure, because it is limited. Evil is just the boundary that divides and destroys unity, but at the same time that boundary limits evil as well only in its effort to become endless. In other words, evil is not an entity in the way it was imagined by the Manicheans, it is rather good that has left the path toward its goal — to the highest good — and gotten lost in itself. And in this case, the goal justifies every means. If I do not have any other goal than myself and my own comfort — I am evil; I will try to take others’ good, I will not see a fellow brother in someone else but a competitor, or perhaps even an enemy. All the misery of this world rests on such metaphysically disloyal competition. But it cannot be said that we are sent into that war unprepared. First of all the family, then the schools and other bigoted institutions, teach quite openly that it is good to trod on others to get to the goal, and if those others resist, then you trod on dead bodies. And that is how the thieves, drunks, blasphemers and perverts have gotten their hands on the ruling places in the world.
It should be explained why the thesis about the finality of death is politically opportune. The equation is fairly simple and petty, as is appropriate for politics. If I allow them to convince me that I am a mortal being who is returning to nothingness, I am left without a future. Namely, death can cut me down at any given moment. With that conviction, I am desperate. I can laugh, have fun, experience joy — and I do — but in the depths of my being I have suppressed my desperation, and the means of smiling, having fun and raising fear serve only to distract me from my desperation. If I am mortal, if God does not exist, then, as Dostoyevsky says, I am allowed to do everything. Why shouldn’t I be? Anyway everything is disappearing into nothingness. Spineless men with some sort of fluid morals blather on in highfalutin speeches, but there are no morals. A mortal being cannot be moral; in the best case scenario, it might become esthetic. And logically, a creature who has no future turns to the past. That is how the homo istoricus comes about. His only basis is the past; he attempts to fill that past with pleasant memories. When someone says “my life,” rarely do they mean that they are alive here and now, rather they mean their biography — their life wasted in the times past. The ideologies of death are always focused on the past, always oriented to the idealization of things forever vanished. In such societies, the future is more of a respect for grammar than it is a hope. And that is logical as welclass="underline" in a future filled with vague projections, only one thing is certain — death.
Furthermore, a creature convinced of its own finality is not free; it is imprisoned in the boundaries of the body, the limitations of the ego, the borders of a country, ideology and time. The most it can do for itself is to make its imprisonment bearable. So we arrive at pleasure, in whose name supposedly all borders and limitations are destroyed. That is the phantom of freedom of the west, a phantom which proclaims that all is allowed if it brings pleasure. However, pleasures are a limitation of the highest degree; the Land of Luxury remains an empty dream. It is different in the world: if you want pleasure you must have money, and if you want money you either have to work for it or take it, it is a matter of choice, both possibilities are legal. And wherever the lack of freedom and power reigns, institutions necessarily reign as a result. The goal of each of them, if we extract programs and slogan as folklore, is one and the same: maintain the status quo. Institutions are nothing more than a childish attempt to stop time; one does not climb up their ladder thanks to spiritual and moral advancement — as one climbs on Jacob’s ladder — but to the contrary, thanks to spiritual and moral depravity. And so institutions should be deconstructed as associations of the captive, dependent, immature and unlearned; associations that are intended for the battle against all freedom of personality, against every genuine action. That is the way it has always been. And that is how the so-called “humanists” will oppose the construction of the Grand Insane Asylum; they will attempt to stop the fulfillment of their own dream. For, we are planning a city in which evil will spread to its most extreme limits, to the border where it will — having no where else to go — begin to destroy itself.
I am familiar with a few details of the project and I believe that all of this is rational, too rational. You cannot plan an insane asylum or prison rationally, because insane asylums and prisons are not rational institutions. They only serve to defend the rational Earthly City from the irrational. However, by excluding all institutions, by melding them into a single one — into an ecumenical madhouse — the irrational forces of the spirit will penetrate into the world and purify it with its redeeming fire.
Note:
The speech of the Grand Master was given in September, 1937. On that occasion, all members of the brotherhood, no matter where they were, fell into synchronized sleep and gathered at the oneiric Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, at which time a small celebration was held in honor of the reconstruction of those parts of the cathedral damaged in the attack of the commandos of the Traumeinsatz.
L. LOENTZE. THE MADNESS OF ARCHITECTURE — THE ARCHITECTURE OF MADNESS
1
When, huffing and puffing, the messenger of the Grand Master delivered the orders for me to write a paper dedicated to the study of space, I remembered a few details of a letter which I was sent many years ago by Dr. Çulaba Çulabi. In spite of that, I found myself in a dilemma. I knew that a generalized, practically undefined topic does not demand exactness or credibility, that the goal of research is purely subjective and that it will lead me in quite a different direction, revealing things to me that I do not want to find out, just as the appearance of Dr. Çulabi sent my life in a direction I was not expecting, at a time when I still ran a very profitable engineering office, had a lovely house, and respectable friends with whom I played tennis on Sundays. Dr. Çulabi showed up one day in my studio. He said that he, Çulabi, was a representative of the IMPEX COMMERCE Company; he had heard praises of my work and wanted to hire me for a big job that his company had taken over. If I thought his name was strange, the job he proposed to me was even stranger. Namely, with a deadline of ten months, I was to draw up the plans for a Circular Psychoanalytic Center with 15,000 offices; then the plans for the interior of Napoleon’s study (in 450 copies), and finally a plan for the torture chamber of the Holy Inquisition, complete with the devices for torture. I said that it was a really big job and that I had to think about it. Çulabi had nothing against it. His rather strange appearance did not fill me with confidence. I checked the business records of the IMPEX Company and I found out that it was reputable, and also that Çulabi was indeed a representative of the company.