In the end, what has a man but his thoughts? I would postulate further, what has a man to stand for, but his thoughts? His actions, perhaps? I know precious little of actions. Lions, donkeys, hyenas. They all act. So is that what we are? No. We are more and less than the beasts. We are thoughts. We are actions and the reflections upon those actions. Yet, we are also not merely reflections. We are not mirrors.
That is the preserve of spirits, of the gods. We are actions and the thoughts upon actions. Neither one nor other. We are free neither from action, nor from thought. Our humanity can only be understood if we embrace both the animal and the god within us. As humans, we must nourish both, yet America is a land of action. A place fixated not on ideas, not on the redemptive power of thought but on the obliteration of the intellect.
It is a place wherein mankind has attempted to deny half of his being, and in pursuing freedom has attempted to split himself. Much like the monk gives up the pleasures of the body, so the American, the American is encouraged to give up pleasures of the mind. He is led by desire into a pig pen, awaiting his own slaughter.
With this in mind, I decided that my study could best be conducted by traveling around this country and seeing how we, as Americans, could best awaken both the god and the animal within. I wandered into the inferno. The grand human inferno, the fiery and mediocre hell that is Manhattan. A world built by men for the torture of their fellows.
A place that shows, beyond all reasonable doubt, that when left to his own devices, when removing God entirely from his creation, man will induce not heaven, but hell. The gilded inferno. The marbled purgatory. This American churning sea of desire, the place where we see man for what he truly is, and recoil in horror. He is the destroyer of all. Of nature, of course, of his brothers, seemingly as sport, and finally of himself.
Men are fixated on greed, on desire, and on the acquisition not of experiences or pleasures but on the ability to acquire. People are fixated on wealth. Man is reduced to the desire for desire. Wanting is all that matters. Not loving, not being, not having, but wanting. We are killers for desire. Even sport would be preferable. This is the grand sickness, the eternal sickness of this land—it is, man unleashed. Man unleashed and turned into, he knows what not?
For inside he is nothing, so all that moves him, all that he understands is the external, the great churning sea of desire. It is not freedom. It is an impression of freedom for people who have not the capacity to see further. And why can they not see further? Because they have not been taught to see. If you wish for man truly to be free—if that is this nation’s promise and not merely a sales pitch for snake oil—then we must first teach ourselves and then our fellows to see the glory.
The glory is in death. Yes, of course, in life, and but also in death. I realize that idea is abhorrent. I realize it is vulgar and distasteful, I realize it is perverse. But it is also the truth.
As I travelled throughout Manhattan, from the migrant slums of the Lower East to the marble-clad mansions by the central park, I came to appreciate a hideous truth; the system that allows poverty and degradation such as I saw is wrong, and the impacts of the degradation on humanity are profound, but far worse is the impact of wealth upon those who possess it, who are possessed by it.
To be removed from humanity, to live as a prisoner in a marble goal, to be isolated from humanity in such a manner, is so profoundly anti-American as to make the whole conception of this nation an absurdity even worse than our treatment of the negro. Manhattan at once depraves the poor and dehumanizes the rich. Its purpose is unhappiness. The nurturing and blooming of suffering.
And this, we are informed, is the high point of American society. Nonsense. This is nonsense. American nonsense, yes, but nonsensical deceptions nonetheless. The real America can only be found not in desires but in the purity of its landscapes.