#though I am curious if these two are meant to represent them as childhood friends in their “current” life

[parab0mb]

friens :)

[truglori]

Sneaky Link 🔗

Synopsis: Black Reader and Eric find each other online!

Pairing: Erik Stevens x Black Reader

Warning: Language, Smutt, Raw sex

Flopping on the bed Y/N found herself bored for the fourth Friday night in a row. This was supposed to be the season of hook ups and living her best carefree lifestyle that she had planned out but yet is was the exact opposite. Being on summer break from college Y/N had to come back home with the schools being closed. It was something she dreaded.

Home for her wasn’t the best place to be. Between her judgmental and nagging parents and older brother, Chris, Y/N was ecstatic when she discovered that she would be going to a school that was over three hundred miles away. Being four hours away gave her enough freedom knowing that she didn’t have any one breathing down her neck or snitching to her parents about whatever she did. With it only being her sophomore year Y/N loved the college lifestyle.

Getting up she went to her window to open it and put in her square fan. Her air conditioner that she always kept in her room was now being used by her brother so she had to settle for this. Turning the knob she felt the warm cool breeze coming through and taking up the room. Walking back to her bed she logged into her laptop going onto the web browser. Clicking the history she found the website she was searching for and tapped it.

Quick Link popped up on her screen. It was a site that allowed people to meet and chat with other people. Even though Y/N has been going on it for weeks now back and forth, she never met one person that she has chatted with yet. She was okay with talking to them online and even over the phone but the thought of seeing them in person scared her. With all of the Lifetime movies and ID channel she would watch, doing something as small as meeting up with them could be dangerous.

Y/N scrolled through her recent messages. She had over ninety-nine notifications. She knew that she wasn’t going to reply to them all, only the once she found cute. It was like a broken record being played. They all inbox her with the same messages, hey sexy! Y/N rolled eyes at the un-originality. To her it seem like the guys didn’t even try to put in any effort.

Tapping on the keyboard she began to text back the handful that she found attractive when she got two notifications. Hurrying up her sentence she exited out of the chat and clicking on her new direct messages.

HandsomeAssNigga👅- Y/N, what in the hell is yo ass doing on this shit...10:35pm

HandsomeAssNigga👅- And I know you still online. I can see the green bubble by ya picture...10:36pm

Y/N squinted at the name. Who the hell was this texting her like they knew her? The question alone made her stomach flutter at the idea of getting caught on a dating site by someone she knew or knew her. Clearly this person recognized her enough to boldly message her. Clicking on their username she went to their page. Her heart stopped and thighs clenched at the same time.

It was Erik fucking Stevens aka her brother’s childhood best friend. Chris and Erik were the same age and only three years older than Y/N. Growing up Y/N stayed crushing on Erik. It was his braids that he rocked back in the day that had her drooling over him but also how nice he was to her. Y/N remembered the time when she was a freshman in high school and Chris and Erik were both Juniors she would always get a ride with them every morning in his 2005 Honda Accord. He would steal glances at her through his rear view mirror that only she would catch but to afraid to ask him about it.

There would be times that she would find underwear from a girl tucked under the backseat. Y/N heard about the rumored that went around the school that Erik was a player. An experienced one at that. He was grown before his time and with the way the lucky girls who had a chance to sleep with him describe it, he gave dick like he was a grown man as well.

Hearing that did nothing but spark the flame that she felt about him. She wanted to experience it herself. But being the quiet and timid person she was then, she never did. It wasn’t until Y/N went to college where she lost her virginity her freshman and started having sex on the regular with her ex who was also her first. From the first few times they did it, she could never cum from penetration. Y/N thought it was normal and that every girl dealt with it until she shared a few stories with her friends and they would tell her about the way their guys would make them squirt.

Squirting was something Y/N always wanted to do but could never achieve with her guy. She loved feeling him inside of her stretching her open but he was a quick pumper. He came too fast for her and couldn’t last long enough to get her to nut. So after every session she would take her bullet and tortured her clit until she felt her cream escaping her hole. Not having sex since the last time she was at school had Y/N body extremely horny and hot and ready like a little ceasars pizza.

Clicking through his pictures had her clenching her thighs. After he graduated high school, the graduation was the last place she seen Erik. She wasn’t even sure if Chris and him were still close friends. But what she could say is that he grew up very nice. He now had dreads that hung over his eyes with a clean shape up to top it off. His teeth pearly and white accompanied by gold canines he was wearing in every other picture and last but not least his body was everything. Standing at 6’3 and looking like a solid 215 from her view Erik was fine as fuck.

Giggling and embarrassed with herself she replied back.

BlackBeauty- Erik omg...this is so embarrassing. How did you find me?...10:40pm

Biting the nail on her thumb she waited for him to answer her. To her surprise he wrote back fairly faster than what she expected.

HandsomeAssNigga👅- Noticed yo little ass on the explore page. I know you not on here meeting with these wack ass niggas...10:42pm

She laughed re-reading his message. To her it sound like it was possessive but she didn’t want to over think it.

BlackBeauty- Never!! I am not stupid. I haven’t met one person yet...10:44pm

Hitting the send button she rolled her eyes noticing herself getting desperate from his attention.

HandsomeAssNigga👅-Okay bet! I don’t wanna have to fuck you up youngin 😈...10:47pm

Biting her lip, she stared down the emoji. She wondered what that meant. She wondered in what way did he meant when he said he would fuck her up. At this point Y/N was dripping between her thick thighs.

BlackBeauty- What about you? I know you out here fucking these bitches you meet on here. Don’t lie lol...10:49pm

Y/N didn’t want to seem nosy, she was just trying to make conversation.

HandsomeAssNigga👅- Damn you cuss now? And second of all don’t be worried about what I do with my dick. I’m grown and that’s different...10:51pm

Bringing a hand down to her covered pussy Y/N caressed it. The warmth coming through her panties and cotton shorts. She didn’t know what it was but the way he was responding had her feeling a type of way. She wasn’t the shy young girl anymore he used to know and she wanted to make that clear.

BlackBeauty- I’m grown too Erik 💦...10:53pm

Her heart beat sped up when she sent the text not knowing how he was going to respond.

HandsomeAssNigga👅- To who? I know ya young ass ain’t out here fuckin yet. You was too shy for that last time I saw you. Even if you was, I know you ain’t getting know real dick...10:55pm

HandsomeAssNigga👅- What’s that emoji supposed to represent? Ya pussy or sum shit? Let me find out Y/N 👿...10:56pm

There goes that little devil that had her questioning herself again.

BlackBeauty- I get dick on the regular. Good dick! And yes Erik that emoji reps my pussy. Same young pussy that’ll be too wet for you to handle! I’ll have you drownin in my shit...10:59pm

Y/N could always talk a good game online. It was where she could be get as nasty as she wanted without actually putting in work. The guys who would hit her up loved her foreplay that she had spit over the internet and she was fortunate enough where they never pressed her to meet in person.

HandsomeAssNigga👅- Bring that pussy here and I’ma show you if I’ll drown in it. Stop fucking playing with me Y/N if you not gonna pull up. I don’t do this back and forth teasing shit. You tryna do a Sneaky Link or what?...11:02pm

Checking the hall Y/N seen that the lights were off. Her parents were most likely sleeping and Chris always worked Friday nights. This was the perfect time and opportunity to leave. She would have to sneak the keys from the key holder and use her dad’s car to get to his place. Y/N didn’t do this on the regular but because it was Erik she was curious. She wanted to see for herself if all of the rumors were true. Y/N was going to fuck him tonight.

BlackBeauty- Send me the addy..I’m on my way...11:04pm

________

After showering and preparing for her dick appointment Y/N successfully snuck out of the house. She put his address in her GPS. It was a twenty minute drive to get to his apartment. Putting the car in park and turning it off, Y/N felt the butterflies in her stomach grow while walking into the building. Taking her phone out she went to his message and looking up the apartment number he gave her. Apartment 3B.

Knocking on the door. She held her hands together tightly. She was beyond nervous and rethinking her decision as her heart kept thumping. She couldn’t believe that she was really going to go through this. After so many years of fantasizing about him in her room she was finally going to see the real thing. Y/N only wondered if it was as good as she hoped.

The door swung open showing Erik sipping on a glass of dark liquor. In nothing but a tight wife beater that clung to his chest and his sweats that hung low Y/N could see the print poking through so visibly. It looked like he was free balling it.

“Damn ma. You wasn’t lying about getting grown. You look good as shit.” Erik sipped from his glass. He stepped aside inviting her in.

Y/N smiled softly going inside. She only took a few steps in and stood to the side waiting for him. She heard the door lock behind her as it caused her to gulp hard on her spit.

Erik eyed her with his low eyes. He chuckled seeing that she was clearly nervous.

“So that’s ya thing?” His voice was low and deeper than what she remembered.

“What’s my thing?” Her soft voice speaking up.

“Talking shit online but quiet it person.” He stated putting her on the spot.

Y/N smacked her lips and rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” She turned facing his livingroom.

“Nah ain’t no whatever. What’s good ma? Where that big girl energy go?” He walked up behind her pressing his body into hers. The hand that wasn’t holding his cup wrapped around her waist gripping the small pudge on her stomach.

Y/N shivered when she felt his dick on her ass. Her assumption was right. He wasn’t wearing any underwear beneath his sweats. She could feel the coldness of his chains on her shoulder when he leaned on her due to her only wearing a tank top. She grabbed his hand, not pushing him away but holding on to him.

“I’m here aren’t I?” She gazed at him over her shoulder.

He smirked at her smart remark. “You need anything before we start? A drink, blunt, something to help you calm ya scary ass down.” He teased.

She pushed his hand from around her waist and folded her arms. “I’m not scary Erik. If I was I wouldn’t be here.”

“Then why you barely saying shit?” He licked his lips.

Y/N shrugged. “It’s just been a while since I saw you. You look...different.” Playing with her diamond earning, she occupied her fingers.

“I may look different but I’m still the same Erik that used to jack ya brother up every time he fucked with you when no one was looking. Ain’t shit changed about me ma so you can relax. I’m tryna take care of you tonight.” He spoke stepping closer.

They were now face to face. Y/N’s frame staring up into his 6’3 one. When she would inhale she could smell his expensive cologne mix with the Hennessy he’s been sipping on since she got here.

“Okay.” She answered with a bite of her bottom lip.

Erik groaned at the action. Both of his hands behind his back now, he bent down to her level to meet her halfway. “C’mere.” He demanded a kiss with messy dreads hanging over his eyes.

Meeting him where he was, Y/N listened giving him one. The taste of the dark liquor transferring over to her taste buds from his tongue invading her mouth. The warmth of it made her melt under him and causing her head to lean back. She was already growing weak just from the kiss.

Erik reached behind her slapping her ass and gripping it with his free hand. “Fuck you doing all that for and I ain’t even do shit yet.” He spoke against her lips peaking through his eyelids.

“Hurry up then daddyy.” Y/N whined.

“That’s my name for the night? I like that shit.” He walked them backwards until they reached his room which wasn’t far away from the front.

Placing his glass down on his dresser he lifted her up by her thighs, picking her up. Y/N squealed from the unexpected action. She held onto his neck hoping he wouldn’t drop her. Erik chuckled playing with her ass cheeks before laying her down on the bed gently.

“You sucked dick before...miss grown?” Bringing his hand down, he massaged his print through his sweats.

Leaning up on the palm of her hands, Y/N nodded answering yes. She did it plenty of times with her ex, who she could make cum quickly off of head alone but the way Erik was grabbing his tool made her think differently.

“So what’s up then? Come show me what that mouth do?”

Kicking off her sandals Y/N got off the bed. His eyes stayed glued to her. Getting on her knees in front of him she tugged the sides of the grey sweats and pulled them down to his mid thigh. His dick sprung out almost hitting her in the face had she been centimeters closer.

Long and thick was what it was. A beautiful smooth brown texture covered his heavy package. Y/N felt her mouth watered thinking about how her cream and juices would look being all over it. This man was truly blessed and so far proving the rumors to be true.

Erik twisted his hips side to side wagging it in front of her. He lifted the wife beater up and tucked it under his chin so that he can get a good view.

Grabbing the base of his length Y/N eyed it. She was trying to figure out ways to be able to swallow this monster without choking. Sticking her tongue out she tapped his tip against it. A string from her saliva on her tongue being attached to his head every time they separated. With her prior experience and watching porn she grew to have her own technique.

Y/N allowed the spit to build up in her mouth when she sucked on his tip. No nigga likes dry head and she wasn’t going to start giving it today. She wanted it to be extra sloppy for Erik. Tightening her jaws she went up and down on his dick. Taking only about four inches of him and using her spit to stroke the rest of him. With just the little bit of his length she was able to take she could already feel him reaching her back.

“Fuck that throat feel good. Shitt!” Erik groaned gripping her tight kinky curls and putting them into a ponytail. He tilted his head watching her go stupid on his dick. He sucked in his lower lip when she began to swivel her head around.

Long drips of spit went falling down on her black tank top. Erik’s eyebrows scrunched up the moment he felt her take his balls in her mouth and suck on them lightly while stroking his tip. His stomach started to tighten and his toes dug into his carpet. This girl was trying to take his soul the way she sucking him up.

“Man whatchu doing Y/N?” Erik asked amazed, closing his eyes for a second. He couldn’t remember the last time he had head this good.

“I’m showing you that I’m grown daddy.” She answered coming up.

Now both of her hands were focused on playing with his balls while she sucked his tip and some of the few inches she was able to reach. Her eyes stared into his not stopping at all. She had him right where she wanted him. She could tell from the way his breathing sped up that he was getting weak and ready to bust a nut. Y/N tightened her suction to make it happen when she felt him pull her off by her hair.

Erik took one hand gripping her spit covered chin and tilted her head up to look at him. “Fuck is you doing sucking my dick like that ma? You tryna make me hold you hostage for the whole night?” He asked seriously.

Y/N giggled. “I just wanna make you cum Daddy.” She reached for his tip and gripped it making him jerk forward.

Erik smacked his lips annoyed that she had him feeling like sensitive. “Chill with that. Let me fuck you first before you suck this nut out.”

Helping her up and placing her back on the bed Erik slide off her biker shorts tossing them somewhere. Underneath them she had on some cotton hipster panties with little rainbows spreaded everywhere. Erik laughed when he seen it.

“Why you wearing shit like this ma?” He teased stepping out of his pants and getting on the bed.

“Because it’s cute. Why you worried about what I’m wearing instead of taking them off?” Y/N mocked his question.

Erik smirked bringing his hand up to the piece of cloth and ripping them straight down the middle and threw them on the ground. A gasp left Y/N lips as she was shocked from him doing that. Slapping his forearm, her lips went into a pout becoming upset.

“Erik, I just brought those two weeks ago.” She smacked the hand that was rubbing her thigh.

“You said to take them off. My bad. That’s the way I usually do it.” He lifted her legs by the back of her thighs while he consoled her as a distraction.

Y/N was frustrated at the fact that he ripped her new panties but also that she wasn’t going to have any to wear back home after this link.

“I don’t care how you do it, you shouldn’t have- ohh shiitt!” Her rant was cut off with the sound of moans leaving her mouth.

Holding her legs by the back of her knees Y/N glanced down to see Erik flicking her clit. The tip of his tongue felt wet and firm, in a good way. She really started to feel it when he took one hand and spread her phat pussy lips. Now her clit was out in the open and more accessible. Erik’s eyes met hers through his dreads when his lips wrapped around her bud and began to suck.

“Mm fuck...daddyy!” The sensation had Y/N’s hips thrusting to meet his vacuum like suction. So powerful and wet.

“I want you to cum on this fuckin tongue!” His words were muffled by the lips of her pussy surrounding his but it was enough to reach her ears. Taking a hand he smacked her outer thigh making his demand clear.

Her warm and slick juices ran out of her opening. It was something about the way he commanded her to nut that made her wetter and willing. Y/N liked to be dominated. Lifting up the tank top and pulling it up to her chest she tweaked and flipped her nipples adding to the stimulation. For her the feeling of having her nipples played with while getting her pussy ate made her orgasm a hundred times better.

“Eat this fucking pussy b-babyy-“ She whimpered feeling a tear slide down the corner of her eye.

Even though he noticed it, Erik didn’t stop. The juices that he caught in his mouth made it hard. He loved a good tasting ass pussy. Y/N definitely had one. Moving his assault from her clit he put his tongue in her tight opening. He began to fuck her with it. Erik put his hands under her ass cheeks and got a good cuff before bringing her back and forth on his stiff tongue. With the way her legs were still in the air he could see Y/N toes curl the second he started the action. She began leaking so quickly. Erik chuckled inwardly when he felt her walls squeezing on him.

“Mhm.” He moaned teasing her.

Y/N was cumming from the second time just off of his mouth alone. She reached down to rub her clit while he stuck his tongue deep inside her. She ain’t never got head this good before back at college. Her thighs began to shake as she felt another mini orgasm hit. Her pussy growing sensitive and overstimulated.

Grabbing his dreads she lifted his head up. “Daddy you was eating my pussy so good. Fuckk!” She moaned with a quiver in her voice.

“Now I’m bout to beat this pussy up real good too. Turn around. I want that ass from the back.” Erik barked getting on his knees.

Swiftly taking off her tank top, Y/N turned around like he said and got on all fours. She felt a firm smack to her right ass cheek. Moaning she rocked back and forth and twerked each cheek individually. Y/N looked over her shoulder behind her seeing Erik watching her move it so effortlessly. His hands went up to her waist and pulled her closer to him. Now she could feel her mound rubbing against his bare hard rock hard stick.

“Doing all this ass shaking, you better not try to run from the dick. I don’t want none of that.” He gripped a cheek spreading it watching her pussy lips follow.

“I’m not gon run daddy..I promise.” She reassured him softly.

Erik gripped the base of his length. Smacking it against her her clit he played with it for a while to warm her up. When he heard her moaning and seen her backing up against him he knew she was ready. Erik sent a drip of spit on the tip of his dick and rubbed it over it with a free hand. He teasingly dipped in and out of her tight hole. Y/N pussy was tight as fuck and he knew he had to work his way in. Getting deeper and deeper with each inch her warm wet walls clung on to him.

“Ooh fuck!” Y/N eyes closed not expecting him to feel like this. Erik was stretching her pussy out. Her arms sprawled out in front of her gripping his sheets.

“Tight ass pussy you got. What happened to getting dick on the regular? Hmm?” Holding her down by the small of her back Erik made her arch deeper as he stroked her slick walls.

Y/N’s mouth couldn’t close or make a sound. From the position he had her in she couldn’t move or run if she wanted to. Pinned down and made to take it. Erik was dicking her down. His heavy fat dick busting her pussy open and touching her stomach. Fuck that. He was putting it in her chest. Y/N reached behind her to hold on to his wrist while he pounded her pussy with precision. Her face smashed into the bed. His dick was too good for her.

“Ooh baby... Daddy don’t fuck me like this!” She shouted not knowing what she was saying. Y/N didn’t want him to stop but she couldn’t handle the pressure he was putting on her bladder.

Erik didn’t have just a big dick that could stretch a pussy out. He knew how to fuck with it. When he stroked he didn’t use his whole body he worked his hips and that’s what drove bitches crazy about him. Erik would fuck like he was trying to make a baby.

“I thought you came here to get fucked?” He asked lifting off her. He bended one knee and balanced his weight on his foot pressing it into the bed. His hand wrapped around her throat as he caught a rhythm making her throw it back on him.

The sound of skin clapping filled the room. Y/N’s arch was now the deepest it’s ever been with Erik choking her from behind and making her head tilt up towards the ceiling. Cramping in her stomach let her know that she was about to break. She was finally about to cum from penetration alone. His curved tip would press on a spot she didn’t know she had there causing her legs to convulse. Her whimpers and moans only encouraged him to keep doing what he was doing. Which was tearing her pussy up.

“Shiitt!!” She cursed grabbing onto her titty to have something to hold on.

Erik bit his lip seeing her ass tremble from her orgasm and feeling her squeezing his dick with a vice grip. He slapped her left cheek before pulling out to flip her over on her back. Looking down at his meat it was covered in her creamy juices. His dick jumped at the sight.

“Good ass pussy.” He mumbled in a trance.

Using the weight of his hips he thrusted finding his way back inside of her. The warm wet tunnel closing in on him. Erik lifted up the wife beater that was still on in the mist, and brought it up under his chin tucking it to move it out of his way. His hands found the back of her thighs and pinned them against her chest. He began stroking and getting deeper from the angle.

Being trapped from his hold that he had on her, the only thing Y/N could do was bring her hands to his hips trying to interrupt his movements. Y/N didn’t like this feeling. He was going too deep. Deeper than what she was used to. Shaking her head from side to side she pushed at his hips that only kept going due to her weak and trembling arms not being able to produce enough strength.

“Move ya fuckin hands.” He demanded while keeping his steady stroke. Erik cussed under his breath hearing the smacking sounds coming from her hole that could be mistaken for a pot of mac and cheese being stirred. That’s how good Y/N pussy was.

Her tight walls gripped his dick. Erik looked between their bodies watch the beautiful art being made. Her pussy following him whenever he pulled out to the tip just to be sucked back in. Pussy as good and wet as hers always got him to bust hard. He was close. Leaning down to her neck he kissed and sucked her skin while having her pinned down taking his length. Erik felt her walls slick up and knew she was about to nut again.

“Let that shit go mama.” He whispered in her neck.

Y/N’s nails scratched against his back. Her eyes wailed up with tears feeling the pressure in her stomach building up. She lost count of how many times he had made her cum tonight but she knew she was grateful and only prayed that this wasn’t the last time she got dick this bomb.

“Unhh.” She couldn’t produce any words. Her toes curled as she gazed at the ceiling feeling her body shake.

“There you go.” He pecked her neck.

Erik talked her through her nut while he continued to chase his. It wasn’t long before he felt his dick throb and grow inside of her. Pulling out he climbed on top of her holding his body up with one hand pressed into the bed as he stroked his dick with the other. Y/N opened her mouth and sucked his tip. She could feel his seed spilling on her tongue and traveling down her throat. She wasn’t usually a swallower but the way he had just fucked her he deserved to have his dick milked.

“Ahh shit!” Erik cursed caressing her jaw as he watched her suck him dry. She was cleaning both her juices and his nut off of his dick.

A popping sound escaped her mouth when she released him. Y/N’s body couldn’t move as she laid back staring at him with disbelief. Erik caught her face expression.

“What?” He asked standing on the side of the bed.

“Nothing. It’s just the rumors that I heard about you were all true. You do give some good dick.” Turning to lay on her side Y/N smiled.

Erik laughed. “Yeah well I could say the same about you.”

Her brows knitted in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Little birdy that goes to your college told me about how good ya pussy was. Had to find out for myself.” He smirked at her.

“Erik what are you talking about?” Y/N sat up.

“I’m talking about your ex that you fuck from time to time is my second cousin. Nigga couldn’t stop running his mouth about you. Small world ain’t it?”

He paused watching the confusion clouding over her face. “Besides why else you think I had hit you up tonight? It damn sure wasn’t to reminisce over the past.”

Taking off the wife beater, Erik leaned down to kiss her lips before walking away.

______________________________________

Please excuse any mistakes!

Tag-List

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[sunnymusingsao3]

⭐ please mr director! release the morgwen cut....(where'd your headcanons for gwen come from, what are some challenges you have re: writing them)

Behind the Scenes: Fanfic Edition

Essay incoming! This one got long as well!

Oh bless you for asking me about this; she once was a true love of mine is one of my favorite things I've ever written, and I am always 110% ready to scream about the things that inspired it!

So the answer to your second question goes hand-in-hand with the answer to the first actually, so I'm gonna answer these out of order!

The biggest challenge with these two is mostly just how little we have in canon in regards to their relationship, background, history, and other such information that would typically be very helpful for writing a canon character-- or how two of them relate-- for a fanfic!

With Morgana, we have a little bit, but she's also not often allowed-- in the show, at least-- to be a character outside of being a villain for our heroes to fight, so one challenge with her is understanding what she does in her day-to-day life. What is she doing when she isn't advancing the plot via attempted fratricide, or directly opposing Merlin in some way? Since she can't possibly always be sitting in her tower rubbing her hands together maniacally (or pulling a BBC Merlin and smirking in full view of everyone who suspects her) I want to know what kinds of things she likes to do when she's not in court, or tackling the Big Themes Of The Show.

She's clearly moved on from lessons with Merlin, so she is not spending all her time studying-- though I do think she must be self-taught in shadow magic, so perhaps some days are spent on magic study-- and ToA is set before Morgana starts being a general-purpose villain to throw into your knight's tale (because as any medieval male writer will tell you, there is nothing scarier than a woman with power).

The way I see it, then, is that in order to establish this close friendship that Wizards says Guinevere and Morgana have, a good chunk of Morgana's time must be spent around Guinevere. And for a Guinevere who, in my headcanon, married Arthur for strategic reasons? For a Guinevere who's got a crush on Morgana the size of Arthur's ego? Spending that much time with her is bound to cause some good old fashioned yearning.

And this is where we get into my headcanons for Guinevere. As I said above, the biggest challenge is how little information we have about Guinevere. She's fallen victim to the Disposable Woman trope, and while I don't inherently fault ToA for that (they have plenty of other very strong and developed ladies), it does leave her with very little character beyond "she was Arthur's wife," and "she was Morgana's best friend." (Short sidenote: I really appreciate the Crusading Widower page on TV Tropes's site, for pointing out that the crusading widower is often an anti-hero or even an anti-villain because I think that's absolutely right when it comes to Arthur).

Anyway, all this to say, since there's so little canon, it's basically a perfect sandbox for fanfic writers to come in and have the time of their lives lol, so this is what I have done!

I am a huge Arthuriana nerd (though I am hardly an expert by any means; I'm just a simple fan who enjoys the stories) so when I saw Wizards utilize wildly famous Arthurian characters, I rather lost my mind over the potential.

I have so many headcanons about how to merge ToA and a bunch of Arthuriana plot points/tropes/characterizations, but for the purposes of this, I will stick to Guinevere!

The main way I went about making headcanons for ToA's Guinevere, was to look at what legends I knew about her and see what could apply to the Wizards canon, without contradicting it, in order to fill in these huge gaps.

For example, we know absolutely nothing about where Guinevere came from, so I kept her father and her home city from legend. Since her mother is not even mentioned in the legends, I also translated that over to an absence of her mother in the story, while also giving her at least a mention, as I think she'd be important to Guinevere, even if she hadn't really gotten to meet her properly. I really wanted this story to highlight the responsibilities that Guinevere has within her roles as wife and medieval royal woman, and I think having her consider what her mother would have done in her shoes tied into that theme of Guinevere wondering "what kind of woman do I want to become?" as she grew up. This is also why Igraine is given a moment in the fic as well; Guinevere's relationships with the women around her is something which I think deserves attention, even in a fic where I'm mostly just trying to establish a general timeline and characterization for Guinevere as a whole.

The idea for Guin's mother to have fallen in battle, in fact, came from ToA establishing that some of the background Camelot knights are men, and some are women, and it's treated as perfectly normal, as far as I noticed. Claire has that one line about a "boy's club," but I do think that it's actually just that she couldn't compete because she wasn't registered as a knight. I might be wrong about that, but I really liked the idea of there being knights in Camelot who are women, and I wanted to keep that in the fic I was writing. Therefore, I think that Guinevere's mother was both a queen and a knight, or, at least, a skilled warrior. Similarly, I also think that Guinevere's father is most known for his relationship with the Pendragons in legend. This then translated to her father being the diplomat, to tie in with her mother being the fighter. I didn't dwell too much on that because, again, the fic was meant to focus on Guinevere, and it had already gotten longer than I'd meant for it to. But, I tried to give a hint at that in the way that Guinevere's father is the one who physically takes Guin's bow, and puts a crown in her hands instead. He's not saying she can't be a fighter, but he is emphasizing that she also needs to be ready to appear in other kingdoms in a formal setting. I like to think that Leodegrance would have wanted Guinevere to have both options, to be a bit more well-rounded than he or her mother were.

Brief addition before I move on to the next phase of the fic: I chose a bow because when the stalkling advances on her, she tries using a stick to fight it off, but shows a bit of an ineptitude at using a weapon like that. Since I didn't want that to turn into "she's a weak royal who couldn't fight at all," especially since it seems to me that most of the time, being royal in the Middle Ages also meant receiving fight training, I chose for her to be better at ranged weapons, like bows, crossbows, maybe even spear throwing.

At any rate, my headcanons from there were created in a similar fashion to the ones mentioned above; I used a mixture of ToA canon (ex: Arthur, Morgana, and Guinevere being shown as childhood friends; Morgana and Guinevere spending time in the woods) and Arthuriana (ex: pulling the sword in the stone, losing it, getting it reforged by Nimue; Leodegrance bringing the round table as Guinevere's dowry; Merlin being a royal advisor).

Now, since this isn't much of a Morgwen cut just yet (so sorry omg), I wanted to skip ahead to the Morgwen pining moments, to talk about them!

The juxtaposition between a burning candle flame representing her love for Morgana, and an uncomfortable midnight cuddle from Arthur (where she can't even bring herself to scratch her nose-- an irritant meant to heighten that feeling of discomfort) representing her relationship with him, is one of my favorite ways to examine the wild difference in how Guinevere sees both relationships. One is untouchable but beautiful, interesting. It burns, and it's bright, and getting too near it hurts too bad.

And then on the other hand, one is there always, it's inescapable, but mostly sweet, though it comes up short of providing comfort. It's not bad, and it's even gentle, and Arthur does love her, but she married him for diplomacy. She married him because it's expected, and it keeps her safe.

(Which, sidenote: I think some stories work well with period-accurate homophobia, and others do not. This is one I would not have put period-accurate homophobia in, as it's fantasy and legend, and I think it's more interesting if Guinevere can't pick Morgana not because of Morgana also being a woman, but because Guinevere is bound by her duties as a royal).

The last thing I wanna talk about is that I have considered writing another Morgwen fic, but I'm just not sure what kind of plot hook or idea I'd like to pursue. So, if there's interest, or any requests that someone might have for these two, please do feel free to ask away! I think their relationship is really interesting, and I'd be delighted to keep writing for them. Guinevere is a fascinating character in particular, and is one who I think, even in legend, sometimes gets boiled down a lot, so I wanna add some depth back into her character, and give her a chance to shine!

Thank you so much for asking, and if there's anything else you're curious about, don't hesitate to send it my way! Like I said, I am always happy to holler about Guinevere and Morgwen! <3

[luninosity]

fanfic writers tag game!

I was tagged by the marvelous @musette22 for this lovely fanfiction tag game that was devised by the clearly very brilliant @thewaythatwerust, to discuss some of the fics I’ve written over time! Thanks so much! 💖

Let’s see, I shall tag... @thebestpersonherelovesbucky @turtletotem @gerec @whtaft and @ninemoons42 <3

Which of your fics…

* Did you think would get a bigger reaction/audience than it got:

Ah, a tricky one! I feel like I never really have expectations - I just write words because I can’t not! But maybe lines of light, which was my Steve/Bucky Fake Character Death Trope fic - it’s sort of a weird little fic, but I wanted more of that trope, but maybe that’s just me!

* Got a better reaction than you expected:

Oh, goodness - just about all of them! I remember being so shy and so nervous to share any of my writing, years ago, and now I write things that people seem to like...I think probably never mind the why and wherefore surprised me most, though! That’s my TJ Hammond/Johnny Storm fic, and when I started writing it mine was literally the third fic on AO3 for that pairing, and for that small a fandom, I’ve just been amazed.

Also, of course: I’m constantly amazed by how much people love Like Sugar! It was the biggest thing I’d ever tried to write, and it made me a better writer along the way, and I suspect it’s the Evanstan fic/series people might remember most, from my fics? (Also also, if original-fic-inspired-by-an-Evanstan-drabble counts: the love for Character Bleed has been overwhelming!)

* Is your funniest:

...am I funny? I don’t know! *waves hands about* I feel like I never set out to “write something funny,” but then again I like terrible puns and wordplay, so there’re probably funny lines in most fics? I hope?

Honestly maybe every inch of north and south, which has the Chris-turned-into-a-puppy plot, or Now That I’ve Found You, Stay, because giant patriotic dildos, or some of the banter in just a couple lovebirds, because I love Chris and Seb in that one. Or some of Bucky’s pulp fiction stories in tales to astonish. Or all the TERRIBLE autumn-related puns in the current Evanstan fic, A Place Not Far Away!

Or we could go REAL old-school and pull out the McFassy semi-crack fic in which James gets magically cursed to turn into a kitten. There’s that.

* Is your darkest/angstiest:

Ahahahaha. Um. *stares in Characters Having Emotions*

Okay, okay, um... Aside from certain specific chapters of Like Sugar and Amateur Cartography, it’s either The Tones That Tremble Down Your Spine (Bucky needs all the softness, after this! of course so does Steve...) (sometimes I think about adding a chapter, because it ends a little abruptly, but I also wanted it to - not everything’s 100% resolved, but it’s clearly on a healing trajectory!) ...

...or, over in Cherik-land, I hope we rise to the occasion, which does have a hopeful ending but is painful, or the balancing act stories (also Cherik) which were...personal in many ways (also originally written over on Livejournal, because I’m old).

* Is your absolute favourite:

Impossible! *laughs* It’s always the current story I’m (actively) writing. Which at the moment is the Evanstan autumn fluff-with-porn A Place Not Far Away. I don’t know if it’s my favorite-favorite, but it’s nice to get back to Evanstan and I love fall.

* Is your least favourite:

Also impossible! There’re things I love about all my stories. If I have to...maybe It’s Time To Bring This Ship Into The Shore, mostly because Michael’s such a dick to James for a lot of it. Which is also true in Loving Days (why was that a plot point in a few of my McFassy fics?) but I think I did a better job with his redemption in that one, and showing how much he changed and tried harder. And with Ship & Shore I wasn’t super-knowledgeable about the soul-bond trope (it was a request-fic) so I never felt quite sure I’d done it well enough!

* Was the easiest to write:

Amusingly, considering how epic and glorious and long the whole series became, I’d say Like O, Like H - the first Like Sugar Evanstan story. It just flowed. It knew what it wanted to be, and I tried to keep up. (Lovebirds was also one of those, as was the TJ/Johnny fic, never mind the why and wherefore.)

* Was the hardest to write:

the sound of rain on tin. It’s been the fic I’ve had the hardest time with ever. It’s my own fault for trying to do too much in terms of plot - sort of AU, an Evanstan-Stucky crossover, Lovecraftian elements - and then starting to post before I had it all properly sorted. I do know how it ends in general terms, I promise! but resolving plot/action has never been one of my strengths, and we’ve hit the point where I actually have to figure out How To Fix The Magic Portal-Thing, and I don’t feel like I’ve got it worked out well enough.

I mean if you all just want me to write the emotional Sebastian talking to Steve Rogers (and maybe a little curious kissing) and Chris talking to Bucky, and then *poof* suddenly Seb and Bucky are back in their respective universes and we get Emotional Reconciliation Scenes and Love Confessions, that part’s easy. I’ve had stray bits of those scenes done for years.

* Have you re-read the most:

Like Sugar, in part for continuity as I worked on later stories and in part because I’m really kind of proud of it.

* Would you recommend to someone reading your work for the first time:

Depends on what genres they like! I’m probably best known for - if anything - Like Sugar, and I think it’s pretty representative of my writing in terms of loving tender kink-with-emotions! But the person would have to not mind Evanstan RPF and soft Dom/sub kink and arranged (sort of) marriage tropes.

Other than that, for Evanstan, maybe Sweet Disposition (the third version of the clothes-sharing fic!); or (baby won’t you please), which is the Chris And Seb Go To A Sex Club For Research For a Role fic, or tempt me, tease me, which is...Sebastian leaves an unsatisfactory date with someone else (brief and random) to go pick Chris up from a bar, and then there’re lots of revelations about Feelings, and also porn-with-emotions. Those last two ‘feel’ similar in my head for some reason - mood, maybe, or story arcs about revelation and discovery.

...for Stucky, maybe when and where our eyes meet (Bucky falling asleep! soft blankets!)...or tales to astonish, because it’s such fun!

...if you want to go a bit older, I have weird affection for my first-ever Cherik fic, Know That It’s True, which is a Cerebro hurt/comfort fic, and then I love the slow development of the McFassy in No Wonder, No Wonder, which I occasionally still think about trying to revise as original, but it’s so character-driven that it’d be hard, but I love the feel of it, the hints of magic and the setting...

* Are you most proud of:

Like Sugar! At the time it was the biggest story I’d ever tried to write, both in terms of length and in terms of world-building and planning and characters growing closer together. Character Bleed got more complicated in terms of needing multiple outlines and plot, eventually, but I couldn’t’ve done that if I hadn’t done Like Sugar first.

* Has your favourite line/exchange/paragraph (share it):

Too hard to pick! There are so many! 

I sometimes say it’s this one, from tempt me, tease me, though not always:

“If you’d like,” Sebastian offers, “we can even tell them I borrowed your key and lost it, if you don’t mind asserting small untruths to hotel personnel.” Big blue half-plastered Captain America eyes stare at him some more. “…Chris?” “You…” One hand waves, a partial gesture, pulled back at the last second. As if Chris has meant to reach out, and thought better of that. “You really would? You wouldn’t, y’know, mind?” Sebastian half-smiles. Thinks of cars with broken-glass windows in Romanian capital-city streets, thinks of students waving flags and cheering with feral glee, thinks of saucer-eyed childhood memories and songs of revolutionary fervor and desperate upheavals of optimism like birthing-pains. Chris Evans is beautiful and genuine and real, and Sebastian would do far worse things, would splinter his body and perjure his soul, to give Chris one more day in which to eat pizza and laugh and clap friends on the shoulder with a broad happy hand. “No,” he says, “I wouldn’t mind.”

Or, from the WIP - the next chapter of A Place Not Far Away - because my favorite is often what I’m currently working on, there’s this! Enjoy? <3

They both watch Sebastian for a second; he’s nodding, jotting down a quote, hair bouncing with the motion. His fingers are quick and tanned, gathering notes; his jacket’s casually open, and dirt’s left a scuff on his right boot.

 He’s a New York City reporter in a black leather jacket and a stylish sweater, but he’s also a reporter who doesn’t mind getting dirty and will run through a corn maze and helped set out signs the first day Chris ever met him.

 Carly pats Chris’s shoulder, says, “Enjoy yourself,” and heads off to supervise some historical blacksmith demonstrations. The sky shimmers in clouds and satin and magic and unfallen rain.

 Sebastian bounces back over. “That’ll be fantastic, she was so excited, she’s already thinking about next year, which is so perfect for a pull quote, and it’ll get people thinking ahead about coming here then!”

 Would you come back, Chris doesn’t say. Would you come back next year, next month, next week, even if your story’s done? Would you stay and not leave?

 He can’t ask that. This is Sebastian’s job.

 He says, “That’s awesome. You want lunch?”

 “Absolutely. I haven’t eaten my way through your menu yet. Recommendations?”

 “Classic Oktoberfest? The whole German sausage, potato, onion thing? That one’s popular. And, um, baked apples. In maple cream sauce.” Food. He can talk about food. Promoting their menu. Not getting down on both knees and promising to bring home every pumpkin Sebastian likes, if that’ll make those happy eyes stay at his side.

 “Sounds good.” Sebastian’s eyebrows go up, beckoning Chris into the joke. “And I do like sausage.”

 “I like your sausage,” Chris tells him, and Sebastian’s laugh is a splash of sunshine through clouds and cold and tree-branches that stretch to the sky.

[if-the-crown-fits-translate-it]

Discord pt 106

[Date: 28/03, 2:57 AM GMT - 28/03, 3:40 AM GMT]  

[Direct continuation of pt 105]

jayyyyyyyy: “can I assume you both like the color pink? or am I just reaching”

[Duke: “However, civility is the noblest pillar of which humanity stands on. Please cease your fighting you two, it can be easily discussed later.”]

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “y'know what fine I don't want to get shrunk any further so I'll try not to argue for now, sorry if I upset you”

Jack the Observer: “I'm sorry, Duke and Duchess, I was about to retire for the night when I noticed you had arrived. I must be on my way, but I hope you will find this humble place at least interesting :)”

Duchess: “Of course; you need not neglect your rest for our sake. Have a lovely night.”

Duke: “Thank you! I wish you happy dreams and sweet slumber.”

llyr (they/them): “ooh, what about favorite animals, if you two have one?

jayyyyyyyy: “I’m still curious-- is your favorite color pink?”

Duchess: “I would say our favorite animal would be cats. And yes- we are both guite fond of pink.”

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “why are you asking for colors? this isn't normally something we ask-”

Duke: “It represents such glorious things, pink. Both soft and strong, loving and deceiving, cool yet warm.”

jayyyyyyyy: “nice! I’m not too big on pink, but its a really nice color”

jayyyyyyyy: “hey siblings, do you want to hear a fun fact about pink?”

Luna Stories: “Hey, what did I miss?”

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “Duke and Duchess are here”

Big G (they/them): “Apologies for not speakin in ender, Im too tired right now. But pink is a nice choice!”

Luna Stories: “Oh!”

[Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “why are you asking for colors? this isn't normally something we ask-”]

Big G (they/them): “We don't normally ask this?”

Duchess: “Certainly, Jay! what is it?”

Duke: “The Korat and Dragon Li are my favourite out of the feline breeds I feel compelled to add. Cat is such a widespread response it only feels fair to gift you with more.”

jayyyyyyyy: “theres actually a specific color pink that Icant really remember the name of that, when standing in a room with the walls painted the pink, would lower your strength by 30%”

[Big G (they/them): “We don't normally ask this?”]

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “no we normally ask things like, fit check, favorite number, chicken nugets, circlet color n' stuff, memories about meeting crown, etc. etc.. I dont think we've ever asked about colors in the first bunch of questions-”

jayyyyyyyy: “the nfl had to ban teams from using it because they would go and paint their opposing teams locker rooms the color before games”

Big G (they/them): “Well that's very odd, huh.”

jayyyyyyyy: “scientifically theres no reasonable explanation for it, but it still happens. its very intriguing”

Duchess: “That is very fascinating!”

llyr (they/them): “actually, that's a fair point :3″

Duke: “How interesting!”

jayyyyyyyy: “mhm! I’ve always wondered about it, but could never even think of an reasoning”

llyr (they/them): “what's you two's opinions on chicken nuggets??”

Big G (they/them): “and on soup?”

Duke: “I am unfamiliar with this dish known as chicken nuggets. It... Is a dish correct?”

Duchess: “Oh, I think they're a fine food! I did enjoy them regularly as a child. And soup is a wonderfully versatile dish.”

jayyyyyyyy: “aWHATA”

jayyyyyyyy: “Duchess, has Duke never had chicken nuggets?”

Duchess: “Duke... Again, I apologize. I am unsure as to why he is... Like this. We have both certainly had chicken nuggets before.”

jayyyyyyyy: “I was about to be so upset if Duke never had chicken nuggets”

Duke: “Duchess, we have not? Not to my recollection - what in the world do you mean?”

Big G (they/them): “jay, friend, I think you should hide your befuddlement you're being a bit rude.”

jayyyyyyyy: “well now I’m just confused

do you guys have alternate memories?”

emuhlee: “I find it quite odd how your experiences differ so much as you're twins, and you ideas and opinions are so similar. very interesting.”

Duchess: “Duke, we definitely...It is fine. Chicken nuggets are small pieces of chicken which are breaded and fried. They are a popular food item for children.”

jayyyyyyyy: “its a genuine question! they seem to be having similar confusion!”

Duke: “Oh, nonsense! we of course do not, we are twins after all! I'd say we even have such a strong connection we could finish each other's sentences. There just must be a simple mix-up in this all, no?"

jayyyyyyyy: “Duke, we gotta get you chicken nuggets, theyre so good”

emuhlee: “my twin and I never really got the hang of finishing each others sentences...”

Duke: “A popular item for children does not sound terribly appealing I'm afraid. With runny noses and sticky palms children have quite... Adverse tastes.”

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “Duke, Duchess, sorry if this seems rude, but are you two human? it's a genuine question. I apologise if I come off as impolite”

Duke: “Oh! Oh! You have a twin?”

jayyyyyyyy: “although its popular with children, its still very much loved as adults!”

Duchess: “Not at all! we are human, yes.”

emuhlee: “I do! A twin sister :)”

jayyyyyyyy: “I still think Duke should try chicken nuggets. theyre So So Good, not just to children”

llyr (they/them): “Ilike chicken nuggets :3

they taste like. chicken :D”

Big G (they/them): “Wendy's chicken nuggets are really good,”

jayyyyyyyy: “if not nuggets, tenders are also good!”

Duke: “I hope you cherish her, emuhlee.”

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “Duke have you tried bacon before? if so what'd your opinion on it?”

emuhlee: “oh I do, she's my best friend”

Duke: “Chicken is rather tasty although sometimes almost too salted, I do hope these nuggets will not dissapoint.”

Duke: “I have had bacon, yes. It is quite tasty.”

Duchess: “Apologies to you all, but I have had a rather busy day and I feel it may be time for me to retire for the evening. I will leave you all with my brother and bid a good night. It was delightful to meet you all.”

jayyyyyyyy: “goodbye, Duchess! have a good night!”

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “goodnight Duchess!”

Dollar General Tubbo: “Good night, Duchess! Rest well”

llyr (they/them): “goodnight, Duchess!! :3″

emuhlee: “goodnight!”

Duke: “goodnight, sister.”

Duke: “Oh dear me, I have been reminded that I have not given a fit check. I hope I used that sentence correctly?”

emuhlee: “yes, you used it correctly.”

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “yeah you did”

Raeva: “I'm a bit late but excited to see Duke and Duchess here”

Duke: “I do not have photos such as my sister but certain family members have said - and I am quoting this so do forgive me if it makes as little sense to you as it does to I- that I am "stealing her look" and "you're basically just wearing her clothes but male dude lmaoooo like you got that bow at your throat but where's the og style? is this a twin thing or do we need to take you shopping? no don't get mad at me I'm just speaking facts."”

Duke: “Raeva, hello! I know of you through my sister, I hoped you enjoyed the conversation you two shared.”

Kate: “Alright, I'm back! Hello again, all!~”

Big G (they/them): “Hullo kate!”

llyr (they/them): “I think I'm actually going to go, heehee. night, y'all!! please be nice to each other :3″

Kate: “Hello! :D”

Raeva: “It was interesting to say the least I don't believe I've spoken to you though.

Night Llry!”

Big G (they/them): “gn llyr”

Duke: “I wish you sweet dreams and soft slumber.”

jayyyyyyyy: “whoever said that to you, Duke, is generally rude and shouldnt have said that

who cares if one person dresses like another? if they like it, let them be”

Big G (they/them): “I would have fought them”

emuhlee: “Duke, I have a question, if you don't mind?”

Renboobigceenzatublraffectionate: “who tf is ur family member?? I will beat their ankles >>:(”

bite I meant bite”

Duke: “I do believe it was meant in jest and it was before they knew us as they do now. It is alright, but I thank you for getting angry on my behalf. What question do you have, Em?”

emuhlee: “Oh! I was just wondering, which of the two of you is oldest?”

Duke: “I am, of course. Do not listen to Duchess if she tells you otherwise, I adore my sister but when it comes to things such as that she likes to bend the truth.”

jayyyyyyyy: “...I sense a little bit of hostility?”

emuhlee: “I see.  I understand where she comes about, on that.”

Duke: “Oh! none at all. She is wonderful and kind, my sister. She is a beacon of glory and I love her to my heart's deepest corners - she is the one who I would dive down for into murky waters and toil in horrid sun and sand for. However, it has been an issue since childhood with her claiming to be older. Our parents did not refute her so this has continued on despite the fact she should know better.”

jayyyyyyyy: “I see.. did your parents favor your sister? since thats what it sounds like :(”

Duke: “Oh my! what a ridiculous notion. My darling parents adored us both. I do hope they are doing well now.”

jayyyyyyyy: “I see.. they sound nice! they probably miss you guys a lot”

Duke: “I.... Suppose so.”

jayyyyyyyy: “mhm. though, its not my business-- how about a topic change?”

Duke: “Oh well! We live in the now, no? Dwelling on the past is for fools and crumbling men and we are neither"

[thescentifollow]

Neighbor - Part 4

Reader x YoungK

Genre: Lecturer Brian au / neighbors au / romance

Word count: 1628

With the sound of the doorbell, you guys came to your senses.

“Aidan is here!”

“Coming in a second.” You answered.

He came to greet you before you could.

“Hey, darling.”

“Hi!” You hugged Aidan. YoungK was a little taken aback by this warm greeting, considering your position just a moment ago.

Trying to not show his perplexity, he fixated a smile on his face. And that smile caught Aidan’s attention.

“Hi there.” Turning you to introduce him.                  

“That’s YoungK, my new neighbor. This is Aidan, childhood friend and Ashley’s twin brother.” You need the feel to emphasize him being your long-time friend.

“Nice to meet you, I can totally see the resemblance.” Feeling kind of relieved.

He was caught by surprise with the twins’ enthusiastic laughs at his wit.

“I’m glad to see a new face in this circle. It’s quite rare.” He said smiling.

When you finally sat on the table, Meg asked YoungK something you were curious about too.

“Your real name can’t be YoungK, right?”

“No, of course, it’s not.” Laughed and continued, “You can say that it’s my stage name. I am in a band called Day6. But we’re not performing anymore.”

“Oh, why is that?”

“Well, I moved here, two members live in Korea, one is doing his master in Canada and the other one moved back to his birthplace, Argentina.”

“It’s sad to hear, it would be great to see you perform.”

“Maybe when we hold a reunion concert.”

“We’ll be the first ones to get the tickets.” Everyone agreed and laughed.

“So, were you singing or playing an instrument?”

“I rapped, sang and played bass guitar. I haven’t been doing the first two for a while. But I still play guitar from time to time.”

“What a well-rounded man! I’ll be waiting for your reunion concert.” Aidan yelled basically.

Thanks to everyone being easygoing the night went well. Oh, and with a little help of the alcohol.

When you were finally alone, you reviewed the night lying on your bed, but got stuck in one moment especially. The moment you met his gaze.

As you tried to brush it off by saying that you just met him, that you are too busy to date and stuff, you fell asleep. But you were aware that these were just excuses, and deep down you felt something that you hadn’t felt for a long time. He was the one who made it.

-

Next Monday

As soon as you woke up, you hopped in the shower. Monday is not a busy day for you, thankfully. Just a meeting with your advisor and you can enjoy the rest of the day. But today you also had to run some errands such as grocery shopping and doing laundry. After a morning coffee, you decided to go grocery shopping to get it out of the way as soon as possible. It was a relief to get your car before the start of continuous days with heavy rain, you thought to yourself, while entering the garage. Just then you heard someone calling your name.

“Hey, y/n!”

It was your neighbor Brian, whom you haven’t seen for a week. Being busy with papers and stuff, you didn’t even get a chance to eat properly this past week. But truthfully, he crossed your mind from time to time.

“Hi, what’s up?”

“Nothing much, heading to class. What about you?” He was smiling, but you were both aware that something was off.

“Grocery shopping.” You smiled as you pointed at the shopping bag in your hand.

“Ah… Free day?”

“Sort of. I just have a meeting in the afternoon.”

“I see. How was your trip to New Jersey?”

“It was fine, you know, nothing much.”

“Right. Well, uh… I have to go now.” He said looking at his watch and continued, “But I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, see you. Drive carefully.”

“You too.”

There was a huge awkwardness, that no one could deny, in the air. The words just couldn’t get out of your mouth. Though it wasn’t intentional, it made you both feel uncomfortable. You tried not to overthink and told yourself that it was because you didn’t see each other for a while. Oh, and because of that moment you shared. You haven’t seen each other since that day; therefore, you didn’t get a chance to talk about it. It’s for the best, somethings are meant to be just moments. Nothing more than that.

-

When you were about to pay at the grocery store, you got a phone call from your advisor. He called off your meeting because of a personal problem that came up. To be honest, you were glad. After being away from home for the weekend, naturally you wanted to spend some time at home.

Even though you prefer spending time home alone, this time you wanted to spend this free time with someone else. It would be a good way to break the ice too.

Knowing he had a class, you decided to text him.

“Are you free after your class?”

You were expecting a text message but instead your phone rang.

“Hello.” You could hear the students saying goodbye to him.

“Hi, I didn’t mean to disturb, sorry.” Taken aback by his unexpected call.

“No, you weren’t, my class just ended.” You were about to answer but then he kept talking.

“But I’m going to Virginia today for a 3 days long conference.”

“Oh…” You sounded a little bit disappointed.

Then he offered something, “How about this? You water my plants for 3 days and when I’m back let’s watch a movie together.”

“Sounds good.”

“I’ll text you once the plane lands. Oh, you can find the keys under the doormat and there are 4 plants in the house, one in the living room, two in the kitchen and one in my bedroom. Thanks a lot.”

“Got it. No problem. Bye.” You felt a little bit frustrated but chose to just let it go. It’s not like you’re close enough to feel this way.

After finishing laundry too, you decided to reward yourself, as if you’ve done something great, by watching a movie. But when you think about it, just to survive the first day of the week feels like a success.

You prepared a cup of green tea and wrapped yourself in a blanket. After choosing Before Sunrise to watch for the hundredth time, it’s finally time to enjoy yourself.

Halfway through the movie, a text message destroyed the whole mood. Annoyed, you decided to check the message as soon as possible and get back to your movie.

“Y/n~ What are you up to? I’m at the hotel right now.” Seeing him being the one who texted eased your annoyance a little.

“Just recharging.”

He smiled at the picture attached to your text.

He answered as soon as he saw the scene from the movie by saying, “Ah, that movie is a classic! When I’m back let’s watch Before Sunset too.”

You were surprised at his sudden excitement and enthusiastic answer.  To be honest men usually don’t like to admit that they like romance movies. That’s why, even though his offer was not a big deal, it was enough for you to see his soft side.

“Sounds good.” You answered.

He answered, “Great, I’m looking forward to it.”

A few more texts about how tired he was and what your plans for tomorrow are were exchanged between each other before you went back to the movie.

This movie always makes you feel all kinds of emotions at the same time because it’s so real. Their meeting, emotions and how they represent them. This movie has a great impact on how you perceive love.

Feeling peaceful thanks to the masterpiece you just watched for the hundredth time, you went to his place to water the plants. As you came in, you realized things were a quite different than before. He had finally unpacked all boxes and put some baubles and pictures around.

Because you didn’t want to want to hover like a stalker, you decided to do what you need to do as soon as possible. You knew what having a stalker means and frankly it wasn’t pleasant.

His tidiness totally baffled you. The kitchen, nothing left unwashed or left on the kitchen counter. Same goes for the living room. Everything is in the proper place, nothing out of ordinary.

“Then his bedroom must be a complete mess.” You murmured.

Contrary to your guess, it was quite neat. His bed was a little messy though. So, you were not totally wrong.

Just when you were about to leave the house a picture on the coffee table next to the comfy looking sofa in the living room caught your attention. There were Brian and four other boys next to him, one of them holding a birthday cake. They were all good looking. Some could even go crazy for such guys.

“So, this must be Day6…”

You smiled at the wholesomeness of the photo. Then Brian caught your eye, as always. His indifference in the picture didn’t fail to make you laugh. You lifted your head and looked around. You could see parts of him everywhere. A sweet peacefulness filled your heart.

“I like it. I… I like him…” Finally confessing to yourself.

You remembered what Meg said a long time ago, “When you have feelings for someone, they get all your attention. And if you try to avoid it, it gets worse.”

You did listen to her last time. It had severe consequences. But it’s almost impossible to live the same thing again, right?

You were torn between the two choices. Should you show your feelings or just keep avoiding until they disappear?

I thought of this picture while writing that part of the story. so wholesome :’)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5

masterlist

[hag-lad]

Digging Deeper

Thank you to my radiant wonderful friend @alienfuckeronmain for sending me EXACTLY the type of self indulgent wind-down activity I wanted on this otherwise depressing weekend! If anyone else wants to answer FORTY-NINE QUESTIONS about themselves, I’m super nosy and will read it all! @fight-the-seether @ptolemyofchaos @butchwizard @metalbutch @nyndelion @comrade-ziltoid @leatherdear @kristalknobb Enjoy, friends!

1. Do you prefer writing with a black pen or blue pen? I prefer black, but I always feel like I write neater in blue??

2. Would you prefer to live in the country or city? The city, but only if it has breathable air, green infrastructure, and decent public transit. So like... definitely no city in America lmao

3. If you could learn a new skill what would it be? The ability to quickly become fluent in another language! I’ve been struggling with Spanish for literal YEARS and it’s honestly pathetic. My brain is so stuck on English.

4. Do you drink your tea/coffee with sugar? Look pal. If I wanna drink sugar, I’m gonna have a soda, not herb water or bean juice.

5. What was your favorite book as a child? I was OBSESSED with The Wish List, by Eoin Colfer (of Artemis Fowl fame). I remember being so fascinated by how dark it was?? It’s an afterlife adventure, where the main character has to escape purgatory by atoning for her crimes of robbery and fraud and whatever. I had a crush on her, so basically this book made me want to pursue a life of crime, even though it explicitly condemns crime and depicts Hell as a very real and horrible place. I was in like fourth grade and was super morbidly curious about Hell and the possibility of going there! Lol

6. Do you prefer baths or showers? Baths... but only when I’m not actually dirty going in. A bath is leisure, not hygiene.

7. If you could be a mythical creature, which one would you be? 100% fae! I would build my dwelling within a sidhe mound, steal shiny things in the middle of the night, make bastardly little contracts for no reason, and cause harmless mayhem and mischief because mortals really are fools (go off, robin goodfellow!) Also I love mushroom circles and dancing in the moonlight.

8. Paper or electronic books? Paper all the way! I read much more content electronically, but it’s usually in the short story or article format. Books are much better in print, I think.

9. What is your favorite item of clothing? Probably my rust-brown overalls.

10. Do you like your name or would you like to change it? I’ve always hated my name but no alternative has ever stuck, unfortunately. My name is Amy, and I don’t think it fits at all. If I knew I’d never have to correct anyone on it, I’d probably just change it to Amelia?

11. Who is a mentor to you? My little brother! He’s this genius musician, and he has taught me so much about song structure, polyrhythms, guitar technique, production tricks, all kinds of trivia that really deepen my appreciation for music and the LABOR that goes into it.

12. Would you like to be famous and if so, what for? No, never, not for anything. I cherish my anonimity so much, I don’t even put searchable tags on this blog cuz I get an adrenaline spike from anxiety if too many people interact with me. I also just think fame is a fucking hideous construct. I don’t think it’s even slightly cool or desirable.

13. Are you a restless sleeper? No, I’m a fucking log. I can easily sleep for 12 hours straight. Thanks, depression!

14. Do you consider yourself a romantic person? No, actually. I’m very much in love, and it brings me lots of joy to do nice things with and for my partner! But romance feels very difficult for me to connect with. I’m super domestic, like, I love the idea of marriage but not necessarily a wedding, or a moonstruck romance or whatever. Those dramatic gestures feel very awkward for me.

15. Which element best represents you? EARTH. Specifically, like... dirt, or soil.

16. Who do you want to be closer to? I want to be geographically closer to my family. We’re thick as thieves, but we all live like 50 miles apart from each other. I miss my brothers and my parents so much, I feel so incomplete and depressed without them to hang out with, especially since quarantine.

17. Do you miss someone at the moment? See above! Lol

18. Tell us about an early childhood memory. When my little brother was a baby, he had this grey car seat with a folding mechanism which held his legs in place. It made a very satisfying clicking sound when the mechanism moved, AND when it was fully unfolded, it looked a lot like a Klingon battle cruiser. (Or so my five year old brain thought.) So! My older brother and I would take this seat out of the car CONSTANTLY so that we could unfold it and “sing” the Klingon theme music from Star Trek: The Motion Picture while we scooched our car seat battle cruiser across the living room floor, pretending to shoot phasers into the TV or the dining table or whatever else got in our way.

19. What is the strangest thing you have eaten? Gifilte fish, maybe?

20. What are you most thankful for? My family, including my wonderful partner and all the cats in our lives!

21. Do you like spicy food? Yes! But my tolerance for extreme spice decreases every year, unfortunately. So I can’t handle as much heat as I used to, but I do enjoy a good kick.

22. Have you ever met someone famous? Lmaooo I made the regretful decision to PAY FOR a meet&greet with Fall Out Boy in like 2006, which was so fucking awkward and painful, I vowed to never approach that level of lame again.

23. Do you keep a diary or a journal? TONS! I’m an obsessive record keeper. Some years I journal more than others, and I’ve found that it is super difficult to keep up with it while working full time. But it’s absolutely one of my favorite hobbies.

24. Do you prefer to use a pen or pencil? Pen for writing. Pencil for drawing, and math.

25. What is your star sign? Virgo sun, Aquarius moon, Scorpio rising 🙃

26. Do you like your cereal soggy or crunchy? Crunchy! A shallow bath in that milk is key.

27. What would you want your legacy to be? My artwork. I go through these aesthetic phases every year that I become super obsessed with/ focused on, and I’ve always meant to catalogue them in annual art journals, but I’ve NEVER FINISHED ONE! They always get pushed aside by the need to work, and I hate that so much. If I could just take a year off work and backfill all of my missed concepts into completed books, I would be so happy. But I literally have NO WAY to pay for that, absolutely none. I fucking hate capitalism.

28. Do you like reading, what was the last book you read? I love to read, but finishing a whole book has been A STRUGGLE lately! Right now I’m chipping away at Tending Brigid’s Flame, which is a quaint lil devotional for the Celtic fire goddess. Very new agey, like cheesy Wiccan vibes. I love that shit!

29. How do you show someone you love them? Quality time!

30. Do you like ice in your drinks? Only if I have a straw. Ice touching my teeth kinda makes me wince.

31. What are you afraid of? Incompetance, doing a bad job, letting someone down, taking up too much space, being a nussiance, etc

32. What is your favourite scent? Incense! Especially cinnamon, dragon’s blood, and amber.

33. Do you address older people by their name or surname? I always call people, regardless of age, by the name they ask me to use. Sometimes it’s a surname or title, usually it’s a first name. I’ll ask their preference if I’m unsure. But I definitely don’t default toward a surname, that’s weird.

34. If money was not a factor, how would you live your life? COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY!!!!!! The need for money rules literally every single hour of my entire life, and I hate it so much. I’m naturally nocturnal, but my job requires me to get up super early and sit in a car for 11 hours a day. I wake up at 5am, come home front work at 5pm, spend an hour or two trying to unwind, then go to bed and do it all over again. I hate my life! Really! I never see the stars, I never exercise, I am completely exhausted and burnt out all the time, and I barely get any quality time with my partner. If money were no object, I would sleep til noon or 1, make art and hike all day, ride my bike and stargaze all night, stay up til 4am reading and playing with my cats, and sleep like a baby. My partner and I would cook dinner for each other and watch Star Trek and collaborate on art projects and I would be so happy.

35. Do you prefer swimming in pools or the ocean? Here’s my hierarchy: Private pool > ocean > public pool

36. What would you do if you found £50 on the ground? I’d look around to see if anyone obviously dropped it and try to give it back. If I couldn’t find anyone, I’d exchange it for dollars and deposit that shit into my account!

37. Have you ever seen a shooting star? Of course!! Hundreds!

38. What is the one thing you would want to teach your children? America is evil and needs to be destroyed.

39. If you had to have a tattoo, what would it be and where would you get it? Lmao this is so cute. If you HAD TO HAVE a tattoo! I really wanna finish my damn sleeves, they’re literally 9 years in the making and barely half finished. But I’d also love more art on my legs! I DESPERATELY want Ziltoid in a lacy valentine heart on my thigh.

40. What can you hear now? Our fish tank water bubbling and my fan on full blast.

41. Where do you feel the safest? Home alone, doors locked, windows covered, lights low. I absolutely LOVE to not be seen or perceived in any way.

42. What is the one thing you want to overcome/conquer? My fear of discomfort

43. If you could time travel to another era, which one would you choose? I feel like I’d want to be a teen in the 80’s and an adult in the 90’s. Does time travel work that way?

44. What is your most used emoji? 😭 or 😎

45. Describe yourself using one word. Defeated

46. What do you regret the most? Convincing myself that math was too hard or boring (or something?) when I was in middle school. I feel like I’m actually a pretty intelligent person who could’ve totally overcome that difficulty and gone on to understand all kinds of patterns and concepts which have eluded me to this day! It’s so frustrating to try and fight that formative self-concept, which now comes naturally but ultimately sabotages me. 💀

47. Last movie you saw? I made my partner watch Troop Beverly Hills, one of my childhood faves. It’s so fun! I love chick flicks so much.

48. Last tv show you watched? Deep Space Nine. Getting through the first season has been harder than expected. It’s actually my favorite Star Trek show?? (Orrrr maybe that’s TNG, ahh! It’s so hard to choose!) But season one is so baffling and awful! Why is there so much space capitalism??! And racism? And war? And drinking alcoholic beverages? #notmystartrek

49. Invent a word and its meaning. I used to call a single strand of curly hair a “curly quink” when I was a child. Therefore, a “quink” is a section of hair, usually a particularly cute or iconic one.

[lilyev]

wassup my dudes, i’m bee and i’m a huge ass nerd who’s super excited to be here ! pls take my daughter lily and love her, or hate her, w/e, i’m fine with it either way

isn’t that LILY EVANS ? yeah that is HER, sitting there at the GRYFFINDOR table with those other SIXTH years and i think i heard sybill saying they look like ZOEY DEUTCH… whoever that is! when she looks into her crystal ball she sees fireflies, coffee with cinnamon, cigarettes in the backyard, honey-flavoured chapstick, chipped nail polish, lying on the roof during a thunderstorm, flowers growing from cracks in the pavement, the feeling you get walking out from a cinema.  anyway i’ve heard they’re pretty TENDERHEARTED, TEMPESTUOUS, and INDEPENDENT. apparently they’re a MUGGLEBORN but i’m sure that’s not related. 

aesthetic: fireflies, coffee with cinnamon, cigarettes in the backyard, the smell of bookstores, honey-flavoured chapstick, whispered secrets, the burn of firewhiskey in your chest, chipped nail polish, polaroids, lying on the roof during a thunderstorm, chapped lips, the summertime buzz of cicadas, flowers growing from cracks in the pavement, burnt chocolate chip cookies, jane austen novels, angry tears, happy tears, scribbled notes in the margins of old books, the red glow of a sunset, the feeling you get walking out from a cinema

CHILDHOOD

lily evans grew up in cokeworth, england, a “distinctly unmagical” town that is solely known for being the fourth-largest steel producer in england. the steel factory smokestacks in the west loom over the town and its winding alleyways, cinder blocks, and weeds growing out of pavement cracks.

lily’s childhood was that of mowed green lawns, challah bread, flintstones reruns in grainy black and white, and playing outside after dinner with petunia till the sky grew dark and the fireflies and mosquitoes came out and their parents would call them back home for bed.

her parents were both university professors who had met while getting their doctorates, her mother in german literature and her father in political science. they were both academic, intelligent people, and saw no reason not to treat their children as such. this meant lots of political discussion over the dining room table — at nine, little lily knew more about the government deficit than most of her schoolteachers probably did. petunia tended to tune out these debates, claiming disinterest, but lily loved them, listening in avidly even if she didn’t understand. as she got older she began to participate more and more, and often even brought up issues she was interested in.

but despite her brightness, contrary to popular belief, school hasn’t always come naturally to lily. she just could never quite bring herself to focus in school. some teachers labelled her a chatterbox, others simply labelled her trouble. really, it was more of a combination of a desire to befriend every creature she met with an inability to sit still.

because lily yearned for something more than life at the end of the cul-de-sac, yearned for some great adventure. she was a curious, fearless thing as a child, always leaping off of the swing and tugging tuney to go explore on the other side of the tracks, where their parents didn’t allow them to go.

so when she met a sallow-skinned boy from the wrong side of town, and he told her about magic, lily was enraptured by the thought. severus snape and the world he spoke of represented, to lily, the adventure she’d only ever dreamed of.

you all know the story — lily didn’t mean to, but she traded one best friend for another, and petunia was left behind, hurt and angry.

HOGWARTS

flash forward to eleven year old lily – small for her age, sitting on a stool in the great hall and listening to the hat debate between slytherin and gryffindor. after she ended up being sorted into gryffindor, and heard everything her housemates had to say about slytherin, she couldn’t help but wonder why the hat had thought it might suit her. ( like mother like son, am i right ? )

but lily is ambitious and proud, and ( especially as a first year ) overflowing with a desire to prove herself. but when it comes down to it, she has a softness under her skin that doesn’t suit the cold blood of a snake, and her instinct to protect those she loves vastly outweighs her self-preservation instinct.

and all of a sudden, she was doing better in school than she ever had before. hogwarts gave her eager, curious young mind the adventure and intrigue it had been craving. for the first time, she actually wanted to learn. the professors quickly became used to the wiry girl with messy auburn hair and bright eyes sitting in the front row of every class and peppering them with questions.

she became the gryffindor prefect last year, something she was both very excited and very apprehensive about. she’s very conscious about the influence she has on younger students, and she’s determined to prove that she was the right choice.

PERSONALITY

lily evans has two main motivators: sentiment and spite. on one hand, she’s romantic and nostalgic, clinging to her fairytale endings and her belief that everyone has at least a little bit of good inside of them. she’d like to believe that everything will turn out the way it should, and that all pain is temporary and useful.

but on the other hand, she has her temper. lord, this girl is stubborn and proud to her very core. she does not easily admit she’s wrong, and she’s often guided by her emotions rather than her reason. it’s not a great combination. she has been called tempestuous.

she tends to make snap judgements about people and stubbornly sticks to those snap judgements. it takes her a while before she admits that someone isn’t as bad as she had previously thought, or that someone is worse than she previously thought ( see: james potter, severus snape )

she doesn’t react well to personal criticism. she can be pretty defensive and even hypocritical sometimes.

but for all her faults ( and she has many — she’s stubborn, over-idealistic, proud, spiteful, at times selfish, hypocritical, quick-tempered, biased ) lily loves. and she hopes. with all her heart.

she cares so much about everything. she wears her emotions on her sleeves. she cries when she’s angry, and when she’s happy, and when she’s talking passionately about something she loves.

if you’re someone lily evans loves, you should count yourself lucky, because she will defend you to the death. and if you’re a person who lily evans hates, you should also count yourself lucky, because no matter how much she hates you, there’s a little part of her that believes in the good part of you.

sometimes she wishes she was tougher, less vulnerable. she wishes the word ‘mudblood’ wouldn’t sting each time it’s flung at her like a grenade ( but it does ), and she wishes she isn’t disappointed with every chanukah that goes by without a card from pertunia ( but she is ). but in true lily evans fashion, she stubbornly holds her chin up high and smiles and doesn’t let the world see her hurting.

HEADCANONS

she keeps trying to keep a diary but she always forgets to write in it, although she refuses to admit it’s a hopeless cause.

has a love for sweeping, dramatic classical music and movie soundtracks

lily comes from a progressive jewish family ! lily was never really super into it when she was little ( she enjoyed the chanukah dreidel games and the purim festivities, loved listening to the stories of esther and the exodus, but fidgeted all through hebrew school and hated the solemnity and fasting of yom kippur ) but she has a greater appreciation for the culture now she’s older. still doesn’t really observe kashrut though.

[ HOLOCAUST TW ] part of the reason she’s super super super against blood purity is bc of this and obvs also cause she’s a muggleborn ! her mother was eight when the second world war started, and as lily’s gotten older she’s heard more and more about her mother’s experience. and it chills her how much it reminds her of all this blood purity and voldemort stuff. [ END TW ]

petunia converts to catholicism for vernon when they get married and lily is so angry she cries for days, but then their mother sits down with her and talks about how everyone has their own faith and you can’t judge someone else for theirs

loves cats even though she’s allergic to them ( has a toad named gilbert, after gilbert blythe from anne of green gables )

has an irrational fear of seaweed – not the kind you eat, the kind that brushes up against your ankles when you’re swimming. also afraid of flying and airplanes

has an extensive collection of nail polish ( picks at her nail polish when she’s nervous )

a physically affectionate person – loves hugs, and cheek kisses, and platonic hand holding

loves old audrey hepburn movies 

she always loved when her parents read to her but she never had the attention span for actually sitting and reading books even though she loved them

[ DEATH, SMOKING TW ] she smokes …… she knows it’s bad but she started after her paternal grandfather died when she was 12 – they were going through his belongings and she found a half-used pack of his cigarettes and pocketed them. she just smoked them to try and catch his smell and feel closer to him but it developed into a habit and then an addiction ( although lily will insist she can stop anytime ) [ END TW ]

bisexual as FUCK thanks 4 coming to my ted talk

[gnosticgnoob]

I recommend the book Julian (1964) by Gore Vidal. Like Game of Thrones, it has the intrigue of warring kingdoms, family treachery, scheming within the imperial court, mysticism, prophecy, and religious conflict. But this is our history, and Emperor Julian's quest was to undo Roman Christianization.

Throughout Julian's and his older brother Gallus' youth, they were essentially political prisoners kept around merely in case they could be of use due to their noble lineage. Their father was executed without clear cause in typical fashion of paranoid Roman politics, and during their upbringing the imperial court kept an eye on them like vultures who would either disdain them and ask for their heads or petition them for political favor, depending on the mood of Emperor Constantius, who seemed at various points just as likely to also have them killed (as he did their father) as to have them formally accepted into the active political scene.

Julian Augustus [writes:]

Ecebolius was eager to go to Ephesus, rather to my surprise; I had thought he would have wanted to keep me from Maximus. But he was compliant. "After all, I am your teacher, approved by the Emperor. You cannot officially study with Maximus, or anyone else. Not that I would object. Far from it. I am told Maximus is most inspiring, though hopelessly reactionary. But we hardly need worry about your being influenced at this late date. After all, you were taught Christian theology by two great bishops, Eusebius and George. What firmer foundation can any man have? By all means let us visit Ephesus. You will enjoy the intellectual life. And so shall I."

What Ecebolius had come to enjoy was playing Aristotle to my green Alexander. Everywhere we went, academics were curious to know me. That meant they got to know Ecebolius. In no time at all, he was proposing delicately that he "exchange" students with them. "Exchange" meant that they would send him students at Constantinople for which they would receive nothing except the possible favour of the prince. During our travels, Ecebolius made his fortune.

In a snowstorm we were met at the gates of Ephesus by the city prefect and the town council. They were all very nervous.

"It is a great honour for Ephesus to receive the most noble Julian," said the prefect. "We are here to serve him, as we have served the most noble Gallus, who has also honoured us by his presence here." At the mention of Gallus, as though rehearsed, the councilors began to mutter, "Kind, good, wise, noble."

"Where is my brother?"

There was a tense pause. The prefect looked anxiously at the councilors. They looked at one another. There was a good deal of energetic brushing of snow from cloaks.

"Your brother," said the prefect, finally, "is at court. At Milan. He was summoned by the Emperor last month. There has been no word about him. None at all. Naturally, we hope for the best."

"And what is the best?"

"Why, that he be made Caesar." It was not necessary to inquire about the worst. After due ceremony, we were led to the prefect's house, where I was to stay. Ecebolius was thrilled at the thought that I might soon be half-brother to a Caesar. But I was alarmed. My alarm became panic when later that night Oribasius told me that Gallus had been taken from Ephesus under arrest. "Was he charged with anything?"

"The Emperor's pleasure. There was no charge. Most people expect him to be executed."

"Has he given any cause?"

Oribasius shrugged. "If he is executed, people will give a hundred reasons why the Emperor did the right thing. If he is made Caesar, they will say they knew all along such wisdom and loyalty would be rewarded."

"If Gallus dies..." I shuddered.

"But you're not political."

"I was born 'political' and there is nothing I can do about it. First Gallus, then me."

"I should think you were safest of all, the scholar-prince."

"No one is safe." I felt the cold that night as I have never felt the cold before or since. I don't know what I should have done without Oribasius. He was the first friend I ever had. He is still the best friend I have, and I miss him here in Persia. Oribasius has always been particularly useful in finding out things I would have no way of knowing. People never speak candidly to princes, but Oribasius could get anyone to tell him anything, a trick learned practicing medicine. He inspires confidences.

Within a day of our arrival at Ephesus, Oribasius had obtained a full report on Gallus' life in the city. "He is feared. But he is admired."

"For his beauty?" I could not resist that. After all, I had spent my childhood hopelessly beguiled by that golden creature.

"He shares his beauty rather liberally with the wives of the local magnates."

"Naturally."

"He is thought to be intelligent."

"He is shrewd."

"Politically knowledgeable, very ambitious..."

"Yet unpopular and feared. Why?"

"A bad temper, occasionally violent."

"Yes." I thought of the cedar grove at Macellum.

"People fear him. They don't know why."

"Poor Gallus." I almost meant it, too. "What do they say about me?"

"They wish you would shave your beard."

"I thought it was looking rather decent lately. A bit like Hadrian's." I rubbed the now full growth affectionately. Only the colour displeased me: it was even lighter than the hair on my head, which is light brown. To make the beard seem darker and glossier, I occasionally rubbed oil in it. Nowadays, as I go grey, the beard has mysteriously darkened. I am perfectly satisfied with the way it looks. No one else is.

"They also wonder what you are up to."

"Up to? I should have thought it perfectly plain. I am a student."

"We are Greeks in these parts." Oribasius grinned, looking very Greek. "We never think anything is what it seems to be."

"Well, I am not about to subvert the state," I said gloomily. "my only plot is how to survive."

much later, as Emperor:

...My old teacher Bishop George had finally succeeded Athanasius as bishop of Alexandria. Not surprisingly, George proved to be an unpopular prelate. He was highhanded and arbitrary with everyone. Matter came to a head when he destroyed a Mithraeum, saying that he intended to build a charnel house on its foundation. When our brothers rightfully protested this sacrilege, he retaliated by displaying all sorts of human skulls and bones as well as obscene objects, declaring falsely that he had found these "proofs" of human sacrifice buried in the Mithraeum. It was an ugly business.

George also incurred the wrath of the Athanasians by his single-minded persecution of all those who had followed the teachings of the bishop. The Alexandrians could not endure him. When word finally came that his protector Constantius was dead, the mob stormed the bishop's palace and murdered George; his body was then tied to a camel and dragged through the city to the beach, where it was burned and the ashes thrown into the sea. ...Not long after, Athanasius appeared in the city with a great mob of fanatics and resumed his old place as bishop. Almost his first gesture was to "baptize" the wife of my governor. This was too much. I banished Athanasius, making it clear that a return from exile did not mean a return to power for deposed bishops, especially those who are resourceful enemies of Hellenism.

At about this time I acquired George's library, easily one of the best in Asia. I am rather sentimental about that library, for his were the actual books which had shaped my own mind. I am travelling at this moment with George's set of Plotinus. The rest of the books I left at Constantinople as the nucleus for the Julian library.

The edict of 4 February had a good effect, though there was much complaint from the Arian bishops, who felt that by allowing their Athanasian brethren to return, I was ensuring doctrinal quarrels which would inevitably weaken the Galilean organization. Exactly! They are now at one another's throats. I have also insisted that all lands and buildings which over the years the Galileans seized from us be restored. I realize that this will cause some hardship, but there is no other way of getting the thing done. I am quite prepared for trouble.

...Late in February I learned, quite by accident, that Vettius Agorius Praetextatus and his wife were in the city. He is the leader of the Hellenist party at Rome while his wife, Aconia Paulina, has been admitted to every mystery available to women as well as being high priestess of Hecate. I was eager to meet them. Praetextatus is a slight, frail main, with flowing white hair and delicate small features. His wife is somewhat taller than her husband and as red-faced and robust as a Gaul, though she is of the purest Roman stock. They are most enthusiastic at what I am doing, particularly Aconia Paulina. "We have had a remarkable response at our temple of Hecate. Truly remarkable. And all due to you. Why, last year in Rome we could hardly get anyone to undergo initiation but now... well, I have received reports from Milan, Alexandria, Athens... everywhere, that the women are flocking to us! We are second only to Isis in enrollment, and though I am devoted to the Isis cult (in fact, I am an initiate, second degree), I think Hecate has always drawn a better class of women. I only hope we shall be able to open a temple right here."

"You shall! You shall!" I was delighted. "I want every god represented in the capital!"

Aconia Paulina beamed. Praetextatus smiled gravely. "Every day," he said softly, "every waking hour, we pray for your success."

For at least an hour the three of us celebrated that unity which only those who have been initiated into the mysteries can know. We were as one. Then I got down to business.

"If we are to defeat the Galileans we must, very simply, have a comparable organization."

Praetextatus was dubious. "We have often discussed this at Rome, and until recently we thought we were at least holding our own. At heart, Rome is anti-Christian. The senate is certainly Hellenist." He paused and looked out of the window, as though searching for Zeus himself in the rain clouds rolling in from the sea. "You see, Augustus, we are not one organization like the Galileans. We are many. Also, we are voluntary. We do not have the support of the government..."

"You do now."

"...now, yes but is now too late? Also, our appeal is essentially to the individual, at least in the mysteries. Each man who is initiated undergoes the experience alone. At Eleusis it is the single soul which confronts eternity."

"But there is also the sense of fellowship with other initiates! Look at us! You and I are brothers in Mithras..."

"That is not the same thing as belonging to an open congregation, our conduct governed by priests who are quite as interested in property and political power as they are in religion."

"I agree." I tapped the papers in front of me. "And I suggest we fight them on their own ground. I plan a world priesthood, governed by the Roman Pontifex Maximus. We shall divide the world into administrative units, the way the Galileans have done and each diocese will have its own hierarchy of priests under a single high priest, responsible to me."

They were impressed. Aconia Paulina wanted to know if cults would be represented in the priesthood. I said yes. Every god and goddess known to the people, no matter in what guise or under what strange name, would be worshiped, for multiplicity is the nature of life. We all believe -- even the Galileans, despite their confused doctrine of trinity -- that there is a single Godhead from which all life, divine and mortal, descends and to which all life must return. We may not know this creator, though his outward symbol is the sun. But through intermediaries, human and divine, he speaks to us, shows us aspects of himself, prepares us for the next stage of the journey. "To find the father and maker of all is hard," as Socrates said. "And having found him it is impossible to utter him." Yet as Aeschylus wrote with equal wisdom, "men search out god and searching find him." The search is the whole point to philosophy and to the religious experience. It is a part of the Galilean impiety to proclaim that the search ended three hundred years ago when a young rabbi was executed for treason. But according to Paul of Tarsus, Jesus was no ordinary rabbi or even messiah; he was the One God himself who rose from the dead in order to judge the world immediately. In fact, Jesus is quoted as having assured his followers that some of them would still be alive when the day of judging arrived. But one by one the disciples died in the natural course and we are still waiting for that promised day. Meanwhile, the bishops amass property, persecute one another, and otherwise revel in this life, while the state is weakened and on our borders the barbarians gather like winter wolves, waiting for us to stagger in our weakness, and to fall. I see this as plainly as I see my hand as it crosses the page... To stop the chariot as it careers into the sun, that is what I was born to do.

[putschki1969]

Hikaru Birthday Event 2018 – Live Report

So…since my last report was stupidly deleted by yours truly and I only provided a mini-report, I thought I would write a proper one for you now. This time around I am using google docs so I hope nothing will be deleted. Without further ado, let’s get to it!

The day of the event was my second day in Japan. I was still quite exhausted from my travels but oh well, it wasn’t too bad. I got up pretty early and met up with my friend Sai to line up for the merchandise. We were at the venue (Suntory Hall Tokyo) at around 10 am to make sure we got everything we wanted. Thankfully the wait wasn’t too bad since we were protected from the sun underneath the building. It was still humid as hell but pretty bearable. Some Japanese Kala-fans from twitter said “hi” to me and as always I was super awkward. Sorry!! Anyways, after the wait was over, we finally got to buy our goods. I bought pretty much everything except the towel because meh, I am not a fan of towels. So yeah, I got the white shirt with the pink triangle, the cap, the ticket file and the booklet\clearfile set. Here’s a sneak peek at the booklet in case you haven’t seen it yet 〈(•ˇ‿ˇ•)-→ CLICK ME

By the way, the goods are available on the Space Craft Online Store since yesterday so be sure to get them quickly!! https://spacecraft-shop.jp/kalafina

Afterwards we headed to “La Maison Kioi” (the Kalafina SPICE interview location) to enjoy some cake. Then we headed to Shibuya to check out the Starbucks seat Keiko sat at in the 10th Anniversary Film. Just a while back, Hikaru had tried out a Calpis drink so e decided to have it too. The place (Afternoon Tearoom) was close by so that was very convenient. The lassi was certainly interesting, it had quite the unique taste, not sure I would order it again though XD.

Slowly heading back to the venue, we came across a bunch of fellow Kala-fans who had just gotten out of the afternoon event. We only heard good stuff so of course we were more than excited. At the venue we met up with lots of other Kala-fans and made some new friends. Then after another hour or so we were finally allowed inside. I delivered my letter and the ones by @theraspberrybushes and @mello-chi and then I went to my seat.

The event started on time…with a more or less unspectacular power point presentation regarding all the questions Hikaru had been asked in the questionnaire. I am pretty sure they used all the questions because there were at least 40 or something. No way in hell I could memorise all of that, especially since the questions/answers went by way too fast. Some random stuff I remember. • Hikaru’s favourite numbers are 2 and 7 • She owns around 1000 mangas • She can read a volume in about 30 minutes • If she hadn’t become a singer she would have wanted to become a mother in her 20ies • The type of character she likes in games: Men-tough; Women-peculiar and beautiful • The type of men she likes: Kind and calm • Favourite colours: Monochrome, blue and red • Favourite game: Momotaro Dentetsu • He favourite castle is Himeji • Her favourite characters in FGO are Gilgamesh and Shiki

Sorry, I can’t think of anything else. She also replied to my questions about recommendations in Toyama but she wrote like ten places or something and there was just no way for me to read it that quickly (especially since I suck when it comes to location kanji) But really, the questions weren’t exactly the highlight of the event but the most amazing part about this section were the childhood pictures of Hikaru which were randomly thrown in between questions. Like seriously the cutest pictures ever of baby Hikaru (and her little sister). Chibi-Hikaru was so freaking adorable, I could barely contain myself. We saw her wrapped up in cute winter clothes with her cheeks all red from the cold. With pig-tails!  (♥ω♥*) We saw her in her pjs at home watching TV.

Then she finally came on stage wearing the gorgeous outfit you saw in the blog post. The top is by IENA in case anyone is interested. Of course I ended up buying it because how could I resist???? http://zozo.jp/?c=gr&did=55355842

She sat down and personally replied to three more questions that were asked frequently. The first one was about her in-ear-monitors. Someone was curious what they always hear when they wear them. Hikaru explained how they work and how they tune out unnecessary noises etc. Next question was about which merchandise she designed was the most memorable for her. She didn’t actually reply to that question iirc but she used that opportunity to introduce this event’s goods. A staff member rolled up a cart with all the merchandise and she introduced them all similar to what she wrote in the Harmony countdown. Sakurada Hirotaka helped her come up with the goods so he deserves credit as well. She also explained that the colours of the shirts represented Kalafina’s origin colours. The final question was about mobile games and how much time she usually spends playing them. If she is into a game and there is an event going on, she will pretty much play all day long. As soon as she gets up, on the train, during breaks, in bed…until she falls asleep XD

Next up was the manga corner. I spaced out a little here. She always read a page out of one of her beloved mangas and then she talked about why this section felt so special to her. ・xxxHOLiC ・My Hero Accademia ・Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai

Please don’t ask me what she talked about. I have literally no idea. I have never heard of these mangas so it didn’t make much sense what she was talking about. But still, it was very nice to see her talk about her passion.

We played Janken afterwards and two lucky winners (one of them my friend Sai) got a present from Hikaru and got to go up on stage. While I can’t say I care much for the mangas they received as present, I would have killed to get a chance to go up on that stage. Oh well, turns out I suck at Janken. XD Somehow I completely forgot how to play it T_T

The Live

宝石-Houseki: WOW! Just wow! I didn’t know that this was the song Hikaru auditioned with. But hey, that explains why she was eventually chosen because man, she slayed! She sounded amazing! I think the song was slowed down a bit, yeah, it definitely was. Her performance was so powerful and tragic, she almost sounded like she was using elements from Keiko’s and Wakana’s voices. She had the same oomph as Keiko and yet there was a hint of tragedy (the same tragedy you usually get from Wakana). Flawless, absolutely flawless. Honestly, I am not even sure which version I like better, Hikaru’s or Keiko’s.

プラチナ-Platina: This is apparently one of her most frequently sung songs at karaoke. She absolutely loves it. It was an okay performance, I can’t say I like that song very much (it’s too cutesy for my taste) and I don’t think the song is particularly suited for Hikaru’s voice but Hikaru was super adorable and all smiles and she obviously had a blast with it so I was happy for her.

北ウイング-Kita Wing: Wow!! Just. Wow!! Hands down one of my favourite performances of that night. I had never heard that song before but Hikaru’s rendition was absolutely gorgeous. I just got to listen to the original version and OMG, they changed it SO MUCH. They slowed it down a lot and made it sound so much more tragic and sad. It left a lasting impression and I think I will have to buy it now. So beautiful.

CAT'S EYE: Sakurada wrote a special jazz arrangement for this song. I wish there was footage of this performance. Hikaru was so freaking sexy here. The way she moved to the lyrics, especially during that “sexy” line! Oh boy! Nosebleed!!! And it was a song I actually knew so YAY about that. If I remember correctly, I think it was actually one of the songs I voted for so double YAY.

ARIA: Finally, the song I had been waiting for. I obviously voted for this because it’s one of my all-time favourite Hikaru songs and I loved the 10th Anniversary version so freaking much (everyone else also voted for it so I kinda knew this would make it onto the setlist). This version was in a slightly higher pitch I think but not as high as the original version. She sang it with so much emotion, at this point I first started crying. Once again Hikaru mentioned that this song means the world to her and it has taught her so much. It’s always special if she gets to sing it and every version is different/unique. I was a bit sad because all the Wakana/Keiko/Kajiurago parts were left out. I had hoped she would sing that WaKei section after the bridge. It’s literally one of my favourite parts of the song because of the lyrics. But oh well, it was still a mind-blowing performance and Hikaru knocked it out of the park. She struggled a bit during the 10th Anniversary performance (especially during the final verse - although studio magic made sure it sounded well-rounded on the DVD/BD) but here she hit every note.

Blackbird: Hikaru mentioned that we would all recognise this song once we heard the chorus but meh, it seems I am the only one who has never heard of this song. Guess it’s because I have never really listened to the Beatles. Sorry to everyone who thinks that’s blasphemy or something. Either way, Hikaru made me really like this song although it will not become my favourite. Nothing about it was very memorable so I have a hard time remembering any details. I just know that Hikaru sounded really chill and cool. She obviously enjoys to sing this type of song.

Honesty: It’s honestly embarrassing how few songs I knew during this live. This was another one I had never heard before but boy, Hikaru made me fall in love with it immediately. I don’t know what it was about her performance but it was just so touching and emotional, it seemed like she meant every word she was singing. Everytime she sang “honesty” my heart broke a tiny little bit. The feels! Oh, the feels!!

Just the Way You Are: Can’t say I ever cared much for this song but once again Hikaru brought something special to it that made me appreciate how lovely this piece actually is. It really felt like she was singing from the heart. On that note, I would like to mention that her English pronunciation was really good during all the English songs. You most definitely understood what she was singing and she tried her best to emphasise each and every word. Very impressive. That’s certainly not a given with Japanese artists. Although I guess we all know that Hikaru’s English is very good. After this song, Hikaru told the Japanese audience that even though they probably didn’t understand the English lyrics, she hoped she was able to convey the meaning through her singing (she was!!). She invited everyone to check out all the lyrics because they are all super beautiful.

魂のルフラン- Tamashi No Rufuran: I was one of the people who voted for Zankokuna Tenshi no These so when she started to talk about Evangelion I freaked out a little. Unfortunately she ended up singing this song instead. I haven’t really watched the series so I only ever knew the OP and nothing else. Can’t say this song left a lasting impression. I don’t remember much from it. T_T Sorry, Hikaru. And sorry to everyone who had expected a more throrough report. I think she struggled a bit during the high parts here but it wasn’t too bad.

History Maker: I am embarrassed to say that I once again didn’t recognise the song. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where it was from. I was confused because I thought it was a Western song but Hikaru had mentioned she would sing anime songs now. I was like, “ehh???” Only afterwards when Hikaru mentioned it was from Yuri on Ice I suddenly remembered. [I am definitely the most clueless person when it comes to anime] This was most certainly the most upbeat and fun song of the night. Everyone was hyped and Hikaru was running around the stage, trying to connect with as many people in the audience as possible. And it worked. So much power, so much strength. Simply amazing. She really managed to capture the spirit of the song. Can’t say I watched the anime but I know it’s about sports and figthing spirit and boy, after this performance I was SO READY to climb Mount Fuji XD (which is good since I actually did climb Mt. Fuji the day after). Once she was finished Hikaru told us that actually no one had voted for her to sing this song but since it’s one of her faves she thought it would be okay to include it, this was “Hikaru’s vote” so to speak.

sprinter: Hands down my favourite performance of the night. The lights were dimmed and all you could hear was Hikaru’s voice which was already brimming over with emotion. The arrangement was super slow, she sang pretty much all the lines (including Wakana’s and Keiko’s). She didn’t sing the Kajiurago parts though. When she got to the “kimi ni aitai…” part, the hall became completely dark and there was just a tiny light illuminating Hikaru. Her voice was raw and fragile and very quiet. She wasn’t even singing them properly, it was more like she was saying them to us. It’s hard to explain but it was utterly heartbreaking. Tears everywhere. She only sang that part once and I think that’s for the best because this way it was incredibly powerful. And even though you could barely see her face you could definitely hear her voice break. She ended the song with Wakana’s line, “I'm calling your name”. By the end of the performance everyone was in tears and you could see Hikaru wiping away a tear too.

That was the end of the live, Hikaru took a bow and thanked everyone. When she told the audience to give a big round of applause to Sakurada he started playing the first tunes of “Happy Birthday”. It was a bit awkward at first because Japanese audiences never know what to do in situations like that. But they caught on surprisingly fast and so everyone was singing for Hikaru. That’s when Hikaru pretty much broke down into tears and watching this made me cry even more. She desperately tried to compose herself afterwards but nope, she couldn’t. Whenever she started to speak, a new wave of emotions seemed to hit her. She had to use a towel to wipe her tears away. She said that she didn’t expect Sakurada to play the birthday song for her (although I think that’s not true because he apparently played it during the afternoon event too but I forgive her for that little lie XD). Oh well, whether she was surprised or not she seemed to be moved either way and that is the only thing that counts. She thanked us for coming, thanked us for making this night incredibly special for her and finally assured us that she would forever remember this evening and treasure it within her heart…during the whole time tears were streaming down her face. She hopes that the next time we all meet there will be less tears and more laughter. She apologised for crying so much (oh please, Hi-chan, never apologise for that!!!!) Then she left the stage and the audience was asked to remain seated until told otherwise. The individual rows were asked to wait in line and leave the hall one by one.

That’s when we all got our personal greeting and postcard from Hikaru. She was standing outside wearing the white shirt from the merchandise and she handed each and every person a handwritten note and thanked them once again for coming. The staff people were rushing everyone out but fans were able to talk to Hikaru for a milli-second. When it was my turn I was shaking and I started crying again. Hikaru smiled at me and gave me one of her English cards (like seriously, she even prepared English cards for her foreign fans! So thoughtful of her!). I told her that I was incredibly moved by her performance (as if my crying wasn’t indication enough) and it looked like Hikaru was about to start crying too but then I was ushered outside so I can’t know for sure. I was shaking so much and then and it took a few minuted to compose myself.

All in all it was a super special event and I am so glad I got the chance to attend it. Hikaru is a born solo performer and she owned the stage throughout the entire event. She made me fall in love with her even more. You could really tell how much she cared about her fans. Right now I am very grateful that she is there for us and wants to be close to us. This event and all her blog posts make me so very happy, you have no idea. My only regret is that Hikaru didn’t mention Wakana and Keiko during the evening event. Why did she only talk about them during the afternoon event? So unfair! But oh well, it’s not like I missed much. She basically just told the audience that they are keeping in touch and that she had received birthday geetings from both of them (duh! Of course she did! Did anyone doubt it?) and that Wakana regularly sends pictures of her plant babies. They are all doing their own thing now so I understand and respect their choice (yes, I think it’s their choice and they are not forced by Space Craft) to lay low and not mention the others too much. However, it’s still nice when they do.

Okay, that’s a wrap. Hope you enjoyed this and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask

[gratefulslug]

Between the World and Me: Chapter 1 Notes

Opening quote critiques the way we respond to certain deaths, romanticizing the deaths of these kids who are killed. They are not born to die, their purpose was not supposed to be a “martyr”, their purpose should have been their life, not their death.

Portrays living as different races as living in different worlds, I have a feeling this will be an overarching theme (pg. 1)

America has allowed for their own definitions of what “the people” mean (in terms of politics), because of this they have allowed and excused their own violence (pg. 6)

Naming who “the people” are is based on hierarchy because America is based on hierarchy, why do we assign value to physical traits? (pg. 6-7)

“America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist” (pg. 8). This is how I view “Trump’s America”, but maybe America has always been this way, and I simply just seeing it now. 

“The police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body” (pg. 9) --> clear connections to current day, use of “destruction” over and over again, but America does not deem it as destruction because of what we have determined as “okay” 

I find myself forgetting that this is a letter to his son, when I remember it makes me tear up, I cannot imagine living a life where I would have to write a letter like this to my child. I suppose that is the whole point, as much as I want to and as much as I try, I will never be able to understand. 

Is the America dream just to be white? (pg. 10)

“That this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must ind some way to live within the all of it” (pg 11-12). --> this seems to sum of the black experience living in America. They are coping with a world that rejects them. 

“But the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men” (pg 12).

I am reading this book in a cafe, I have started to cry as this subject material is very sad and very necessary. I keep having to put the book down as I read to take a breath. But I noticed that as soon as I began to cry, I reached for my phone to tell my friends “omg I am literally crying in this coffee shop right now”... what does that say about me? I am trying to turn this pain into my own when it is none of the such. I’m embarrassed that this was my initial reaction and embarrassed to be typing this.

I am thinking about the mold black kids are meant to fall into. I am thinking about a boy at my school, he is black and he has gotten himself into a lot of trouble with the law throughout the past year. But, the past few months (after an expulsion) he seriously turned his life around. But, for him that also meant taking the twists out of his hair, changing his style, changing the way he speaks. I wonder how much of that is from internalized racism? or from what the school has projected onto him as being the “ideal student”? (pg 14). 

How much of black culture in America is built out of fear? (pg 14-15)

I imagine the parents beating their children out of fear, they want their kids to be harsh in order to survive, but at the same time they don’t. Do they want to take away their blackness? (pg 15)

“Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body” (pg 16.) --> This quote really affected me, it seems to perfectly encapsulate the idea of fear manifesting in violence, but the violence doesn't have bad intentions. She was trying to help. 

“Either I can beat him, or the police” (pg 16). 

Is this beating a shared experience for all black kids? Even now? Why are these kids continuing to put themselves into dangerous situations after being beat for it? Or is that too easy of an assumption to make? (pg 17)

Laws are made for “the people”, which has never included black kids. (pg 17)

I will never know what it is like to be a young black kid reading of police brutality, I cannot begin to imagine. I wish I could share their understanding in order to empathize, but I can’t. (pg 19)

“cosmic injustice” and “profound cruelty” (pg 21) used to describe violence toward black bodies, I think those definitions will be the closest I can come to understanding. 

“And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same” (pg 21). As much as the world has changed, ex. it is significantly more acceptable to wear natural black hairstyles, not to say that it is fully accepted/gone without judgement in any way, the systems have stayed the same. Black men and women and children are still left with the same unfairness. 

“I recall learning these laws clearer than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my  body” (24). I think this is a really good example of how white privilege works. I have never had to worry about the security of my body.

the “need for escape” seems to be why kids are turning to the streets, it is partially because that is where they are told to go, partially because that is how they escape? 

“The world had no time for the childhoods of black and boys and girls” (25). These black kids are forced to learn two lives, both of which are necessary for their survival, the streets are their now, school is their later, Imagine how exhausting that must be, and how stressful it is to quite literally have your life on the line. 

School is made for a certain, white, student. It takes that student and turns them into a uniformed student. They do not learn, they do not grow, them memorize and their curiosity is taken away from them. (26)

He felt like he had two options, the streets or school. But did not fit either mold, he was too “soft” for the streets and too curious for school. (27)

I had always thought that these kids were born into a world too hard to escape, but didn’t necessarily understand that they tried, but it doesn’t matter when the world isn’t built for you. (28)

“I had no sense that any just God was on my side... My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box” (28).

New definition of interrogation as “drawing myself into consciousness” (29).

“the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera” (32). Reminds me of modern day police brutality and the videos that are shared. Is showing that graphic footage actually helpful or does it act as “trauma porn” to certain viewers? 

“Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that black are in especial need of this morality” (32). Education seems to have this failing view that violence is bad. You cannot always declare violence as bad, especially when the people writing that history are probably white men. This land is acquired “through murder and tamed it under slavery” (32), and now you are going to preach of nonviolence? 

Talking about intentions of individual educators, reminds me of certain arguments about “ACAB”, intentions of the individual are essentially bullshit. They don’t matter. It is the systems that need changing. But what does that really mean? We seem to throw around that idea without really knowing. How should education become more inclusive, how can ALL educators practice this? How can a police force be a positive thing when it was originally made as slave capturers? (33).

Definition of politically conscious: “as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty” (34). Also connects back to arguments of rhetoric! 

Knowledge brings hope, or opposite (34)

“Black is beautiful-which is to say that the black body is beautiful...” (34)

THIS is what Malcom X represents, not just unruly violence, that is what I was taught in school. (34-36)

“it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver” (36) --> connection to modern day, looting/violence from protesters was criticized but you cannot understand what they have gone to, and why their actions do appear justified

“White America is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies” (42). How is this moved past? How do I, as a white person, contribute to this?

I don’t necessarily understand the distinction he seems to be making about being black/ having a black body (pg 44)

He turned to literature for answers on black history, but found differencing opinions are more questions instead. (47-48)

“bound by my ignorance” (48). This is often how I find myself feeling, even while reading this book. 

Writing = thinking, connection to summer assignment 

Trauma passed down in our bodies, he didn’t need to directly experience the things his ancestors went through in order to feel them. (51)

Idea of “intellectual vertigo” (52) piqued my interest. I think I am constantly feeling that, especially surrounding politics. 

Fear seems to be an overall theme of black lives, fear of difference/culture/lack of understanding (57)

Story of the woman eating with her hands reminded me of going to lunch with Apurva and Alex, she felt the need to ask us if it was okay for her to eat with her hands. She said she hadn’t done it with any of her other friends, but because of my and Alex’s perspectives and us going to the temple, she felt more comfortable. It still made me sad that she felt she had to ask, and even as she did it I remember watching her eat. Embarrassment of ignorance. (57)

“... ranged between women and men, asserted this not just with pride but as though it were normal, as though she were normal...” (58)

“But I was from a place -America- where cruelty toward humans who loved as their deepest instincts instructed was a kind of law” (58) !!!!!!!!!!! Wow, what a way to think about this. 

“Hate gives identity” (60).... how exposure changed a person.... I identify as a bisexual woman. 

The way he talks about love on pages 60 and 61 really resonated with me. But I think it is more of a for-me thought than a class thought. 

“And I could no longer predict where I would find my heroes” (61) this is something I also find myself learning more and more. The people around me have changed so much, this seems to be the purpose of him telling these stories of different men and women. 

You control what you can, find comfort in that. (62)

“It was beginning to come together- even if I could not yet see what the ‘it’ was” (63). How this is so much of what I feel, always. 

Black women have “a knowledge of cosmic injustices” and I enjoy that he is able to recognize the different struggles black women will face compared to black men. (65)

The way he talks about his child is not something I have ever heard before, I cannot tell if I find it beautiful or confusing. “you were our ring” “we’d summoned you out of ourselves” “you were the God I’d never had” (67) is this too much for a child ? (66-67)

Perhaps the main theme of the letter: “There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case.” (68). What a beautiful message and interpretation of his own curiosity, he definitely did not lose it as a child, as many do.

“’Slavery’ is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman, a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved” (70). Relating back to beginning of the letter, there are the people, and slaves do not fit into that group. 

“you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know” (71) --> this seems to be what he is trying to tell his son.

“You have to make peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us, and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71). This is the line he chooses to end his letter, reminding his son of what his body was. 

[lamingtonladies]

Ur-Fascism – Umberto Eco

Printable pamphlet here

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.

In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good.

One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American liberators was thus—after so many palefaces in black shirts—that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne…” Unfortunately there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.

In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights—the windows closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone luminous halo—listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.

In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.

But who are They?

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists”—meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. … Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.

There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles as Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech or States of Mind Created by Fascism.) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.

The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism—which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle decadence.

Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.

Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:

1 2 3 4 abc bcd cde def

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia. This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism. If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties—among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.

Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.

The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,”—I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte Le teste degli impiccati Nell’acqua della fonte La bava degli impiccati.

Sul lastrico del mercato Le unghie dei fucilati Sull’erba secca del prato I denti dei fucilati.

Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi La nostra carne non è più d’uomini Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.

Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti E sulla terra faremo libertà Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti La giustizia che si farà.

On the cobbles in the market- places The fingernails of those lined up and shot On the dry grass in the open spaces The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.

Biting the air, biting the stones Our flesh is no longer human Biting the air, biting the stones Our hearts are no longer human.

But we have read into the eyes of the dead And shall bring freedom on the earth But clenched tight in the fists of the dead Lies the justice to be served.) —poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli

[leftpress]

Ur-Fascism

Umberto Eco | JUNE 22, 1995  Submitted by @sarahmascarah

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.

In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good.

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One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American liberators was thus—after so many palefaces in black shirts—that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne…” Unfortunately there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.

In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights—the windows closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone luminous halo—listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.

In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.

But who are They?

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists”—meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. … Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.

There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles as Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech or States of Mind Created by Fascism.) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.

The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism—which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle decadence.

Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.

Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:

1 2 3 4abc bcd cde def

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties—among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.

Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.

The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,”—I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte Le teste degli impiccati Nell’acqua della fonte La bava degli impiccati.

Sul lastrico del mercato Le unghie dei fucilati Sull’erba secca del prato I denti dei fucilati.

Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi La nostra carne non è più d’uomini Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.

Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti E sulla terra faremo libertà Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti La giustizia che si farà.

On the cobbles in the market- places The fingernails of those lined up and shot On the dry grass in the open spaces The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.

Biting the air, biting the stones Our flesh is no longer human Biting the air, biting the stones Our hearts are no longer human.

But we have read into the eyes of the dead And shall bring freedom on the earth But clenched tight in the fists of the dead Lies the justice to be served.) —poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Copyright © by Umberto Eco

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Ur-Fascism/Eternal Fascism by Umberto Eco

WRITTEN ON THE “NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS” ON JUNE 22, 1995

--Op commentary: Please if you are going to read just one thing today read this essay on how to recognize fascism around us in any historical time.   Thank you.--

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.

In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good.

One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American liberators was thus—after so many palefaces in black shirts—that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne…” Unfortunately there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.

In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights—the windows closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone luminous halo—listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.

In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.

But who are They?

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists”—meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. … Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.

There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles as Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech or States of Mind Created by Fascism.) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.

The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism—which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle decadence.

Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.

Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:

                                          1    2    3   4

                                       abc bcd cde def

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties—among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.

Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.

The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,”—I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte Le teste degli impiccati Nell’acqua della fonte La bava degli impiccati.

Sul lastrico del mercato Le unghie dei fucilati Sull’erba secca del prato I denti dei fucilati.

Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi La nostra carne non è più d’uomini Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.

Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti E sulla terra faremo libertà Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti La giustizia che si farà.

* * *

(On the bridge’s parapet                                                                                 The heads of the hanged                                                                                 In the flowing rivulet                                                                                      The spittle of the hanged.

On the cobbles in the market- places The fingernails of those lined up and shot On the dry grass in the open spaces The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.

Biting the air, biting the stones Our flesh is no longer human Biting the air, biting the stones Our hearts are no longer human.

But we have read into the eyes of the dead And shall bring freedom on the earth But clenched tight in the fists of the dead Lies the justice to be served.) —poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Copyright © by Umberto Eco

[nebris]

Ur-Fascism

Umberto Eco June 22, 1995 Issue

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.

In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good.

One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American liberators was thus—after so many palefaces in black shirts—that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne…” Unfortunately there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.

In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights—the windows closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone luminous halo—listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.

In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.

But who are They?

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists”—meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. … Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.

There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles as Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech or States of Mind Created by Fascism.) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.

The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism—which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle decadence.

Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.

Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:

1 2 3 4

abc bcd cde def

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties—among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.

Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.

The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,”—I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte Le teste degli impiccati Nell’acqua della fonte La bava degli impiccati.

Sul lastrico del mercato Le unghie dei fucilati Sull’erba secca del prato I denti dei fucilati.

Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi La nostra carne non è più d’uomini Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.

Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti E sulla terra faremo libertà Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti La giustizia che si farà.

On the cobbles in the market- places The fingernails of those lined up and shot On the dry grass in the open spaces The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.

Biting the air, biting the stones Our flesh is no longer human Biting the air, biting the stones Our hearts are no longer human.

But we have read into the eyes of the dead And shall bring freedom on the earth But clenched tight in the fists of the dead Lies the justice to be served.) —poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Copyright © by Umberto Eco

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Beer with a Painter: Tom Uttech

Tom Uttech, “Ajawakamig (1014)” (2017), oil on linen, 84 x 96 inches, 91 1/2 x 103 1/2 inches including artist’s painted frame (all images courtesy Alexandre Gallery)

Tom Uttech greets me in Saukville, Wisconsin and leads me to his studio carrying a tall walking stick. Uttech lives and works on a former farm, and is an advocate of prairie restoration and an avid bird watcher. He has reestablished hundreds of native plants to the fields around his home, and reported sightings of record numbers of bird species to Wisconsin ornithological groups. The studio — a converted barn — is a workshop for these multiple interests: containing not only major paintings in progress along with his own black-and-white landscape photographs, but also animal skulls and antlers, lengths of bark, old tools, bird nests, vintage Native American canoes hanging from rafters, binoculars, and well-thumbed bird guides on sturdy drafting tables. He is curious to know what a New York writer is going to make of it all, and conscious that his work is anomalous.

As beautiful as the fields and old stone walls around his home are, his paintings are actually studio inventions, based on memories of canoeing and camping in the northern reaches of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada — a true wilderness. They are both highly fictionalized and hyper-real: invoking sublime American landscape painting and magic realism, with a dreamy but tightly realized rhythm of compositional organization. The landscapes are populated by dozens of intricately rendered creatures: wolves, bears, moose, and birds — running or flying from right to left, or facing us head-on and unflinching. His wide, flat, pine molding frames are part of the work: stained and decorated with painted images of animals, tracks, canoes, and fish.

We decide to sit outside so that Uttech can give me a lesson in birdcalls while we talk about art. Our conversation is punctuated by his observations; he pauses to point out the sounds of house wrens, a red-bellied woodpecker, a Great crested flycatcher, a hummingbird, an Eastern wood peewee, and a red-winged blackbird. The awe and reverie in his paintings is matched by his pragmatic directness. In the newest paintings, this quality is even more present.  They have frontal symmetry of organization: it is a maximalist vision of nature, both orderly and untamed.

Tom Uttech in his studio

Uttech was born in 1942 near Wausau, Wisconsin. He studied at the Layton School of Art and University of Cincinnati, and he was a professor of art at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, until 1998. Since the inclusion of his paintings in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, his work has been the subject of more than 40 one-person exhibitions. Examples of his work can be found in the collections of the Chazen Museum of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Georgia; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among many others. His work is represented by Alexandre Gallery, New York, where a solo exhibition of his paintings is currently on view.

 *   *   * 

Jennifer Samet: Do you have any memories of drawing or art-making from childhood that stay with you?

Tom Uttech: According to my mother, I was never unhappy if I had a piece of paper and a crayon in front of me. That started when I was still sitting in a high chair. The two things that brought me pleasure were art and birds.

My first memory is from before I was three years old. I was living with my grandparents, since my father was in the Navy at the time. My grandfather had a cheese factory and a farm, and it was a beautiful spring day, when the grasses were very green. As I was looking out across the field, a red-winged blackbird coasted through. They perform a certain type of a flight when they are about to land — singing and proclaiming territory. So I saw this absolutely black bird, with a red epaulet, fringed by yellow, against the green field. I’ve always wanted to replicate that experience, but of course that can’t happen.

When my dad returned, we moved to town, to Wausau, and I’d go out and watch the nighthawks. Most kids would be doing other sorts of things. My interest in art and birds were two strikes against me as far as normalcy.

Installation view of Tom Uttech: New Paintings (2017), Alexandre Gallery, New York

JS: You did your undergraduate work in Milwaukee and then went to the University of Cincinnati for your MFA. Who were some of your influential teachers there?

TU: My experience at Layton School of Art in Milwaukee was very positive. I was lucky to have teachers who let me follow my own path, including Guido Brink, a German immigrant from the Bauhaus, from Düsseldorf. He had been in the Nazi army. He understood that my interest was to replicate the feeling of an experience, rather than describing the appearance of it. In two years, he hardly said a word, but I remember one thing he did say. If a painting was not working, no matter what the problem was, he would say, “Paint a tree yellow.” It’s a way of jarring reality. I still don’t follow that advice, but it’s a great attitude.

My experience at the University of Cincinnati was unpleasant, and I was in an environment that was not supportive of the kinds of unusual interests that I had. After graduating and teaching for a few years, I became disillusioned.  There was a big discrepancy between what the art world was supporting and what I wanted to do. I tried to adjust. Over time, I realized the work I was making was a compromise, between who I was as a person and who I was as an artist. I reached a point where I decided, “If this is art, I’m not an artist.”

But when my daughter was two or three years old, I would sit with her while she was watching Sesame Street, and I would draw. Since I had made the decision that I wasn’t an artist, none of it meant anything or was important. So I could do anything. I drew things until I got sick of them and then tried other things.  I expelled the compromised ideas I had been working with, and in the process, a new set of images emerged. They returned to my appreciation of the northern landscape. Images came to me from reading Finnish mythology. I was led to that through the music of Jean Sibelius. I made a series of paintings of with biomorphic images, such as landscapes populated by women with deer heads. It was 10 years of real weirdness, and during that period I was teaching in the art department of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, with students following current interests such as highly minimalist paintings and conceptual work.

JS: How does drawing fit into your process now? Do you plan the paintings by drawing them out?

TU: They are not at all pre-planned in the drawing stage. I like to start without any idea of how it’s going to end up. I invent a place where I’d like to be, or a place where I can create this unified experience. It is like starting out on a canoe trip and not knowing what is going to happen. That is wonderful as an experience. The drawing of the painting becomes the most enjoyable part of the whole painting process, because I’m able to spend my time finding things.

JS: I know that your paintings refer not to this landscape, where we are now in Wisconsin, but to an area farther north. How is specificity of place significant to you, even though you work from memory in your studio?

Tom Uttech, “Ganawaabandiwag (Northern Lights)” (2003/2017), oil on linen, 66 x 72 inches, 73 x 79 inches, including artist’s painted frame

TU: There are places I feel a spiritual affinity for. They are found in an area of the North Woods geologically known as the Canadian Shield, which stretches from central Canada all the way out to Newfoundland, and which dips into the extreme north of the northern US.  It is a land of glacial lakes, boreal plants and animals, and few human inhabitants. When I am there, I feel at home, complete, and invisible. I try to have my paintings contain and communicate that feeling.

JS: Are there experiences in the wilderness that have been particularly spectacular and have informed your work in some way?

TU: There are many, like the time I was camping on a small island with a group of friends. We were sitting around a fire late at night. We didn’t know it, but there was a wolf on the island with us, and he started howling. There is something about the transmission of that voice and the sound waves that I could feel in my body, rather than hear.

JS: Why are the birds in your paintings all flying from right to left?

TU: It is not about anything you might imagine. I was making a landscape painting that was not looking interesting. I figured I had nothing to lose; I couldn’t ruin a painting that was already ruined. So, I decided it might be more interesting if I added two or three wolves in it. Then I thought it would be more interesting yet if they were running. For no particular reason, they went through in that direction.

It did make the painting more interesting, so I added even more. They were all moving in one direction. Something was born. After doing it accidentally, I had to do it again. I’ve tried paintings where they go in different directions, and the paintings never feel right.

I often think it’s easier to draw a creature if you start at the nose. I’m right-handed so it works that way. Drawing it from the tail to the head for a right-hander feels like doing everything backwards. On the surface it is totally superficial, but, sometimes, decisions like that may reveal more — a deeper quality of some sort.

JS: Although you are working from memory, photography must play a role in these paintings. How do you paint the specific species of birds that are represented?

TU: I use the illustrations in David Allen Sibley’s book, The Sibley Guide to Birds, because it is only when birds are flying that they expose the patterns and shapes of their wings. However, when they are flying, it is all a big blur. We would never be able to see those details. In that sense, one of the crazy things is that the paintings are so wrong. We are able to see all that, as if I was capturing a 100th of a second.

Tom Uttech, “Kikinawadad (996)” (2017), oil on linen, 32 x 36 inches, 38 1/2 x 42 1/2 inches including artist’s painted frame

JS: Can you tell me about the painted frames, which are a significant element of your work?

TU: While I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, I was exposed to several influential and politically important professors who followed strict formalist theories. It was not correct to refer to the image of a tree and call it a tree. It was necessary to call it a green vertical shape. When I berated the limiting characteristics of that practice to a faculty member, he sarcastically asked, “Well, do you want us to start teaching rosemåling?” I walked away thinking, “Why not? That stuff is pretty interesting.”

At the time I had begun to use wide frames, and I thought adding decorations to them would bug him. So of course I had to do it. The decorations started with northern themes, like moose tracks, and gradually grew into images that complimented and augmented the information in the painting itself. They could tell a different story, and therefore make the whole story more complex and interesting. I was hooked.

JS: Many of your paintings utilize a deliberate symmetry of organization, and in your newest paintings there is a vertical symmetry. How do you think about symmetry and compositional organization?

TU: There is a lot of symmetry in life, of one kind or another. One of the neatest things about nature is that it is totally chaotic at all times, while it is simultaneously totally organized. And a lot of that organization has to do with symmetry. Symmetry is life; it’s reality. That is magic. Painting, hopefully, can do that too.

The symmetry of the reflections is a different story. In the far north, twilight lasts a long time. If you paddle at just the right pace on a calm day, you will see in the water a perfect reflection of the real world. This upside-down world exists just like the “real” world, although it’s not actually there. It becomes like a ghost; it seems to complete reality.

Tom Uttech, “Nanagatawendamowin (994)” (2017), oil on linen, 66 x 60 inches, 73 x 67 inches including artist’s painted frame

If the water is clear, it further complicates and completes the meaning of life. The things we see under the water — fallen trees, submerged plants and fish and such — are real, but they exist in a realm where we humans are denied entrance. So there is a combination of real, unreal, and also unavailable. That is mind altering. I want to generate that in my painting — not describe its appearance. So far I am not totally satisfied with my efforts.

JS: Although you are making representational painting, you seem also to have a real affinity for abstraction. Who are some of the artists you think about?

TU: Even though I rebelled against rigid formalism, I do know and love the necessary role that formal abstraction plays in visual communication. I love the way the early Abstract Expressionists were able to do so much without representing anything, and how older representational painters like Vermeer made paintings that are actually rigidly abstract. Joan Mitchell is one of my absolute favorite painters. I wish I had had the chance to get to know her. She must have been a dervish — all the work she did, and the energy. Her paintings are all so good; they never disappoint me.

The same is true of Willem de Kooning. The paintings say that you don’t need the representation to express the feeling. J.S. Bach, and a lot of music, does that. Instead, you are being transformed out of life into something else, which is undefinable. I’ve been very jealous of de Kooning. He was able to paint beautiful paintings that are some of the most abstract paintings ever. They are not about anything, and he gave them incredible, specific titles, like “Montauk Point.” What can I do? “Landscape with birds.”

JS: Can you tell me about your painting’s titles?  I had assumed they were names of places.

TU: They used to be, but then I ran out of names of places I’ve been. They are words in the Anishinaabe or Ojibway language. I title them after the sound of the word, and then, secondarily, the meaning of that word. It is meaningful to me because I grew up surrounded by their words and came to love, respect, and appreciate both the language and my contacts with its speakers. I like the way that language can reflect the physical character of the North Woods and therefore further complete the experience of seeing my paintings.

JS: How do you think about the play between a symbolic or visionary depiction in your work, and the highly specific elements that are represented?

TU: I want to use the metaphoric possibilities of painterly technique to energize the stories the paintings are telling. For instance, when painting trees, I often try to use erosion as a method. Paint is applied in a very liquid consistency and allowed to freely run down the painting. I augment this by flooding the space with turpentine, which further erodes it. The painting process replicates the natural forces that cover the face of a tree or cliff, and I’m simultaneously representing its appearance. If a tree is painted this way, it will communicate differently than if it were painted with gooey impasto. This nearly uncontrolled erosion is contrasted with tightly rendered birds and animals. This is hard to do successfully.  But that contrast is fun and adds a lot of spice.

Tom Uttech, “Nin Kikinge (998)” (2017), oil on linen, 21 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches, 27 x 33 inches including artist’s painted frame

Recently, I was sitting down by the creek on a chair of two rocks, made by the man who built this place, including all the stone walls. He had an uncanny relationship to rocks, like a Zen priest. It was an evening after there had been an inch of rain, and the creek was roaring like mad.  It became a sensory experience like the wolf calling.

After a while it was no longer a literal experience, for my mind was lost in a reverie of complete peacefulness. I was no longer a hungry person with a bad knee. I was a consciousness that was a part of the creek, and rock, and the falling light of night approaching. I felt the same as the mosquito biting my face, and the breeze disturbing its meal. Attaining this state is important to me. I keep trying to use all the forces of painting to replicate that, so I can repeat it for myself — and, if I do it well enough, share it with viewers.

The post Beer with a Painter: Tom Uttech appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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