Apologia for Virility

To myself, in the memory of my defeats, of my lows, of the mediocrity of the life I’ve lived – I thereby dedicate this saddened and heroic Apologia.

Litanies for the Maiden

I sing for the maidens; I sing the sadness of the maidens, fated to cry till dawn. I sing for the maidens that delighted virile will – and the muscles, and the bones, and the restfulness. I sing for the tragic bondage of maidens. I sing for the white prey caught in arms grown from the Sun. I sing for their futile toil, their tears nostalgic for purity, their wailings in the fear of their master’s appetite.

I sing for the maidens; I sing for the fearful enemy, for the warm temptation, for the eyes which know defeat and crying. I sing for the maidens; I sing for their flesh which curbs the arrows of male gaze. The flesh of maidens which clouds the serenity – of the sky, the eyes, the spirit. The flesh of maidens, which will flower in passion and will reveal itself – a cloudy dream and shadow – in the paths that ascend to heroism.

I sing for the maidens; I sing for the sad companion of the sad individual who I worship by calling him a male. I sing for the paste which has moulded our flesh. I sing for the humble angel, kind and fearful, who is tearing up inside our souls. My song is hate; my lips are blood; my eyes are glass-of-silence, my arm a sign raised up to the sky.

I sing the charms; I sing the temptations; I sing the joys which have enlightened our sex in its pathetic descent; I spread the smoke of tired torches, where the wind alone smoothens the rocks. Listen to the praise of maidens:

White bodies, with undercurrents that caress the eye, with the miasma of burned myrrh;
White shoulders, soft snakes in which lips immerse themselves, suckling, and become hot;
Restless necks of white Shulamite;
Breasts grown up under the flame of midnight dreams, when fearful lips whistle delights and the knees tragically separate as an omen;
Breasts round and sour;
Womb gripped by icy winds;
Womb pure, womb foreign like a silent forest, womb tensed waiting for a miracle;
Hips green as unripe fruit, flesh shrouded in mystery-fumes, shadows that dilate nostrils and heat up the breath in your chest;
Thighs – a rebus with the same solution!…
Thereby I sing anaemic litanies for maidens fated to cry till dawn.

Glories for the Male

Glory – the sex in which cliffs and eyes-of-sky were moulded.
Glory to the eternally-tempted, to the restless one, to the one with long and hot breath in his chest, and with ribs seeded with urges of triumph.
Glory to the eyes crushed by eyelids, drawing hate and spewing sparkles.
Glory to the arms, to the flesh writhed on bones of adolescence and febrile with urges.
Glory to the flesh and glory to the blood. Blood red and heavy, which lips sip like wine flowing between the breasts of a she-devil. Blood that foments, and rummages within the depths, and quivers the muscles, and chokes, and blinds.
Glory – the athirst mouth, clenched in judgement, wild in fury, terrifying in appetite.
Mouth wildly-opened in the face of flesh, of winds, of springs, of trees, of rocks.
Mouth burned by the scorch of white and warm bodies, treasures of uncaressed caresses, spring of dark delights.
Teeth perverse, triumphant, piercing, which bite into chaste shoulders, into anxious thighs, into hips twisted by the poison of longing.
Glory to the virile figure, glory to holy ugliness, glory to the bones that crack cheeks, and clench lips, and raise the forehead upwards, face to face with the gods.
Glory to the eyes that desire everything, and take everything, and master everything.
Glory to passion, storm that burns the soul and purifies it.
Glory to the pure male.

You the ones emaciated by sexual nights, you the ones resigned to all-restful mediocrity, you the ones thundered by virile heroism, you the miserable sons of cave-snowdrifts, you the aromatic torches in sentimental churches, you all the ones exhausted, disgusted, dying – bathe in the heavy and cold raid, crush stones, sip the sour water of the sea! A new lifeblood will gift you the earth and sky. A new soul will spill the Sun. Harsh thoughts will thunder your skull. Will it! You will be born anew in virility!

Nostalgic Highs

Enthusiasm will not devour my voice. Truths will lay themselves down in peace.

I don’t consider a male to be just anyone with a masculine name. There are certain conditions of virility that must be met. We are reborn in virility as we are reborn in Christianity: through effective modification of our life, through overcoming, through transfiguration. Can those conditions be classified in categories and reduced to epithets? Virility is a dynamic phenomenology, a flowing series of attitudes in the face of reality, of soul, and of God. From the hirsute and jovial male, carrying the potencies of his sex in a sincere unconsciousness, to the enlightened bearer of a world valorised and imposed on others by his will – how long is the way? We can only capture virility in its “becoming” – as paradoxical as that statement is.

An essential element of the male – obvious in all its phases of evolution, from the primary gesture of the master delighting his body in the pain of others to harsh ascetic renunciation – is the natural function of “will”. Women have the nostalgia for will. They will themselves be crushed – or they reinforce themselves in the illusory will of a caprice. Pseudo-males meditate on will, dissociate it, scorn it, or accept it in inoffensive doses, with a waste of enthusiastic rhetoric. Pure will – an act purely masculine. It is not a cerebral fantasy but an effective experience, which has no hope of success in a consciousness poor in spiritual tributaries, in fullness, in reserves. It was maybe a fated thing, or a decision of the tragical cosmic: the right to will – lengthily, intensely, resistantly; and not in ephemeral outburst – is granted to only one sex. Also fated was the eternal always fresh presence of temptation. Ancestral weakness has penetrated the viscera; it sedimented in brain and heart. More and more individuals were born without a sex, and the actualisation of virile potencies became difficult. The world defends itself against them and being unable to eliminate them, it secludes or perverts them. The world exalts a “fashionable” virility. That’s why – for the souls which yearn for lost purity – this purgatory is so excruciating.

Life – bringing with it neither pain, nor delight, only fulfilling itself correctly like the exercise of a muscle – was unconscious. Consciousness gave it its first urge for overcoming, together with the painful awareness of insufficiency. This fact was commentated by many cerebrals and many men skilled in action, but this is how I understand it: consciousness shined a light on the helplessness of man in the Cosmos. “I want that apple; I want that maiden!” The male, nude in the sun, bites the apple, deflowers the maiden. But when consciousness was awakened: “If I wanted to float above water, I would drown; if I wanted the Sun, others would think I’m crazy.” These are worries which never disturbed the soul of the first male. Because if he willed it so, he would float above water and he would have the Sun. Don’t ask me for evidence. Do you not understand that original will is now inaccessible to us? And that we can’t judge them with our brains, which have thought for too many centuries? The weakness of thousands of men – transmitted hereditarily to the thousands of pseudo-males of our times – deepened itself in Human-Cosmos dualism. Yet, at the same time, the dawn of a masculine transfiguration rises from this dualism, the dawn of personality.

Here is the interpretation of the paradox. The inborn assurance of helplessness – transmitted through flesh and spirit – has made the male more organically mediocre. Consciousness has accepted almost naturally the limitation of one’s will by the immensity of the Cosmos. The smallness of humanity seemed to it as a necessary a priori. However, there have always been males which suffered effectively from the tragic pain of a will deteriorated by lack of absolute self-confidence, by cerebral desires more and more alien, by the refinement of sensibilities. Their souls have managed to knead a new paste. They discovered virility in its continuous flow, in overcoming, tireless overtaking. From these initial retorts, the ultimate phases of the tragic masculine were sublimated; the sadness of the ascetic was crystallised.

Lost being the will which was capable of everything because it didn’t want everything – the soul of man is tormented by eternal desire. The want of everything is virile suffering. A male which arrives at an awareness of self always starts by desiring a lot, desiring more, desiring more of. And that male bleeds for every defeat. How could I better worship that appetite from male flesh and spirit, than with a

Chant for the thirst of everything!

I don’t want your body and I don’t want your eyes – but all the bodies.
And again, if a mystery remains foreign – I throw away the body.
Why should I keep the body that didn’t give itself totally to me?…
Everything – warm me!
Everything – ravage me, love me, hate me, carry me on winds and into the world!

I want my arms a garland around the globe. I want my eyes a lash of sea, where the sun meekly drowns. I want my mouth a sucker on the breasts of earth and salt. I want my shoulder a glimpse. And again – I want my arms as paths of stars.

I yearn for everything, and I writhe, and chew the ash of partial delights. Why can’t I live an hour of everything? You see how I bleed and you hear how I groan when around me pass strangers? I hate the brains and I hate the bodies which I do not own.

I want the aromas of flesh; I want the breeze of mountains; I want the fragrance of rot, of death, of drought, of sea…

But why should I call to them, why call to the unnamed fragrances?

The rib of the slave, the leaves of the elms, the coldness of the cliffs – do not stop me wanting for that which I know I will never be able to sip.
I want sour fruits and sweet figs.
I want to be a hoof, a memory and a dragon.
I want all the writings; why should I not know everything?
Let my soul burn all my passion; why should I lose drops of poison and fists of honey?

How could I better say that I want to think everything, to penetrate into essences, to rebirth in God? How could I better say that my longings dry my smile and evil my eyes, because they are poison squeezed from the weakness of my ancestors?

They burn in me, and nothing is mine! How long will they fan the flames and fuel the embers?…

Do you know the mania of the soul which feels its powerlessness? I hate the man within, I hate my flesh; I hate the defeats of my ancestors – because it impedes me from owning everything. I cannot own everything; I cannot sip, cannot bite, cannot love, cannot rustle, cannot carve – everything. I am nothing but a poor body in which writhes, in revolt, a soul which wants Everything. And the soul wails, for it is powerless.

Do you suspect, in the beyond, a shimmer of a new vision? Those that understand their powerlessness to own everything – take a plunge. They will sing, perhaps, the song of harsh and sour triumph…

Virility is not only sensual, just as it is not only spiritual. That’s why the obsession for everything starts to crystallise a synthesis which carries a male to supreme enlightenment. Synthesis and overcoming are the discharge of potencies, realisation of potentialities which have rumbled in one’s soul since the Fall. Females borrow values. Pseudo-males comment, chip, combine them. Fresh visions, unexpected valorisations, effective spiritual creations, meant to feed other spiritual lives – are accomplished only by a virile consciousness.

Masculine evolution is fuelled from the very clashes, experiences, obsessions of the spirit. That’s why they escape the historians. Virility, like faith, is the concrete descent of a harsh spirit into the life of man. One cannot summarise its phases. One cannot prescribe a recipe for it. Virility simply exists, is experienced. We cannot indicate but its essential characteristics, which have to be understood in their flow, in their becoming, in their continuous derivation from one another.

Man climbs by himself, in silence, unknown by anyone – a peak without steps, without a path, without ropes. His defeats and triumphs are his own. His friend and his wife does not know them. With every hour lived harshly, the male approaches the completion of the artwork for which he was born: personality.

Clarification for Ladies and Gentlemen

For the gentlemen which demeaned, shamed, compromised, vitiated, gangrened the potencies of the sex; for the ladies which exalted and contributed to the rooting of eternal mediocrity in the male – I write these clarifications, strict chirurgical exercises for the purification of its original meaning.

Don Juan doesn’t embody the essence of virility. One who wastes his life collecting women shows that he values them more than they are worth. The restlessness and thirst of Don Juans is mediocre. They have refused to gather and glorify the whole in a single loving body and soul. The error is irredeemable. Do these type of people not understand that they will never wield but many, and not all? Their misery breaks them down, grinds them down, pulverises them. These loser males waste away before they manage to exalt their personality with harsh work.

There is no overcoming, no possibility of trans-substancialisation of latent virtualities gifted by your sex – without a restless inner life. Out of it will the new male be born, lord of our times, if we will it. To capture the inner restlessness of a veritable male spirit means to capture its virility in potentia. From here, from the soul, starts the path towards overcoming. Let’s curse our ancestors; but let’s not forget that their virility, their pure will, is now physiologically and cosmically inaccessible to us.

There happened once upon a time – in a moment or a millennia – that painful upheaval of essences or criteria or values, or however you prefer to call it. The fall from initial virility was a tragic fall; maybe it was even the fall of man. Those who contemplate the will of the God-Man – can meditate on this simple phrase and understand much.

But, my ladies, I don’t want to tire your sight by aiming it in a past long forgotten, and neither will I bore you with theological coquetry. Internal life, harsh internal life – is, still, the only redemption. Don’t smile, gentlemen; you do not know it, even though you don’t ignore it.

You live that fake inner life which is borrowed from books, modelled after celebrities. You read too many sweet poets, refined, subtle and snobbish. Your philosophy was established together with your first moment of sentimental desperation, was it not? You meditate too clearly within the interlude of the nordic dramas, in the image of steamships on a sunsetting horizon, in your lonely walks. You keep in your soul too much of those adolescent coagulations, those pointless melancholies which you believe are the sadness of a genius, that auto-toleration which brings mediocrity and smugness. You are too feminine. Without doubt, the feminine soul is enchanting and incomprehensible. But leave that type of soul to the ladies who love reading or who carry from salon to salon the nostalgia of their tenor lover.

The life of masculine spirit is harsh. Inner life means hard work, unrecognised by others, with a late harvest. So, work is always painful – because it’s a renunciation. Do you feel the sun rising? Salvation will be accomplished through renunciations, and the first one of all, and the hardest to discipline – is work.

How should I sing for work? How should I sing for the trowel, the plaster and the stone with which I raise the walls of my soul towards leaden peaks haloed in the red of sunrise? I want this page to feel the feverish desire, the unfiltered desire that is consumed in work done with an exhausted breath, with glassy eyes, and with clenched fists. An undisciplined spiritual life cancels itself. Lack of discipline can be accepted from time to time as an experience, never as a norm. Naturally, discipline doesn’t mean methodology, neither rigorous limitations, nor mental hygiene; but rather continuity, perseverance, the obsession for overcoming and for penetrating into the depths.

One who works endlessly towards spiritual overcoming – distils virility into essences more and more pure and intoxicating. My ladies, you will not recognise the superior male in the sober neophyte of painful initiation, in the agreeable dilettante of literary salons, in the snobbish amateur of mondain philosophy. Here is what you have to learn: that your masterful eyes will never be able to see authentic male dispositions, the restless spirit of your male friend, the journeys-after-you of your lover. And this, my ladies, is because of that pseudo-spirituality which you so like the taste of and you force to spring around you out of the brains of the ones compromised by desire for sex. By considering it representative, and exalting it as a spiritual tonic – the pure virile spirit is organically foreign to you. And without doubt, we are not fully to blame.

The first sign of the steps which the soul accomplishes – is silence. Naturally, not yet the severe silence of the ascetic. Male consciousness should be kept free of confessions, this plague of adolescence and of sentimental men overwhelmed by feminism. Why do you keep confessing? Why do you divide your pain and joy by sharing it? Why would you lower a foreign thought even into this last corner of authentic aloneness: the experiences of your soul? A male is sober, silent about his inner treasure, which no one suspects. Your silence should not be exhibited to others in daily and bearable social mediocrity – it has to be concealed under an unattached and superficial verbosity. The most suffocating feeling of rebellion, the most painful feeling of disgust that is endured by a masculine consciousness is in the face of surrogates, of a counterfeit personality, of snobs trying to affect an intellectual suffering they are not worthy of. My ladies, you ensnare yourself completely in the nets of these well-perfumed youths which speak to you of dreams, of glory, of melancholic journeys, of princes, of originality. This offence to our sex that you utter: originality. You consider original to be all the castaways, all the helpless ones, all those with rabid minds, the mediocres that mimic this or that paradox of an illustrious paederast, the philosophers parroting book chapters, the dilettantes with a colourful presentation, the poets and the poet-like which are begging for genius, the erudite and daring jokers, the old journalists puffed up in a dubious perversity, the mystics humming a pathetic sanctity. My ladies, these – are – the superior – males – for you, the ideal fiancés, the dreamed-of men. Take them all. If you would collect all of them – do you suspect the male sex will thank you…?

Gentlemen, if you have sincerely decided to walk the uphill path of personality – don’t desire for that sensuality which many talk of but nobody knows. Passionate, overwhelming sensuality, unsuspected by women – only troubles the flesh that knows harsh restraints. Don’t measure lips, nostrils, or eyes. What value do these have in the face of that desire which springs up from the depths of the flesh and spirit…?

Don’t whine of your superiority; don’t borrow the mask of those which want to be pitied and wanted. These are humiliating surrogates, waived around like a banner by that femininity unable to bear the harsh cold wind which blows upon a crown. So, because the path of immediate triumph leads along the swamps – discard that type of triumph. You will collect later – that other triumph.

Here are a couple of inscriptions on the same plinth, for the ladies and gentlemen which want these specifications formulated in a more accessible form:

Don Juan was a loser-male. He valued women too much; and when he scorned them, his “act of forgetting them” he still found in their bodies.

A new virility, adapted to new humanity – springs up from spiritual life. One becomes a pure male through inner-sharpening, through experiences, through intensity.

Femininity is seduced by the surrogates of inner-life: mediocre idealism, infecund, borrowed.

The crisis of the first step of male evolution: stepping from a dubious spirituality to an austere one and to a disciplined working of the spirit.

The feminisation of society is a powerful temptation during evolution. Immediate enemies: the morgue, auto-toleration, acts of confession, cheap nostalgia, snobbism. The only salvation: spiritual asceticism.

The Tragical Masculine

To live in permanent danger – this is the commandment of virility.

Don’t tell me that modern life excludes heroic danger. Don’t speak to me of that civilisational comfort which neutralised the corrosive fight, by legislature. There exist, for the contemporary male, just as many dangers as for the one living in caves – the dangers of the spirit. Confront them, those who dare. Heroic life can be accomplished in a library, and in the cell of an ascetic too. In those dark fields, the sky is abound with poisoned arrows. Death lurks in the trenches, in the swamps, in the forests. Madness… Do you think that nefarious experiences are not wounds of the spirit, and do you think that the loss of initial values is not death? Do you think that the courage of reading with satanic temptations is not worth as much as the courage of sword clashes?

The evolution and purification of virility through experience, its sublimation until inner enlightenment – so rare it is… – is accomplished within the frame of creation and for this creation. Inner life does not stay barren. Is it clear now, the difference between an authentic masculine spirituality and the monkeying around of dilettantes and snobs? The former germinates and warms a new consciousness – independent of that unified around bodily functions – which I call personality. The later spiritual life is satisfied with mediocrity and banality spun around a couple of sentimental worries and is crystallised in interpretations stolen from books or flowered by a foreign light.

Every male is obliged to create. Sexual fecundation was, perhaps, a fateful sign from the heavens. Your kid continues your flesh, and his soul will continue the soul of his parent, if he is also his spiritual parent. In masculine consciousness, the desire for creation is ever-burning, for overcoming oneself by conquering citadels,through art, through all the freedom of the Spirit. Not everyone can become a great general, great poet or great thinker. In fact, in our point of view, this doesn’t have any significance. These creations are secondary. More precisely, they spring from an initial creation: personality. Here is what we are all obliged to create: a consciousness crystallised from experiences, from battles, from defeats, from pain. Through it we survive. It explains the necessity to birth and live heroically. There is, obviously, both a male and a female personality, there are diverse spiritual structures. I do not think between these pages but about personality as the ultimate synthesis of virility. It is a process of formation which I’m uncovering.

A soul enriched by experiences awakens at twilight, at the crossroads of two essential spiritual currents: Dionysian and Christic. Sensuality, pagan delights, melancholy of wearied senses, wild vitality consumed without fruit, freedom in Pan, thinking in Apollo. On the other side – disciplined sensibilities, hierarchy of senses, effort towards continuous purification and spiritual overcoming, impetus towards union with God, freedom in Christ, heavenly freedom springing from restraint.

Only in a virile consciousness tested by experience does this conflict become tragic. Their clash is painful. Only a male on his way towards inner fulfilment can be truly tempted by life, consumed by Dionysian desires, drained by them. Where resistance is paltry – temptation doesn’t ravage, doesn’t drip down like a bruised and sweet delight.

The conflict – which becomes a crisis when the nostalgia for asceticism becomes a commandment – is solved by-itself, through a new vision and valorisation, drawn up by a spirit in continuous overcoming. What I call personality is nothing but a supreme synthesis, necessitated by the dynamic of the spirit, through which Pan and Christ are seated in their proper place. It is a re-elaboration of values given to life, pleasure, Cosmos, Divinity. It is a large vision and the organisation of everything; the pillar of inner equilibrium. Personality is created, fueled through tireless battle with the self and the world, it’s built – stone over stone – through spiritual experiences. This is the only artwork that we are called to create. I showed in another place that through it we survive efficiently, because a personality is a spiritual organism, whose life transcends physiology, as a plant transcends the mineral.

Personality, sprung up from effective experience, cannot be known but through experience. Fakes exist here too: imagined personalities, composed on the model of characters in books, mosaic-ally, without organicity.

In every soul, the flesh-spirit conflict is resolved differently; a different vision is crystallised; the forces are equilibrated on a different skeleton. And this is because at the foundation of personality stand one’s own experiences, which have never been identically repeated in another consciousness.

Do you understand the constant masculine wakefulness and corrosive unrest? Do you understand the tragedy of that soul which through the sublimation of sexual energy is approaching God, and at the same time, through temptation, the white-bodied devil Dionysos?

Do you understand the will in which the evil doesn’t die through the actualisation of the good, but grows together with it, and tempts him all the more, and stalks him, and threatens him?

The masculine tragedy, of a strident dualism, when the soul doesn’t defend itself just against the body, but against the soul born of it too? Christic essence against the sensual paganism of Dionysos, and against the nostalgic paganism of Apollo.

Renunciation

My words will be few. Now, I gaze upon peaks untread upon by human foot. Do you know the mountain where the worthy man, one who peered inside his soul, is ending his life, alone? Do you know that willed loneliness, complete loneliness, loneliness without the hope of respite?

This man rips himself away from our world. Every year, we considered him the same as us. And yet: this man outdoes us by far, his will tramples us. Who could penetrate his virile silence? Now he is gone, maybe even dead in a burrow, or a green-ice cave, or a desert. He didn’t leave our ranks because he was afraid of life. He didn’t leave because he was tired, exhausted, disgusted. If so – he’d be back. Up there on the peak, between twilight and dawn, his battle is unimaginable. It’s crossed by madness, it’s fierce with hunger, with sleeplessness, with memories. How can you think that silence is found in loneliness, in caves? Only the bravest of us dare step there, those which, if they had other thoughts, would be led to triumph, to glory, to delights.

Everything or nothing – of the worldly things. This is the first law of renunciation. How much can one have? One woman, a hundred women, a thousand? And in how much time? And – can we truly have them? We could never lord over their thoughts. And from how many countries can we gather them? And what about the sea which always remains in front of us? And the flowers we can’t pick? And the sky which we fray in the smallness of our eyes?…

Delight in piecemeal becomes impossible when the soul is illuminated with virile ascesis. It is worthy to renounce, scornfully, the breadcrumbs of delight offered to your flesh. And it is courageous to renounce spiritual delights and rewards.

What does Glory mean – this last temptation, which made so many a male consciousness bend the knee? Can we truly know it, or do we only hear of it? How much does it help in overcoming yourself – when your soul is already serene in the face of praise and hate? How many centuries does glory last? After all – how could a man who wants everything be tempted by the pathetic praise of only a single continent?

All synthesis must be overcome through a new synthesis. A virile spirit is always tortured by an intense dynamism. Even silence itself must be overcome. The ascetic will accomplish that kind of silence – absurd for the mediocre ones of our world – which hears the earth, the forests, the birds. In silence he will suffer his abandoned joys forever. Out of memories and pain – his soul ascends. Temptation hasn’t died – yet. Personality hasn’t crystallised – definitively. In his inner acts of retort, spirits boil which threaten those of the world: spirits unknown, foreign, divine. Silence – about them.

He will live alone, unknown, forgotten, unsuspected by anyone. He will die on a glassy night, with cold infinity above him. His soul will boil the snow for a bit. Nobody will cry for him. Nobody will be shaken by this monumental “overcoming-of-yourself” by an enlightened male.

But – who knows if he will truly die? And, who knows if his supreme act of renunciation doesn’t signify an act of supreme lordship?

What if we, the small ones, which run around on city streets and suffer in warm buildings – are nothing but puppets, prey to his magical will? And if, after all, this is the truth? That what we do, desire and think follows the will of a few great ascetics?