August 14, 2004
THE PILL OF MURTI-BING
Kompozycja, 1918, by futurist artist/novelist Stanislaw Witkiewicz (click for full-screen)
KRAKOW: Nobel prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz has died at the age of 93. His life spanned the cataclysms of the 20th Century: born in Lithuania in 1911 to a family of Polish nobility, studied at Vilnius University, survived WWII, became a diplomat for the Soviet puppet regime before defecting to France in 1951.
In 1953, Milosz's The Captive Mind, an etiology of moral suicide under totalitarianism, shook up Western intellectuals in thrall to Marxist cosmology. The book with a synopsis of Insatiability, a prophetic 1927 phantasmagoria by avant-garde writer & artist Stanislaw Witkiewicz (who committed suicide in 1939 when the Red Army invaded). Insatiability is a study of decadent Polish society that has lost faith & meaning, & fears the approach of a vast Sino-Mongolian army that has conquered the East from the Baltic to the Pacific.
Suddenly, hawkers appear in towns selling Murti-Bing pills, created by a Mongolian mystic who has found an organic means of exporting his philosophy. People who take the pills become immune to metaphysical angst & spiritual hunger, & no longer fear invasion. War is averted when the West surrenders to the East, and the leader of the Western Army is ceremonially beheaded. The new age of Murti-Bing begins:
"The heroes of the novel, once tormented by philosophical 'insatiety,' entered the service of the new society. Instead of writing dissonant music, they composed marches & odes. Instead of painting abstractions as before, they turned out socially useful pictures. But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities, they became schizophrenics."
Milosz wrote those words in 1953, when this nightmare vision had come to pass:
"People in the West are often inclined to consider the lot of converted countries in terms of might & coercion. That is wrong. There is an internal longing for harmony & happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction. And Murti Bing is more tempting to an intellectual than to a laborer. For the intellectual, the New Faith is a candle that he circles like a moth. In the end, he throws himself into the flame for the glory of mankind."
Prescient words in 2004, when the West is again threatened by Oriental totalitarianism our effete intelligentsia can't grapple with. For a modern take on jihad & the West, see my story Cities of Dust.
See also: Daniel Goldfarb's Argonauts of the Western Pacific,about the homoerotic relationship between Witkiewicz & Bronislaw Malinowski
Posted by Jeff at August 14, 2004 09:36 AM
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