The Aristos

by John Fowles

  89 Though, like all the arts, poetry condenses, selects, distorts and emphasizes in order to present its view of reality, its very precision and the enormously complicating factor of linguistic meaning make it less immediate; and in an age neurotically aware of the brevis lux and the night to come, it is immediacy that the audiences want. But poetry is still even now more a nation’s anima, its particular mystery, its adytum, than any other of the arts.

  90 If at the moment it seems less relevant it is because the sudden flood of mechanized techniques of presenting the visual and aural arts is producing a general linguistic anaemia, a debilitation of language, throughout the world. The majority, consisting largely at this stage of evolution of a recentiy emancipated proletariat to whom art is still much more an incidental source of pleasure than a fundamental source of truth, naturally hear beauty and see beauty more easily than they can find it in thinking, imagining and apprehending linguistic meaning.

  91 This bias could be corrected in our educational systems. Most large schools have art and music teachers. A poetry teacher is at least as important; and the ability to teach the writing of poetry is not the same as the ability to teach the grammar and literature of the language.

  92 What is even more ominous for poetry is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. He is chiefly interested in art, in the cinema, in photography, in dress fashions, interior decoration and the rest. His world is bounded by colour, shape, texture, pattern, setting, movement; and he is only minimally interested in the properly intellectual (moral and socio-political) significance of events and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals.

  93 A visual is always more interested in style than in content, and more concerned to see than to understand. A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police; he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

  94 Poets are essentially defenders of order and meaning. If they have so often in the past attacked actual human orders and meanings, it was to establish a better order and meaning. Absolute reality is chaos and anarchy, from our relative human standpoint; and our poets are our ultimate corps of defence. If we think poetry of least concern among our arts, we are like generals who disband their best fighting troops.

  95 Cherish the poet; there seemed many great auks till the last one died.

  11

  THE ARISTOS IN THE INDIVIDUAL

  1 I hope it is now clear what kind of acceptances and sacrifices and changes I believe we must make to arrive at the Aristos, the best for our situation at this time. But the word aristos is also an adjective and can be applied to the individual. What can be said of the ideal man to achieve this best situation?

  2 First and foremost we cannot expect him always to be the aristos. We are all sometimes of the Many. But he will avoid membership. There can be no organization to which he fully belongs; no country, no class, no church, no political party. He needs no uniform, no symbols; his ideas are his uniform, his actions are his symbols, because above all he tries to be a free force in a world of tied forces.

  3 He knows the difference between himself and the Many cannot be one of birth or wealth or power or cleverness. It can only be based on intelligent and enacted goodness.

  4 He knows everything is relative, nothing is absolute. He sees one world with many situations; not one situation. For him, no judgement stands; and he will not permanently join because if he permanently joins with others, however intelligent, however well-intentioned, he helps to constitute an elect, a Few.

  He knows from history that sooner or later every congregation of the elect is driven to condone bad means to good ends; then they cease to be a congregation of the elect and become a mere oligarchy.

  5 He accepts the necessity of his suffering, his isolation, and his absolute death. But he does not accept that evolution cannot be controlled and its dangers limited.

  6 He believes that the only human aim is contentment; and that it is the best aim because it can never be fulfilled. For progress changes, but does not reduce, the enemies of human contentment.

  7 He knows the Many are not only a besieged army; but starved of equality, a seditious besieged army. They are like prisoners vainly and laboriously trying to file their way through massive iron bars in order to reach a blue sky in which they could not possibly exist; while all the time, just behind them, their cell waits to be properly lived in.

  8 He knows we all live at the crossroad of myriad irreconcilable poles, or opposing factors. Their irreconcilability constitutes our cell, and the discovery of living with, and utilizing, this irreconcilability constitutes our escape.

  9 He knows all religious and political creeds are faute de mieux; are utilities.

  10 He knows the Many are like an audience under the spell of a conjuror, seemingly unable to do anything but serve as material for the conjuror’s tricks; and he knows that the true destiny of man is to become a magician himself.

  11 And he knows all these things because he himself is one of the Many.

  12 To accept one’s limited freedom, to accept one’s isolation, to accept this responsibility, to learn one’s particular powers, and then with them to humanize the whole: that is the best for this situation.

  APPENDIX

  The original impetus for these notes, and many of the ideas in them, came from Heraclitus. He was alive at Ephesus in Asia Minor five hundred years before Christ. That is certain; all the rest is more or less plausible legend. It is said that he was of a ruling family, but refused to rule; that he went to the best schools but claimed that he had educated himself; that he preferred playing with children and wandering about the mountains to listening to the glossy platitudes of his eminent contemporaries; that he was invited by Darius to his court, but refused; that he loved riddles and was called the ‘Dark’, that he hated the masses of his day, the Many, and that he died miserably. All that remains of his teaching can be printed in a dozen pages. The following are the main fragments of his teaching, some original and some as filtered through in the Hippocratic corpus.

  * * *

  This world, which is the same for all, was made by neither a god nor a man.

  The opposite is beneficial.

  If it were not for injustice, men would not know justice.

  War [all biological conflict] is justice, because everything comes into being through War.

  The beginning and the end are the same.

  Even sleepers are workers.

  The keraunos [the thunderbolt, chaos, hazard] steers all things.

  Change is rest.

  All that we see is death.

  The one and only wisdom is both willing and unwilling to be called God.

  Humanity has no understanding; but the Logos [divine law, evolution] has.

  How can you hide from what is always present?

  It is not better that men should have all they want.

  Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.

  To God, all things are good and fair and just. It is men who suppose that some things are fust, others unjust.

  The Many turn their backs on what concerns them most.

  The one most in repute knows what is reputed, and no more. But justice will always overtake the liars and charlatans.

  Much learning does not teach understanding.

  The Many know neither how to listen nor how to speak.

  The Many pray to images, as if they could speak to houses. They do not understand either gods or philosophers.

  Dionysus [ritualistic religion] is the same as hell.

  The Many misinterpret the events of their lives; they learn of things; and then they think they know them.

  Even asses know straw is better than gold.

  Though the Logos [the law of evolution] is ubiquitous, the Many behave as if each had a private wisdom of his own.

  Custom and nature do not agree, for the Many formed custom without understanding nature.

>   As a child to the man, man to the Logos.

  The aristos [the good man by Heraclitus’ definition of what constitutes good – independence of judgement and the pursuit of inner wisdom and inner knowledge] is worth ten thousand others.

  Wisdom consists of one thing – to know what steers all through all.

  Those who are awake [each aristos] have one world in common, those who are asleep [the Many] live each in a private world.

  All men have one concern: to know themselves, and be sober.

  The greatest virtue is to say and act the truth within the limitations of nature.

  Sometimes obey one only.

  Gold miners dig much and find little.

  To verify statements and to make original statements require equal intelligence.

  Nightwalkers [lovers of obscurity], Magians [professional mystifiers], priests of Bacchus and priestesses of the vat, and the initiated [the elect who brag of their election] are evil.

  Religious rites are unholy.

  Lovers of wisdom must know many things.

  A dry soul is wisest and best.

  Man grows from his smallest to his greatest by removing excess and remedying deficiency.

  The oracle at Delphi neither hides nor states, but gives signs.

  What sense have they [so-called educated men]? They follow the names in repute and are influenced by the Many, not seeing that among the names in repute there are many bad and few good. But the aristos chooses one thing above all others – immortal glory among mortals, while the Many glut themselves like beasts.

  Man must cling to what is common to all, as a city clings to its laws.

  Time is as a child playing draughts. Dogs also bark at a man they do not know [the Many and the aristos].

  If you do not expect it, you will not find out the unexpected.

  The road up and the road down are the same road.

  Potters use a wheel that goes neither forwards nor backwards, yet goes both ways at once. So it is like the cosmos. On this wheel is made pottery of every shape and yet no two pieces are identical, though all are made of the same materials and with the same tools.

  What is not cannot come into being. From where will it come? But all diminishes and increases to the greatest possible maximum and the least possible minimum. ‘Becoming’ and ‘perishing’ are popular expressions; they are really ‘mixing’ and ‘separating’. Becoming and perishing are the same thing, mixing and separating are the same thing; increase and diminution are the same thing; they are all the same thing and so is the relation of the individual to all things, and all things to the individual; yet in spite of appearances nothing of all things is the same.

  Men saw a log, one pushes, the other pulls. But in doing this they are doing the same thing. While making less, they make more. Such is the nature of man.

  Fire and water are sufficient for one another and for everything else. But each by itself is sufficient neither for itself nor for anything else. Neither can become the complete master. When fire has finished all the water, it lacks nourishment, and conversely the water with the fire. Its motion fails, it stops, what remains of the other attacks. If either were to be mastered, nothing would be as it is. Fire and water suffice for all that exists to their maximum and minimum degree alike.

  NOTES

  References are to page and paragraph numbers.

  13.3: Many modern philosophers. The classic statement of their position was made by the Viennese Circle in the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung of 1929.

  ‘The metaphysicians and theologians, misinterpreting their own sentences, believe that their sentences assert something, represent some state of affairs. Nevertheless, analysis shows that these sentences do not say anything, being instead only an expression of some emotional attitude. To express this may certainly be a significant task. However, the adequate means for its expression is art, for example lyric poetry or music.’

  16.15: Pangloss. The pedantic old tutor to the hero in Voltaire’s Candide (1759). His incurable and misleading optimism brought him nothing but misfortune.

  17.19: supernovae. A supernova is a star that explodes as a result of violent internal changes of pressure, which lead to an equally violent nuclear reaction. In the first second of such an explosion as much energy may be released as in the course of 1,000 million years of the star’s normal nuclear reaction processes. Such explosions may have an intense phase of a fortnight or more, and all life on the supernova’s own and neighbouring stars’ planetary systems would be charred to nothingness. Professor Fred Hoyle has calculated that in our own galaxy alone there are at least 100,000 million stars capable of evolving human life on their planetary systems.

  20.35: Emily Dickinson. The great and lonely American poetess (1830-1886) whose brilliant command of paradox was married to a profound insight into the nature of human suffering. The line quoted is the central theme of much of her work: if life were one long happy summer, we should be without the mysterious truths we learn from our ‘winters’ of suffering.

  21.42: A phoenix infinity. The mythical bird phoenix, supposed to be the only one of its kind and to live for five or six hundred years, lit its own funeral pyre and then sprang reborn and young again from its own ashes. The red shift referred to in the previous paragraph is the proof – from spectographic analysis – that very distant objects in our universe are receding from us; a blue shift would indicate that they are falling back on us, and that a universal holocaust was one day inevitable.

  22.51: St. Augustine. Bishop of Hippo, and author of The Confessions.

  23.54: Tao Te Ching: Exceedingly difficult to translate, but roughly ‘The Classic concerning the System that governs all and the Nature of things’. It was formerly ascribed to Lao Tzu (‘Old Man’), a supposed contemporary of Confucius (551-479 bc). Modern scholars now believe that Lao Tzu was the name of the book, not of the author; and that it is really an anthology of Taoist thought from the fourth and third centuries before Christ, designed primarily to give advice to the wise as to how to live through the troubled times of the Warring States period (480-222 bc). Politically and socially it recommends meekness and submission – the art of survival at all costs. But what makes it one of the great monuments of human thought is its attempt to describe the indescribable – the nature of God and of human existence. The Tao (way or system or divine principle) is often described as wu wei and wu ming – without action (in human affairs) and without name (indescribable in words). There are some strange parallels with pre-Socratic Greek thought.

  26.62: contingent. Used here, of course, in the sense of ‘conditional’ or ‘non-essential’.

  27.71: Erigena. Otherwise known as Johannes Scotus (c. 815-877). Philosopher and theologian.

  29.4: The Bet Situation. From the famous pensée of Pascal. Il faut parier. Cela n’est pas volontaire: vous êtes embarqué. (You must bet. You have no choice: you are in the game.)

  45.71: stasis. Stoppage of the circulation of the blood.

  52.23: My contention here was tragically borne out by the Robert Kennedy assassination. At the preliminary hearing, Sirhan’s greatest concern was that his name should be correctly spelt and pronounced. There is something almost parasitical in such acts: now Sirhan’s name will be remembered as long as Bobby Kennedy’s.

  74.29: amour courtois. The code of ‘knightly love’ that dominated educated Europe in the early Middle Ages had as its central principle the idea that truly noble love is never consummated. It was, so to speak, a game without a prize – and whose only purpose could therefore be the continuance of the game.

  102.2: Ernst Mach. Austrian physicist and psychologist (1836-1916).

  104.9: Kierkegaardian step in the dark. The argument of the Danish philosopher is that at some point in all the major decisions of life (for Kierkegaard, of course, the greatest was whether or not to be a Christian) reason and intelligence and scholarship become powerless to help; so one must either live in perpetual doubt and anguish or step into the dark. />
  Tertullian. Tertullian (c. 155-222) came, like Saint Augustine, from near Carthage. He too led a wicked youth, turned to Christianity in his later years, and became the greatest theologian and apologist of his time. His most famous statement of position is his credibile quia ineptum – it is credible because it is absurd.

  114.43: Odi profanum… ‘I loathe the vulgar crowd, and shun them’ – from Horace. He was given the Sabine farm – which remains a delicious rural retreat only twenty miles from Rome – by the millionaire Maecenas.

  115.47: the ancient Milesians. The pre-Socratic philosophers. Miletus ought to be ranked with Athens, Rome and Paris for its importance in the growth of the European spirit.

  Orphic mysticism. The associated cults of Orpheus and Dionysus – both gods of the senses – relied on music, alcohol and ritual to gain and hold adherents. These cults probably had much in common with more recent African secret-society ‘religions’. Apollo stands for reason, law, moderation.

  130.27: ‘feelies’. From Brave New World – movies that can be felt as well as seen and heard.

  152.40: an artefact. Artefact properly means any artificial object (as opposed to natural object), but since ‘works of art’ has come to be applied to painting and sculpture only, I use artefact here in the sense of any creation of man in any of the arts.

  158.65: Laius and Jocasta. The parents of Oedipus.

  171.112: Meaulnes. From Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier. One of the great parables of that aspect of the European spirit that prefers the dream to the reality. Do-maine perdu, domaine sans nom: lost place, place without a name.