Hidden History

Hidden
History
Otokar Bfiezina

translated from the Czech by

Carleton Bulkin

Twisted Spoon Press

Prague • 1997
 This book was made possible through financial
support from the Czech Ministry of Culture

© Twisted Spoon Press, 1997

Translation © Carleton Bulkin, 1997
Afterword © Petr Holman, 1997

All rights reserved under International and

Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

ISBN 80-902171-2-5
CONTENTS

the sole work ........................................................7

a reflection in the depths ..................................15
the meaning of struggle ....................................25
the present ...........................................................33
the work of death ..............................................42
hidden history .....................................................65
an edifice on high ...............................................77
the word .............................................................. 90
the glare of freedom ........................................105
peace .................................................................... 118

afterword ...........................................................135
 The Sole Work

In artistic work, the elevated places

of doubt are a land of hunger and cold. Even the creator, when
he loses his orientation, becomes lost here in dark moments of
weariness, in the soul’s moments of loneliness and dryness; he
knows the feverish illusion of freedom which deceives the one
who ascends in these places; but here he is mute. He creates, not
as an indifferent observer of the cosmic drama, but only as a
participant, a player, sacrificing himself. He blossoms, not as a
severed branch, but only in his connection with the family of
life. Only in the effect of the stream which lights all suns and
develops all countries, which creates history, raises and leads
crowds, builds and shatters empires, works in the invisible with
dazzling splendor and which makes the whole species awaken
in a single being, do the creator’s eyes become illuminated and
his tongue untangled. Man creates only in a state of grace, in
the fervid burgeoning of faith.
But who will grasp the wealth of this faith by words alone?
Like bark in a surge of growth, words chap, break off, and fall
away, and new ones are formed underneath, in accordance with
one law, under one sun. Its dogmata are abysses, definitions
have a thousand meanings; where all words have fallen silent,
terror and love, pain and passion still speak. Mystery is alive
here, miracle the sole reality; at every step, hopes fly upward

7
like frightened birds. Here, obedience is freedom, immortality
a certainty, rebirth a path, death an illusion. The black, fiery
wine of every inspiration has ripened on these mysterious vine-
yards. Does something change in its radiance if we know not
whose hand bestows it upon us from the invisible world? Was it
not faith which set the courage of our teachers afire, that they
wrenched themselves from the trifling, flattering pleasures of
the earth, from the toils of their ironic, deceptive smiles and
their frightened, ever-cautioning reason, and that they walked,
in heroic humility, along a narrow footpath between open
chasms of madness, to places where no one had set foot before
them? And lo, to the blessing of our kind they found happiness
where no one had ventured to search for it, the spirits of the
tempest arose in the place where they stood; that which they
touched ripened sweetly in their hands, and they subdued even
reason, so that, made merry, it shone on their paths which they
had feared before.
The nations divide the earth between them in their blood;
the princes of the marketplaces rule over their work, seizers of
power, metals, waters, fire; the suffering brotherhoods join in
unity; empires, embracing the whole globe, are created in the
subconscious of the millions; gigantic metropolises are raised
beyond the horizon; one after another, the hidden forces of the
earth fall into man’s hands like reins: and beyond everything
that seethes here, in a magical effervescence of regenerations, in
the depths, by the spiritual hearths, labors the creator, the
artist, the scientist, the thinker, the loving one, the saint, the

8
visionary, insensible to the mortifying glare in the madness of
their faith, sinking with happiness and humble anguish over
their bounty, confused by the mesmerization of unfriendly
spirits, which must be constantly dispelled by an abundance of
love if work is to be possible; given to vertigo at every glance
downwards and back, stirred by the nearness of the ages which
await their work. Unknown to all and also to themselves,
without any possible rewards for the very highest they bring,
they pile thought upon thought, intuition alongside intuition,
dream upon dream. But do not mourn them in their madness,
the madness of seekers. Do not judge them if they delude them-
selves and go scorned among the brethren. Nothing is lost in the
spiritual world; even a rejected stone will find its place in the
builder’s hands and a burning house will save the life of one
who has strayed. Every clearly expressed thought makes the
dream of all people on earth easier. And the hidden work, at
which both the artist and the genius of science, both the thinker
and the saint labor alike, changes the entire life of the earth;
creates new links between beings, new glowing foci in the battle
of the spirits; prepares new effulgences of passion, remakes sen-
sations, forms, shatters and also heals bodies, revives their mag-
ical capacities, proclaims new events of history from afar,
organizes Man, reaches beyond the visible world.
Every manifestation of creative work is a means of commu-
nication which allows one spirit to recognize another.
Everything is language; even our body is language and speaks
prodigiously through its every limb, through every gesture, by

9
both silence and passion, both illness and death; everything has
a spiritual meaning, and the hidden history that is both ours
and of our dead, even if time has made it impenetrable, is con-
stantly revealed in the features of our faces, by the lines of our
mournful hands, by the confession of our eyes. The life of the
earth, of both animals and plants, is an unbroken series of signs
on our path. But we understand barely the first sentences of this
language; and although its sole purpose is to draw us closer to
itself, it has sparked discord among us until now. All the lan-
guages spoken by the nations on earth matured under the mes-
merization of this secret language of things. They originated in
the fire of artistic vision and perish if they are not animated by
courageous spirits: by creative vanquishers, by those who love
greatly, by powerful observers of visible things, by visionaries of
things that are invisible, endowed with mercy. The language of
waters, forests, storms, winds, the creation; the extraordinary
messages which every place on earth has for man; the organiza-
tion of the human body, which is always in connection with the
soil it grows in, the hidden history of the species over thousands
of years, determine the type of each language, its vocabulary,
composition, music, and rhythm. Although every language is
imperfect for the service of higher spiritual life and we babble
like children when struck by the light, there is deeper wisdom
in the organism of a language than in most of what we say with
it.
Every scientific discovery refines our mutual understanding
by some new insight; it uncovers new places of spiritual contact;

10
every one is accompanied by an upsurge of love reaching far
into the distance. It makes our language deeper and so
heightens our power over things. Everything on this star is
waiting to serve us, if we can command each element in its own
language. Yet all science would be in vain if it were not meant to
teach us how to master and manage life, how to regenerate our
kind and create a higher, more fiery, more benevolent life on
earth.
But the invisible world pervades the visible world. Through
the freedom of dreams, art influences the interpretation of
things. Through a more delicate and sensitive ear, it inclines
toward the universal pounding of blood in veins. The light
which it pours over things is purer and more enigmatic than the
light of our sun; it is the second, spiritual aspect of this light.
Painting, sculpture, verse, music, dreams, are all signs which
spirit gives to spirit, in the enchantment of phenomenal life.
Therefore they have more than one interpretation; their lan-
guage is of a higher order than any human language, and one
word expresses a whole family of relationships. What terrible
and paradisaic places they are created in, accessible only with
difficulty and yet nearer to everyone than the beating of his own
heart! What utterances, impossible to profess other than by the
excited movement of a gesture, a silence between two shouts,
the fieriness of rhythm, the whisper of lights, the madness of a
color, by the divine ambiguity of music! The clouds, flames,
winds, the whole orchestra of nature from which the language
of your fathers was created in ancient times, you allow to speak

11
anew, that things may say for you why you are dying! What
visitations from the higher world before conception! A blessed
childhood lives here, a childhood not growing old through the
ages, among nations, nearer to the mysterious threshold we pass
out of in birth; a childhood which is forever beginning anew
with the naming and the depicting of things, as if they had
never been depicted and named before. For in their mystery
they had not previously been named and depicted. They had
been glimpsed only in fragments, and everything still awaits
and will await the creator’s hands. Thence the eternal injustice
of youth and the sadness of the artist’s autumn, which
reproaches summer that it did not give what it promised. And
yet it is only from the consecrated places of this childhood that
the invisible rivers flow which irrigate everything on earth that
grows for the sake of eternity. A weak, pitiful person, if he
enters this land of roaring springs, acquires an energy at which
he himself shudders. It seems that the order of things has
changed here; gravity has disappeared, every flight appears pos-
sible, the most inaccessible appears reachable, madness appears
as wisdom; here the enslaved heart, which has been forced by
the earth to conceal itself, beats freely; one dares to confess to
the most dizzying hopes, as well as to horrors which have no
name; the cries of the overpowered and the humiliated resound
here into eternity; the obedient rule, princes serve; to rule here
means to give, to see means to have; only one who has already
found, seeks; the worth of a gift is determined by the worth of
the one receiving it, everything is a curative and everything is a

12
poison in accordance with the highest justice. Magnificence
envelops everything greening and blossoming, woman, child,
heroism, justice, and death — the sower of life. Our mysterious
body and springs of thought shine through here in their bril-
liance. As if in the hands of the clairvoyant, every thing dis-
closes its secret past, evokes a vision of distant places and
dramas to which it was a witness. Poisoned mists in places dan-
gerous for the species become a frightening vision. Those who
do harm to one another in the too-difficult dream of their day
would shudder, so close are they to each other when they have
grasped one truth, when they have interpreted one symbol the
same way; waves of admiration throw them into each other’s
embrace, as if they had died; after their rebirth, will they live as
they had lived before? The basic dissonances in the conception
of one work of beauty hurl light as far as the roots of beings;
they reveal their different stage of development in eternity.
Happy are they who can grasp the mystery of the struggle and
whose love does not die at the same time! “Where you are going,
we have also gone, and where we are going, you will also go,” is
written on all the milestones along the path of the spirit.
To project oneself as far as the most hidden, painful mys-
teries of the heart and body, to defend what one has seen, even
at the cost of one’s life, in this is all the striving, the heroic mad-
ness, and the sublime humility of the creator. By what disorder
of the eye could this highest humility be seen as pride? Is pride
even possible, in these places where the earth opens before our
every step, and everything we and our fathers have accumulated

13
may go up in flames at any minute? On the structure we are all
working on in our blood, the most dangerous and highest work
is entrusted to the most obedient. But to reach as far as the last
casting off of the veils which our weakness hastily devises
around us, and to stand in trembling nakedness before the
highest will — does this not exceed life’s powers? Are we not
already in death, here? Will life bear this last rending of decep-
tion? Is this not rending a bandage from a wound which is
bleeding to death? And yet we believe that some of our kind
have come even here, but glory fell on their body like a cloak of
light in unearthly mercy and covered their nakedness by its bril-
liance, too terrible for mortal eyes.
Everything that stands capable of life here, healthy under the
sun, has been preserved for us by the creators’ loving hands, the
enemies of deception, self-tormenting, scourging and curative.
Struck until black by the thunderbolts which pursued from
every cloud, they show us a new earth. They lay themselves
benevolently on our forehead and heal our dreams. For there are
dreams which should no longer be dreamt by man today, and
others which should never have been dreamt at all.

14
 A Reflection in
the Depths

The whole earth, both visible and

invisible, is mysteriously alive in man; the fire of its depths, a
brother to the fire of the sun, the effervescence of the sources,
the music of the rivers, the lordly restiveness of the seas and
winds, the invisible effulgences of light, the mute life of min-
erals, vegetation, animals, and the continual influence of the
astral worlds. How could we understand the language of colors
and the wisdom of forms if our soul had not been mysteriously
present at the creation of this visible world and did not bear
from the ages the memory of a giddy life before birth? But there
are beings in whom one of these memories, at the touch of
things, is capable of flaring up with an intensity incomprehen-
sible to others more forgetful. The passionate and touching dis-
quiet of a child, at the first greetings of this earth, revives in
them again and again. The most reticent places on earth
resound toward them joyously, as at a meeting after a separation
that has lasted for ages, and their days are like the first springs
of life, rich in the events of whole centuries. Where others curl
into themselves, they flutter with love; where others’ eyes have
opened and shut in the glare, they see. Creators of dreams, con-
secrators, master teachers, scientists, affirmers of a spiritual
connection to the earth walk among us, laden with all the hopes

15
of our kind. But in everyone, even in the most humble of all the
brethren, there slumbers a mysterious initiator into the mystery
of nature, and he awaits his awakening. If all mute lips could
open and ponderous hands write, our kind would be richer
than we can imagine. You stand before a work of art, the scent
of gardens, and the laughter of girls breathes on you from a
perfect line of verse, the sources of music flow, and the hidden
artist in you and the reticent poet and musician awaken; this is
the same, hidden creator who designed, among all the sisters of
the earth, the one whom you love, and who gives you to taste
the happiness of an ancient, bygone sun from a glance at a
flower, at the sky in its brilliance, at the sparkling of the waters,
and the coming of night. Love has made your senses open out,
and given your sight that depth of magical clairvoyance in
which all things on earth bloom into their proper essence, that
is, into beauty. Spoken from the depths, a person sees things
and people only when he loves them. It is pointless to claim that
lovers look upon one another in the glare of illusion which
desire casts upon them; only lovers in the purest moments of
their love see each other as they are, that is, beautiful; for they
see each other not only in the visible part of their being, but in
the more powerful, invisible part, unincorporated into the
sphere of our light, which works to become the body in another
time. No one can grasp the beauty of that which he does not
love. Between the subject and the creator there must be a spir-
itual relationship, if a work is to come about which will last; a
spiritual relationship, a radiant force field, in which sparks fly

16
from one heart to another when they have drawn near to each
other. Thus in the works of the great masters, whose love
extended to everything that lives on earth, there is so much
goodness, justice, and in all its tragic lot, so much tenderness.
An attentiveness whipped up by the will cannot replace the kind
clairvoyance of love. Only the eye of love is as patient as the sun,
returns anew a thousand times to the same outline to portray its
life, and nothing on the subject which it loves is negligible to it.
Obsession with the features one loves creates the style of a work
of art. It reveals the hidden characteristics of the creator’s being
to all, since we love only where we are mysteriously reflected.
Love establishes our kind and our place in the hierarchy of
spirits. Even the satirist and caricaturist sees only by his love,
but the too-sharp light of this sun conceals from him the more
mysterious brilliance which flares from beings marked by death;
compassion would open his hand and delicately take from it the
engraver’s stylus.
There is no artistic work into whose whirlpool the waves of
another, invisible world could not be carried along. Every crea-
tive work is a work of mystical obedience. The steps of all
seekers meet each other in the silence of a single mystery. The
music of the worshippers’ hymns has hardened into the marble
of cathedrals; their vaults have expanded over the theater of the
sacred drama which symbolizes the adventure of the spirit on
earth; a myth has arisen from the experience of innumerable
generations, like a Mesozoic mountain mass from a sea pacified
by the ages; a palace has grown up toward the same sun under

17
which the law harnessing nations together in unity matured,
and toward which was lifted the dream of majesty, of pride, of
ascendancy and its cruel happiness. The computation which
ensures the solidity of a bridge’s iron construction turns to the
forces regulating the cosmos as prayer turns to them; the study
of the laws of nature, which gives man power over the elements,
is only another path of mystical meditation. There are heights
where knowledge is saintliness.
Consecration occurs from one spirit to another. At some
degrees it is borne only by the living word, by a thousand-year
oral tradition, which writing always signifies only imperfectly.
The highest and most beautiful that people experience on earth
is covered in silence and mirrored in artistic work, even the
most magnificent, only in weakened form. Though in his intox-
ication by the earth the artist dreamt of a nature higher than
earthly nature, his vision grows poor and feeble if it is not con-
stantly strengthened by the humble and loving observation of
earthly things.
The spoken word of the representational artist often has an
eloquence through which a new and sharp vision is added to
the word; but it is far from being able to approach the myste-
rious land from which the artist returns and gives. If the
painters of light, waters, forests, movement, life, pain, death,
and unearthly vision could put into words what they bestow by
form and color, we would greet new poets and intriguing
thinkers among us; we would be amazed at what man may still
believe, and at what he may discern in nature of both demonic

18
and sacred life, the language of which we have become unused
to. But the word was not given to them; if they speak of that in
nature about which they are most eager, they are obscure. They
themselves would often shudder with horror at how far the
world they have portrayed is from our cities, works, laws, and
truths. Where was their soul as they were considering values of
light and their hand was seeking magical lines of movement? By
what lakes, under what stars, through what events has it grown
strong? What spiritual encounters, what kisses have made to
kindle in them the holy madness of beauty, which has changed
the things before them so they begin to shine as when struck by
invisible rays? Here lies the deep kinship of representational art
with music. The word and the music which accompanies it are
two worlds, and how far they often are from each other in the
eternal development of the worlds! To what refinement is the
rustling of our trees and waters, the singing of birds and the
touch of straws, the turbulence of crowds, the wailing of hearts
conveyed in music! Who would not sense that the hidden his-
tory of our kind is reflected in the history of music, from the
solitary song of grief to the harmonic eddies of many voices and
to the storms of polyphony, where all the elements of the
cosmos acquire a voice, controlled by the omnipotent wind-
storms of the spirit? What new cities, what new humanity, what
higher systems of law, what sweeter and more fateful passions
does music reveal! What superearthly longing for the separation
of dissonances is stilled in it, and lips, cracked open by the heat
of thousands of suns, watered from the sources of justice! The

19
heavens are the condition of the soul and the gates of higher
worlds are not separated from us by the abysses of the ages or of
space; among the innumerable worlds of the internal universe,
our spirit lingers in the one it has reached by its own purity.
The pentecostal days of humanity were arched in their azure
blaze over our teachers and are also arched over us when we are
able to transform ourselves through love. The time in which a
great artist creates has influence only on the morphology of his
language, not on its content. Morphology submits to the
changes which our body brings; the meanings mature and grow
rich through the centuries. Yet the world, as it manifests itself in
some of the great creations of this time, is often closer to the
vision of the past, as far back as times primeval, than to our
current vision, and often anticipates the history of this earth. By
its mystery, however, representational language evades pursuit;
what would have awaited the bold one who, ages ago, expressed
in language comprehensible to all what the artists of the time
had painted and hewn into stone? As from windows set toward
the east, the dawn of the new day shines from their images and
what is invisible is reflected in their magical mirrors. People
who experience the ideas of their time too powerfully stop dis-
trustfully before works of art; beauty, convicting their eyes of
weakness, passes sentence on their lives; they recognize by the
confusion in their ideas that one of their divisions has been
attacked beyond the horizon, but they do not see the enemy . . .
Time is measured differently in art than in our history and
is not subject to our historical calendar. A fleeting instant

20
acquires eternities, and the spirit of a genius on this earth, as on
an adventure ship sailing through the ages, picks up messages
which have been sent across long, mysterious waves from world
to world as from one spiritual station to another in the depths
of the cosmos.
But in all of this, though ages and distances have lain
between individual artistic creations, in the giddy reaches of the
internal universe this is the only planet which is reflected
through symbols in art, and but a single spirit suffers in it and
works for its liberation. In prehistoric memories, in barbaric art
and in all the cultures which preceded our own, there is a shared
characteristic of perfection and weakness which would be
apparent to a higher, non-human intelligence as the imprint of
a pair of spiritual hands: the work of a Man, the only one in the
brotherhood of the millions, the mysterious ransom for the
pain he proliferates where he treads; a single voice of anxiety
and longing and short, divine moments of recognition and hap-
piness, sounding into all the ages.
But who would want to read the dogmata of beauty from
these characteristics common to all art until now? Is not life on
earth the crossroads of a thousand paths? Alongside the forces
which have been speaking for ages, are there not others which
have remained silent until now and are secretly laboring? The
work of revelation has not been completed, man has not been
liberated, the imagination that creates his cities, workshops,
machines, countries, forms of love and dreaming, ferments ever
more intensely in the incessant parching of the sun. The higher

21
possibilities of happiness and power that captivate the millions
are not sensed even from afar. A loving, invisible world awaits,
and the beating of hearts resounds like the echo of blows on the
door in the quiet of the night . . . Even today, the more elevated
people on earth suffer more from the pain of the brethren than
from their own, and martyrs, not for their own salvation, but
for the salvation of the species, are constantly dying alongside
us, in prisons, in exile, and in the most difficult of all exiles, in
the solitudes among the crowds.
As in dreaming, in which image after image flits before the
sleeper, depending on which place of the eternal, timeless
night his spirit is lingering in, artistic revelations, one after
another, are projected into the internal eye of humanity.
The dead speak as the living and encounter each other where
the living have never encountered each other; both every
delight and pain which flies along its fiery paths from the
limbs to the heart, ignites symbolic visions and prophetic
dreams. New continents arise from the seas, unfamiliar cities
rumble among the gardens. The clusters of white and green
flowers have moved to new places on the meadows under a
new spring; the constellations have rearranged themselves in
the depths of the night; the plots ready for sowing have been
rotated. The last wagons of the harvest will travel by different
paths, wreathed in ears of grain, filled with singers. Ever more
numerous rows of fraternal beings descend into the dark
ferment of the crowds, and they glow as if their bodies had
kindled in flames from their hearts. Which of these visions

22
will be strong enough, like a too-vivid dream, to waken us?
One must ascend to the sources of knowledge light as spirit;
thus on the path to them is the vesture of earth put aside, as on
the path to death. The last peal of freedom resounds in silence;
the one who labors, reconciled, asks for nothing other than the
fulfillment of his own mission. The instants of his creative
ecstasy burn into the spiritual night like windows lit up with
light, which mysterious silent ones who lost their voice on earth
and the spirits of millions of brethren who have been suffering
on earth eagerly approach from all sides . . . He should speak,
for all of them, and also for those who have not yet been born;
for all the things of the earth, the grasses, the trees, the ele-
ments, the innumerable silent beings. Only these instants are
worthy to conceive beauty, moments when the creative spirit
calms and stills the confused turbulence of hearts, breathes
through all lips, sows into the flames as if into soil, appoints a
work for thousands of hands and sees into the future for innu-
merable eyes.
As long as the artist has not yet reached the places whence
all paths but his own are invisible to him, he still has far to go
toward his freedom. Yet the spirit of the creator is like a tower
in the fire of battle; there is no hour of calm, there is never
safety; the time has not yet come to put aside the weapons. The
attacks of the visible world are the smallest thing that threatens
his path; even the dead and the invisible can also rise up
against him. In the sphere where the spirit conquers, every-
thing can be dangerous. Doubt is a deadly vertigo, and overly-

23
proud certainty is like closing one’s eyes before a new, still
higher revelation. Every hour wants its victory, as every instant
of ascent in flight demands its thrust of the wings. But whoever
has sent pain instead of joy into his gardens will not give the
brethren the most blushing fruits that ripen high on the sunny
side. Degrees of happiness inform the height of our ascent, as
the falling degrees of the earth’s atmospheric pressure indicate
the height of the ethereal path. But only in the healthiness of
the heart (and what is love other than that?) will the spirit find
the elevated joyousness of creating, for like branches without
sap, those hands which are not watered by the heart, by its spar-
kling, luminous blood driven high, will dry up.

24
 The Meaning of Struggle

New conquerors, unknown to the

masses but advancing in all the works of the earth, have joined
the ranks of the nations, invisible and omnipresent; their ships
meet in all ports and seas; their eyes drop down onto the conti-
nents between the oceans as onto battle plans; they estimate the
future harvest beneath the parching suns of all the earth’s tem-
perate zones; they know the riches of all the coal deposits, iron
mountains, gold-bearing waters, stores of copper and tin; the
gunshot of the ceaseless war, which they sustain like huntsmen
drawing out the hunt, resounds as far as the primeval forests
and the tropical deserts; not knowing of this, all nations are
under their sway; the invisible ones labor in the all-princes’
council; their defeated die inconspicuously, like those branded
by an enigmatic disease which will quietly drink up their life;
but their most exquisite victories are those in which invisible
blows, flying from the light-filled infinitudes of spirit and
thought, cover all distances with corpses. Slaves on both hemi-
spheres of the earth mysteriously accompany every step of their
path and their dream. Creative spirits, inventors, victors over
the elements, and artists are employed on their fields. To the
one who has gained control of the earth, even the sun appears
to serve as a jealous overseer of the work of the skies and the
winds.

25
 But every force, beating like a cry into the depths of life,
revives thousands of slumbering forces. This power, on which
the hands of the dead worked for ages, and the sole tragic
beauty of which is that, in it, man first embraced the whole
globe with the burning net of his will, is challenged by an
equally mysterious, omnipresent enemy. The crowds, the
humble makers of bread and splendor for thousands of years,
have stirred. In the first chill of terror which accompanies
every new truth, we begin to sense that beings we will never
see our whole lives long have the largest share in our joys and
sufferings, and that we are being struck by blows without ever
knowing the hand which inflicts them. The mystery of unity
blazes from the depths of matter; distance ceases to be dis-
tance; the suffering which is becoming ubiquitous on earth is
turning into a natural force working for the transformation of
the whole of life. The spirit, captive in the service of the vic-
tors, moves against them. In the most burning focal point of
economic and social struggle, it is a matter of the spirit, of one
heart’s different relationship to millions of others, of a dif-
ferent perspective on joy and beauty. The new man proclaims
himself on earth. The landowner, surveying his mead from end
to end, sees before him all the continents and mountain
ranges, with all the seas, riches, fraternal nations and cities.
His empire and a different order of things are already prepared
in the depths of spirits; and the sadness and disturbing beauty
of the present era is born of the fact that the inner truth within
millions of people is different from the truth of visible reality.

26
Man trembles before the horizons which open before him at
every step like hallucinations; he is intimidated by the majestic
silence in which the cry of his amazement is lost without reply;
he trembles, unwitting, before windstorms bearing him song
from all the seas, suddenly opened, the clamor of far-off
metropolises, ports, and workshops, and also the scents which
rise from the primeval forests and waft above the equatorial
lakes. As in a sudden gust, his breath lingers in the sweet
blowing of the ether on his face from the movement of the
f lying earth. Bred through the ages for distrust and for
struggle, he trembles before the unexpected touches of mil-
lions of spirits, whose burning presence he begins to feel even
in the depths of his being, where his most secret thought con-
sidered itself to be alone. He closes his eyes, but the sun’s irri-
tating rays penetrate through his closed eyelids against his
will. Where his fathers’ horizon bordered the mountains of the
homeland, he sees the sparkling mirrors of distant rivers and
continents beyond the oceans. Eddies circling round the globe
disperse the sparks of distant, burning cities onto the roof of
his house. The silence of prisons and places of execution pen-
etrates to him from the other side of the earth through the
seething turmoil of its core. The crashes of beams from the
collapsing scaffolding of a mysterious building and the blows
of axes give him no rest. Night has transformed into the
confused cries of those who ask and those who, from a vast
distance, answer. But never was the passion for life so tragi-
cally powerful, seizing the nations in violent waves; never, to

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the disinherited, did the illusion of life appear more dazzling,
the gift of breath and delight more precious, the body richer
and more remarkable, grapes ripening in the sun sweeter and
more desireable. As if all the brilliance of the world beyond
had filled the earth and beat sparks from the waters, trees,
flowers, skies, and eyes. But the nations’ passion for the earth
grows with the same strength as the consciousness that,
without the shared work of the millions, no one will taste the
fruits of its hidden gardens. The highest delight of the earth,
the elation that comes from the victory of fraternal strength,
joy at the brethren’s happiness, remains unknown and inacces-
sible. The body of man was formed through the past; whole
regions in his senses, facing into the night of the cosmos, have
not yet been reached by our light; the sensitivity to higher
forms of love, which would be as aware of the joy of the many
as of its own, has remained undeveloped. With anxiety as if
before beings from another world, the crowds have given way
before the sweet will of the saints, whose hearts, like the fruits
on the sunny side of the garden, have ripened sooner than the
hearts of the remaining multitude. The hopes of the species
turn to the child, woman, and the people. It is necessary to
expand, spiritualize the body in the area of the unconscious, to
make it purer, more resonant, more clairvoyant. And with the
painful instinct expressed by the earth’s mysterious law of rip-
ening, man begins to realize that everything that is directed
toward the transformation of our husbandry of material
things, to the strength, the purity, the refinement and freedom

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of the senses, is a spiritual effort, a struggle for beauty, the last
struggle on earth, pointing into the unfathomable future.
For ages art has taken part in this work to create a new man,
sweetly and self-evidently, like the sun, delight, and death.
What is visible to the creative spirit is visible only in the light
which emanates from the higher life in the cosmos. In the fairy
tales of ancient times, in myths, in clandestine science and also
in dreams so delicate and unbelievable that it was necessary to
create a special language of symbols, music, and forms, that
they might be signified from afar; for thousands of years, this
light has sustained hopes for the mastery of the elements by the
loving power of the spirit. Omnipresent in the deep longing for
magnificence, like an orchard-keeper it has laid out gardens for
lovers beneath all the suns, and on these looms it has woven
both liturgical vestments and the garb of women. It did not
cease even before death, and it longed to guess the answer from
the compression of their reticent lips. It was the omnipresent
engineer of festivals, the architect of the illusion of life, the
master of silence, deep in which the murmur of the stars can be
heard, the creator of higher afflictions and the bitter judge of
the earth.
But the creation of beauty is not limited to works preserved
in books, paintings, sculptures, and buildings. It lies in the
whole plan of life; it is an omnipresent sensitivity to the mag-
netic poles of the spiritual world, and the creation of a language
is just as much an artistic work as the founding of an empire. In
every person, the hidden artist is unceasingly active; in instan-

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taneous flashes, as under the sparks of creation’s chisel, he is at
work on the unity of the personality. The life of a hero and
saint, like every artistic work, grows from the inspiration which
stems from a decision in the higher sphere of life, where death
is no longer taken into consideration, and from the hard path
of the will, the hypnotized blazing of the goal. The dream of the
lover, the prisoner, the sailor, the northerner, and the believer is
a poem and does not cease to be one for having been sung in
silence. The uninterrupted spring of love changes the movement
of girls’ bodies into music, and the innumerable nameless actors
and creators of new gestures discover, without knowing it, new,
vivid symbols for the cosmic language of the will. Unknown
musicians transform language, and women inclined over the
bed of a child search for ever more perfect kisses in the creative
dissatisfaction of their love. Every strong feeling is always and
everywhere artistically creative and gives us an inkling of
regions of magnificence inside us thus far unattained.
But nothing is irrelevant for the creative spirit; both things
and beings, by their invisible radiation, penetrate into the
hidden places where our work germinates. Our ideas are tinged
by the grace of white clouds, by all the flowers of the meadows,
by the blood of the roses, and the sun sifts them through the
shining sieve of its rays like grain. The sweet intensity of spring-
time, the trembling purity of the heavenly canopy, the secret
language of colors, the glory of the waters, the mountains, of
infinity, are working continually in our subconscious and
nourish superhuman longings within us. The most precious,

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ethereal part of our every intake of breath refreshes the roots of
the heart, weary from the too-heavy sap of the earth. Every
word which has fallen into the living depths of our interior (and
this fall often lasts for years), necessarily, by a law as ancient as
the conception of the worlds, struggles to become flesh. But the
path from a new dream to its transformation into movement
and a sacrificing of life is difficult and painful, since it is neces-
sary to deflect it far from its hundred-year-old paths; and last
year’s sun slumbers in the bread by which we live. But even a
trembling, weak, and uncertain dream becomes a force strong
as a hurricane if it flashes in millions of hearts at once. The
crowd has not only moments when it appears to be flying head-
long backwards through thousands of years, but also anxious
emanations and a warning instinct of danger beyond the
horizon, when it becomes more clairvoyant than prophets, and
when it can decide in favor of a justice as frightening and
incomprehensible as nature.
Where the life of a people ceases to be creative in the sphere
of beauty, it is a sign that the people is suffering beyond its
ability to endure. A slavery which has rendered labor joyless and
sends its captives into their lairs exhausted, with eyes ex-
tinguished, which lays waste the beauty of women, has made
motherhood fearsome and transformed the morning, drawing
near in the sunrise, into an enemy and an arsonist for millions
of people, and works for the ruin of the species. For beauty in
all spheres is conceived from the kisses and richness of a free
embrace; the slave who has lost faith in his emancipation no

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longer has the strength to see and create beauty. Beauty is a
flower from a surfeit of swelling life, the denial of death; it is
the path to the mysterious south, an ever more ardent sun, more
passionate foliation, a more spiritual sky of blue, deeper nights,
more intense stars, a lighter tread, hardly touching the earth,
but by all laws its dominant achievement, the highest quantity
of energy with the least wastage; it is a quiet, unbelievable cer-
tainty, the only certainty on earth, vibrating through all the
suns, an unbroken smile which, seen from the earth, always has
in its sweet glare a certain melancholy, but even in this, there is
an inkling of the boundless calm of a kind of inexpressible,
prepared magnificence . . .

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