“..the stags, racing ahead of the packs, terrified by the thrashing staves of the villeins, reminded Pietro of something…. The boars and stags and hares and netted birds hadn’t a chance. There was no skill to their taking – only overpowering force. He had that feeling again that he had had before: that life was neither good nor pleasant nor worth the living. You started out in blood and stench with the echoes of your mother’s dying screams inside of you somewhere so that unrecognized, unremembered, they were there a part of you; then afterwards you were the hunted, always the hunted, running with that tiredness inside of you that was part of death itself, the knowing always in the end that the running was no good because you’d be pulled down – by the big ones, the strong ones, the ones whose world would crash about their heads if they permitted you, the small the wily, the different, to go on living. Or they worried you to death in small and ugly ways: by telling you what seat you might take at a table, by the epithets with which they addressed you, by forbidding you to wear fur or bear a sword or take to wife a girl of different station. Small ways and ugly, but they killed something inside of you – your pride of manhood perhaps your belief in yourself until you became the beast-thing that they were and lit candles and rang bells and ran weeping and howling to prosterate yourself before the unknown and unknowable because you had to have something to cling to against the onrushing dark..
..Somebody had to turn on the pack. Somebody had finally to do it right and skillfully, until this world where everybody alive was somebody else’s man was replaced by one where a man could be his own man – unless he chose to be God’s…”
Frank Yerby, The Saracen Blade, Dial Press: New York, 1952
I have this book on my To Be Read pile bought on your recommendation of Mr. Yerby made so long ago, waiting to be given attention.
Somebody had to turn on the pack. Somebody had finally to do it right and skillfully, until this world where everybody alive was somebody else’s man was replaced by one where a man could be his own man – unless he chose to be God’s
It really is a quote that reverberates.
Who do you see doing it, turning on the pack?
Roissy seems to be doing it to me.
*To me, roissy seems to be doing it.
I liked his “Odor of Sanctity” better. I recommend reading it first. It is a longer novel, but it has so many twists and near escapes that it may keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time.
Saracen’s blade is a nice desert to it.
Both novels walk a line between Christendom and Islamdom, and show a sensitive outsider who finds love, often, but never quite real happiness.
Basically the heroes of both novels are sensitive men who society sees as beta males, but who actually have real courage inside of them, are a bit ahead of their time, in a sense, and are actually in many ways more manly than those who condemn them. The hero in Odor of sanctity is a Christian Gothic noble who finds a greater nobility than his birthright, the hero of Saracen’s blade is a baseborn blacksmith’s son who inwardly is a young man of greater nobility than the nobles he ends up serving. And both are men who suffer for love, and yet bear their scars manfully.
Yearby on occasion throws out a pithy quote or two.
I believe it consumes him in a most unseeming manner. When I was a bit younger, I could have easily become a Roissy, except for a couple of things.
1. I am no nihilist, though I do not quite believe.. rather I know.
And with increasingly greater degrees.
There is a vast ocean between the Arabic word Iman and the English word Belief. My virtue sadly is not commensurate with my iman and ilm, or rather my iman and ilm are stronger than my amal, if that makes any sense. But what I know prevents nihilism. For I’ve seen an abyss, but also what lies on the other side, and I know the abyss is to be crossed, not plunged into.
Once you know a truth it changes you, from the inside, making other than it seem hollow and frail. If you deny what you know then it rots your soul.
To me Nihilism is a useful tool, a blade with which you cut things smothering you aside in order to breathe freely. But there is a time to put aside the blade and to survey the new lay of the land, having cut aside the weeds…
And a time to learn the difference between useless and harmful weeds, and helpful herbage.
What I know causes me to realize that what some mistake for women’s faults are in themselves necessary in the grand order of things, and since I realize men’s faults I cannot begrudge women theirs.. even if I poke at them now and then with a slight smirk..
2. I truly love women, inwardly. Which prevents me from becoming a misogynist, even when I am tried. A love including, not in spite of, both their weaknesses and strengths. Because I see the weaknesses of you ladies as simple inversions of your strengths.
Men too have our weaknesses and strengths, in abundance. And just as with women our weaknesses are also inversions of our strengths.
In the same way I see both my race, and my Ummah – virtues many, and faults vast and ugly. But how can a man not love his family, spiritual or fleshy?
Both have evil enough as well as virtue. If I wish to be loved for who I truly am, I must love women as they truly are, but with clear and open eyes.
Roissy’s a clever one, as are a few of his commentators (I have my favorites, who are more clever than most commentators on HBD blogs…) .. Roissy knows far more than what he says. Which is why he often has a last laugh. Where I find myself disgusted with his writing, I note underneath it a keenness of vision that penetrates deeply, and keenly. He withholds some things..
But he is not quite the savant some of his fans make him out to be.
His perceives real injustices that causes him to turn on the pack…
And someone has to do it.
But that which causes men to replace one tyranny with another, I want no part of. And what he suggests simply replaces one tyranny with another.
At the end of the day I believe he has a wound similar to that which healed in my heart some time ago.
An existential wound that lay in discovering that the true nature of sexuality, women, and men’s desires alike, are quite different than the politically correct myths we have been fed while young. A wound made deeper by early rejection, and kept open by later success, ironically.
Such wounds are emotional, not rational, and can only heal if one is willing to heal. And sometimes smarting from an open wound is a delicious type of pain, that can hold us back from greater things.
And every revolution eats its young.
The Industrial musician, and social Darwinist, Boyd Rice once quipped
“The Strong eat the Weak, and the Clever Eat the Strong.”
My friend, Abu Abdullah Maghribi, has a slightly different take on this.
“The weak end up outdone by Strong brutes, the Strong outdone by the Clever, and the clever eventually end up outdone by women…
who usually end up outdone by dumb strong brutes..”
A subtle twist on the “chicks dig assholes” theme. And it illustrates a game I’d rather evade, in order to do more productive things with my life.
3. I have an intuition that this is the 11th hour, Those windmills Roissy tilts at are rigged to eventually knock him off his horse.
Nihilist Hedonism has an unpleasant way of forcing the clock’s hands to move quicker than I am comfortable with. Pleasures I could take with an outstretched hand, would corrupt me to a degree that would make my life’s real work difficult to accomplish.
It is fun knowing that you could easily pluck a ripe fruit, if you chose to, and yet refrain from it. When I was younger I knew not how to reach fruit on the tree. As I grew older I learned that some lie low, but are usually not satisfying. For good low lying ones are plucked quickly. Then I learned to reach higher fruit. But once can get indigestion, and realizing sometimes that just knowing you could gorge yourself if you so chose is a type of joy. One realizes that sometimes good fruit has a knack of falling into your hand, from the strangest places, the effort of climbing is better spent elsewhere.
And most of the fruit trees in this land bear tragically spoiled fruit. Good trees are rare.
And there are far more important things in life, for it is far later than we think.
Someone has to turn on the pack, and such a one may eventually be ripped to shreds in doing so, or may end up replacing some of the dogs in the pack.
Others may choose to lie in wait, and simply take the affair while the pack is occupied elsewhere. So some of the clever eat the strong, but others still may simply take the house unoccupied while others are occupied with gorging. And being leaner still, dispatch their rivals.
Hedonism is a trap that dulls a sharp sword.
Roissy has a thing going for him that puts him ahead of most of the diverse crowd floating around in HBD, conservative, racialist, or game circles. He’s smarter than a good deal of them, has sharper vision, and is more honest.
I contend that the lot of them do not see certain things. What they do not see shall be their undoing, just as what their liberal egalitarian opponents do not see shall undo them. Both see half of the puzzle. Both mistake their half for the whole. The entire game is rigged, on both sides, left and right.
I suspect Roissy is intelligent enough to realize some of this, but too much of a hedonist to care. The temptation to turn on the pack, Roissy style, is strong. And if I did not know what I do know I would probably fall, delightfully, to that temptation.