Old texts on traditional marriage ; vampirism and gayety.

Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian bigwig, a century or so ago. He had a lengthy, scary beard, just like me. Also just like me, he was an insanely prolificⁱ universalistⁱⁱ with very strong conservative biases that the banal derps of his day mostly tried to avoid, for the same reasons they carefuly avoid me : the plain, deeply felt knowledge that should they try to field instead of avoiding, they'll end up like that guy in that gif. In any case, he was the ideal father figure to the rather psychologically dissolved kid that was attempting to put forth the pretense of having made and leading a local national-socialism just as good as the original,ⁱⁱⁱ which is how he got murdered.^iv

Panait Istrati was a tramp, essentially, but otherwise a longshoreman in the port of Braila^v who got picked up by the nascent monkey chorus^vi as some sort of promising "new" writing voice.^vii He was muchly celebrated, except by Nicolae Iorga, who said of him this much :

Opera lui Panait Istrati ne arată elocvent că avem de-a face cu un hamal din portul Brăilei. D-nul Panait Istrati mi-a trimis Kyra Kyralina cu dedicație. Am încercat să o citesc, dar am fost nevoit să arunc cartea imediat; asemenea lucruri nu se pot citi. Eu nu-i găsesc absolut nici o calitate.

which comes to

The work of Panait Istrati eloquently shows we're dealing with a longshoreman from the port of Braila. He sent me Kyra Kyralina^viii with a dedication. I tried to read it, unfortunately I had to drop it immediately, such things can not be read. I find absolutely no value to it.

Obviously, Kyra Kyralina was part of the mandatory reading list back when I was in highschool. Bearing in mind that I had no idea about all this foregoing matter at the time^ix, I nevertheless did not read it.^x It failed to interest me, perhaps through the influence of Iorga's words filtered through my environment, perhaps for other reasons.

I've picked it up yesterday, however, and it's quite the read. Iorga is generally correct, it has no actual literary or artistic merit, it roughly reads as the careful noted simplicity of a mentally challenged individual.^xi I do find some merit to the work, however, the same way I find merit in all sorts of crap : the unintentional historically and anthropologically relevant content. If you will, it's one thing to discuss the aesthetic merits of the hairdo of a woman depicted on a coin, it's quite another to point out that this coin is a valuable inkling into how women did their hair at that time. Obviously Iorga, being a contemporary, wouldn't think anything of this. I, however do. By the time we're done (because all this was mere introduction), so will you.

I. Marriage's a bitch.

D-ta nu știi, poate, Mihail, de ce e vorba. Nu știi că la noi, în noaptea nunții, femeile din familie și chiar femei străine, năvălesc în camera de culcare a tinerilor soți, câteva ore după ce s-au culcat, gonindu-i în altă odaie și răscolind patul pentru a găsi mărturia netăgăduită a fecioriei miresei, pe care o duc câteodată în triumf pentru a o arăta musafirilor, care petrec în odaia de alături. Mi s-a întâmplat să văd și mai mult decât asta: am văzut acest steag dus în vârful unei prăjini pe șoseaua de la Petroiu la Cazasu, înconjurat de o ceată de femei turbate, care hăuiau în jurul dezgustătorului trofeu. Întovărășite de un țigan care scârțâia din diblă, ele mergeau, în zorii zilei de luni, ducând “rachiu roșu” fericitei mame și nefericitei mirese.

The narrator is gay. He perceives this as it was perceived at the time : a disease, like persay syphillis. Something to be cured of, perhaps by a better clime.^xii As part of his self-curing efforts, he meets a girl. Unrelated to those efforts, but quite on the thing's own merits, he falls in love with her. He actually expresses the belief that his affairs could have normalised, if given a chance.^xiii But they do not. Do you know why not ?

Because traditional marriage, bitches! To wit :

You might not know, Mihail, what I speak of. You might not know that here the custom is that come the night of the wedding, the women of the family and even women foreign to the family overrun the bedroom of the young couple, a few hours after their retirement, chasing them into another room and taking the matrimonial bed apart, to find the undisputable proof of the virginity of the bride, which at times they take as a triumphal procession to be shown to the wedding guests, partying next door. I have personally seen more than this : I have seen this flag hoisted upon a pole and paraded down the main road, surrounded by a posse of rabid women, howling around the disgusting trophy. Followed by a gypsy torturing his violin, they'd go, in the early morning, taking "red ichor" for the happy mother of the unhappy bride.

The grammatical coherence of the original is a little questionable, but anyway, there you have it. Traditional marriage, bitch. It's this thing where the bride's underwear does not to belong to the bride, or to her groom, but to the tribe. That's what it is. What now ?

I have raised this question before,

To which some really retarded people masquerading as “conservatives” thought proper to raise the objection that marriage is “traditional” and penis-in-asshole is “not traditional”. I’m not even going to bother with the obvious “in what parallel universe ?” line of inquiry, seeing how marriage is certainly ulterior in this dispute. All I want to know is… what exactly is “traditional” supposed to mean ? Are these people owners of their wives and thus adhering to a traditional view of marriage ?

No, they’re not. They’re just idiots who happened to be born in 1950, have no idea that a world existed for quite a few years before the 1950s, and have no representation of the simple fact that what they hold as “values” and possibly “sacred” are little bits of reused chewing-gum that have been chewed by so many sets of teeth and dentures, have been glued to so many underchairs and pavements, have been re-used, re-drawn and re-defined so many times it simply makes no sense to go “O, I am against gay marriage because I want to protect the pseudo-traditional marriage which includes women that talk back and own property jure uxoris from adulteration”.

Puh-leaze.

Consider the point properly. What traditional ? Which tradition ? Why that one ?

Let me tell you a little of "traditional marriage". The traditional marriage of the Greek^xiv works like so : the married woman, and her children, keep house in the castle. The married man, with his apprentices, keeps a workshop somewhere in the workshop quarters, outside the walls. He has an older woman there who cooks, because the apprentices are entitled to be fed by the master. The man visits the woman occasionally, to beat her, to fuck her, to talk to her. Depending on how close they are, and marriages go through phases anyway. Some husbands may sleep with the woman, some may sleep at the workshop, some may alternate. And marriages go through phases anyway. The woman may not visit her husband. The kids do not generally get to, except boys of sufficient age, if the father even likes them at all. Which isn't that much of a given. Girls in no case do.

There, that's it, now you have it : traditional marriage. Does it come closer to the 1950s insanity born out of the "let's house these men come back from Yurp" or does it come closer to the 2000s arrangement of separated parents ? You think you "working to support the wife" while she "fucks all comers" is some sort of novel hell imposed upon you by your government ? Maybe read some books for chrissakes! You know, the sorts of books your government never bothers to translate for your benefit, perhaps in part because it doesn't particularly mind your delusional notions that it is powerful, and important. After all, it doesn't care so much if you love or hate it just as long as you think it's the only penis in town, so to speak. Na mean ?^xv

And since we're here with the cock out already so to speak, let's go on a tangent and fuck some ass, too. So, do you know what the original vampire did ? You don't, I bet. The original vampire stole the manna, which is to say the "life vigour" out of cattle and grain. It made them unable to reproduce, see ? No more calves, no more wheat seeds, not as big, strong, powerful, life-like, life-giving.

Do you know then what particular sexual group does this fittingly describe ? Yeah, that's right, "the love that doth not speak its name", was it ? Now riddle me this : how come vampirism became a huge pop-interest just about the time homosexuality became pop-fashionable, to the drowning out and desperation of all the actual homosexuals ?

That's interesting suddenly, isn't it. So how do a bunch of ruminants, too blessfully clueless and generally ignorant to even spell their own name, manage to figure out that hey, since we're doing one type of faggotry now, why not also revive the other ? They don't even fucking know, nor could they conceivably know, of the link between the two, that has well endured throughout centuries of mutually masturbatory history. So then ? How is this possible ?

While pondering that, perhaps also ponder how rape marketing works. Not like "the people" are actually quite predictable or anything. It's just seduction, right, people make choices, right ? It just comes to them, they get inspired. Right ?

Right ?

1. To the tune of roughly ten meters' worth of published shelving, which is almost as much as the billion words on Trilema. [↩]
2. Historian, politician, literary critic, poet, playwright, you name it, he wrote it. Then he rolled it up and smoked it. [↩]
3. This was quite fashionable in the 30s - lots of loser kids all over Europe loved to pretend that they're core devs of nazi alt-chains. Because powerful ideas attract idiotic immitators and vanity is a more powerful motivator than ability, which is how the world works now and also how the world has ever worked. Not likely to change, either.

   And before your stupid mental codes take over : the proof that nazism was in fact a very powerful idea is to be found in the pudding. Every single state reorganised itself as a nazi state after the 50s. Why would they have, if it weren't a very powerful idea? But in fact it is, both very powerful and the natural extension of the idiotic nonsense of "let's make it cheap, which means let's make it out of idiots" French revolutionary crap, a necessary step on the way towards Stalin's international socialism and FDR's rebranding thereof into "democracy". Because that's how the progre world works, you rub together some boogers with a coupla petrified turds a certain patented way, name the result "coral" and presto, that's what coral is now!

   (And if the "let's make it cheap" reference isn't directly obvious to you : after the middle ages, a quality-oriented paradigm had emerged all over Europe, which is a large topic all of its own. The French then came up with a very effectual attack on it : they basically DDoS'd the whole rest of the world. This works like so :

   1. Prussia spends a lot on its own recruits, as per Mit Pomade bezahlt die Franzosen ihr König; Wir kriegen's alle Wochen bei Heller und Pfennig. France fills the ramparts with peasants fresh off the fields.
   2. Prussia makes the mistake of trying to match the headcount (which it did).
   3. Prussia makes the forced mistake of taking its payment obligations seriously, which France does not even seriously consider, not even for a moment. This is a forced mistake for reasons we won't get into here.
   4. No matter how badly the French socialists mismanage the finances of France, Prussia also defaults. Except for Prussia this actually means something.

   This, incidentally, is the ever-repeating, self-replicating blueprint of socialism : "we don't aim to do anything, just as long as we can make everyone else suck worse". This is the unmistakable essence of current US politics, but for that matter it's gone so far it's even directly visible in schooling there. Kids aren't particularly concerned with learning anything, and they definitely aren't going to beat themselves over having failed to learn. They are however quite concerned with "nobody throwing the curve", and they just might beat the azn kid that didn't quite get the socialist memo. Because "he doesn't understand how the world works", of course. Bomb the fucker!) [↩]

4. Excellent incentive to not suffer idiots : once they figure out they're not actually like you, they'll prolly try to kill you out of wounded egotism. [↩]
5. At the time, Romania was a major economic power, mostly because of the important position it occupied in the grain trade. As much as a quarter of all grain shipments went through the Romanian ports on the Danube and the Black Sea, which resulted in the grain price actually being fixed on Romanian soil back then. [↩]
6. You know what the star system is ? Well, do you understand how it not merely dovetails perfectly into the socialist mindset, but it is in fact the only mode that the socialist mindset allows ? [↩]
7. Really, they were trying to create a local Celine, because "Little Paris" hysterics ; and so they made one, like children make "horses" out of sticks or whatever else's available. [↩]
8. Spelling was meanwhile altered, because "reforms", but in fact because the government just didn't like to think of citizens as actual people. So... what do you mean they're ethnically Greek ? And what do you mean they spell according to how they spell, rather than to how "things are spelled" ? Burn it!!1 [↩]
9. Nor did I in fact realise just how similar Iorga and I actually are, until I sat down to make the introduction for this article. Because that's how it goes, the obvious only becomes obvious once the matter is at all considered. Which is why it's so important to think your thoughts rather than just have them, like street whores have bastard children. [↩]
10. This ran the significant risk that one might fail their Bacalaureat, and not be allowed to go to college. I didn't particularly care, and I actually stated on my exam paper for RomLit that I did not read the thing nor can I be bothered discussing it. It was a different "must read" thing, I do not recall exactly which. I ended up with a 70% grade, which was the most one could get that didn't satisfy one of the three subjects.

    Luxury (as the true mark of freedom) was being discussed in channel as "the ability to sleep ad libitum". This may be so for adults. For children however, the ability to do whatever one pleases and not do whatever one does not please, for this reason, is the one true luxury. Or in the immortal words of Cartman, "I skip school and I kill people. Whatever, I do what I want!"

    In any event - I get to go through life as that kid that never read a line he didn't feel like reading. So do lots and lots of other kids, these days. I am nonplussed by this inflation. You however are ruined by it - if you beat your children more, and force them to read as by God you should, it wouldn't be the case that they're accidentally indistinguishable from their masters. which would mean they actually have a chance to live.

    Just in case you're not convinced it's a matter of life and death (for them, and for you), suppose there's an inhabited island somewhere, sporting the troglodytes you'd expect. Suppose a powerful lord off the mainland comes visiting once, say accidentally. He throws a party, fucks some local girls, and leaves. Suppose now the troglodytes spend all their time making crude immitations of the guy's headgear, out of leaves and twigs. They're powerful lords too, right ? Just like that guy, right ? Then a few months later the end comes. Had they instead toiled under the whip, as the troglodytes that they were, to build themselves the actual thing, or as close as it could be had, they might have stood a chance. Do you take my meaning now, or is the short term inconvenience of the whip enough to blind you to the long term silence of the grave ? [↩]

11. An uncharitable soul could observe that this is roughly the way Hemingway reads too, but I'm not that uncharitable. [↩]
12. An illustrative quote :

    A, câtă nedreptate e în viață! Unui om schilod de un picior sau de o mână, nimeni nu-i aruncă disprețul lui, toată lumea îl privește cu milă; dar fiecare se dă înapoi, nimeni nu simte milă înaintea unui schilod al sufletului! Și totuși, acestuia îi lipsește însuși pivotul vieții. El îmi lipsea mie. Întorcându-mă în România, veneam să cer acest sprijin celor care nu erau niște nenorociți ca mine, ci oameni, cu viață sexuală firească. Ei mi l-au dat, dar pentru un moment; și mi l-au retras îndată, rușinos, pentru a mă azvârli din nou în viciu.

    which is to say,

    A, the unfairness of life. If one is maimed in the leg or arm, he is not despised by anyone, but pitied by all. Yet everyone withdraws, nobody pities he with a maimed soul. And yet, he misses the very axis of life. It's what I was missing myself. Returning to Romania, I was coming to seek the support of those who were not unfortunate wretches like myself, but people with a healthy sexual life. They extended it for a moment, but withdrew it instantly, shamefully, to throw me back into vice

    Quick notes :

    • the word firesc, which I've translated as "normal" actually comes off the root that names nature, firea, that-which-is. So it's not normal in the sense of normative, it's normal in the sense of ontology. "The way things actually are".
    • the word schilod is the superlative form of injury in Romanian, which is why maimed ended up in there.

    [↩]

13. Relevant quote :

    Închiși amândoi, ne petreceam zilele în convorbiri tainice, interminabile, și de o dragoste fără seamăn. Îi ceream iertare... Ea îmi spunea că nu mă vede întru nimic vinovat. Oh, cum aș putea să uit singura ființă care m-a înțeles și a avut milă de mine? Și cine ar putea pretinde că, fără ura care ne otrăvea, n-aș fi devenit soțul și omul normal spre care năzuisem din toate forțele mele.

    Nu mai eram atât de timid ca la început, nu mi-era frică de nevastă-mea, dispăruse groaza care-mi îngheța sângele la apropierea ei. Aveam chiar momente când dorinți vagi, slabe deșteptări, mici impulsuri senzuale îmi furnicau trupul și mă făceau să roșesc când ea mă strângea în brațe, mă mângâia, mă asigura de dragostea ei.

    which is to say,

    Locked in a room together, we spent our days in secret ,endless conversation made of an incomparable love. I'd ask her forgiveness. She'd tell me she sees me in no way guilty. Oh, how could I ever forget the only being that understood and took pity on me ? And who could claim that, but for the poisonous hatred surrounding us, I'd have become the husband and normal fellow that I aimed to be with all my might ?

    I was not as timit as at the beginning, I no longer feared my woman, the horror that froze my blood in my veins at her approach was gone. I even had moments when vague desire, weak awakenings, tiny sensual impulses coursed my body and made me blush when she hugged me, caressed me, assured me of her love.

    Quick notes :

    • "Obviously", he does not tell her he's gay. He tells her he's... cursed. Seriously.
    • Apparently, pity wasn't always nor everywhere the despised human emotion that the US puritans have made it out to be. Who knew.
    • I am well convinced she never sucked him off. Because yes, idiots.

    [↩]

14. If you'll bother to read the linked text, you'll gain the benefit of an actually very informative alternate model of reality. Which is exactly why people read in the first place.

    And please don't tell me your tradition somehow trumps a coupla milennia worth of life, from Thracia to Macedonia all the way to Anatolia and perhaps Bactria. [↩]

15. No, perhaps you do not. One of the ever-rotating bylines of this blog is,

    Mentula cum doleat imperio, tibi, lector, culus. Non sum diuinus, sed scio quid facias.

    Let's leave that as homework, and move on to link to the logs. [↩]