Victory over the millennium

The 20th century is a time of continuous apocalypse, endless anticipation of the end of civilization. The wonderful era of enlightenment and positivism ended with a complete rethinking of its basic values; It turned out that rebuilding the world through reasonable efforts is impossible. The search for a truly effective means of re-equipping the universe has brought to life many different kinds of demons - small and large. The millennium has taken place, but whether the century has ended - not in the chronological, but in the spiritual sense - is unclear. Judging by the literature, it is in full swing. The flow of books in which various models of the transformation of the universe are described with all their might is not going to dry up at all.

One of the most global projects to gut European culture was, as we know, Nazism. Having bizarrely reworked the charlatan visionary work of Blavatsky and Gurdjieff (by the way, or inopportunely speaking, a classmate of Stalin), chopping the Nibelungs and Nietzsche into the resulting salad, Rosenberg and Hitler built a deranged costume opera, spreading their terrible version of Bayreuth throughout Europe. Deciding to destroy Judeo-Christian values, the SS mystics tried to excavate the birthplace of the spirit somewhere in the Himalayas. It is these investigations that are discussed in the novel “Travels to Agartha” by Abel Posse, a modern Argentine classic, just published by Ultra.Culture.

Posse's most famous book is “Dogs of Paradise,” a false biography of Columbus, where America is discovered during a mystical search for an earthly paradise. This time the metaphysical pilgrimage is made by the canonical SS man, the exemplary blond beast Walter Werner. It's 1943. The Third Reich has just been defeated at Stalingrad, its last hope is the Ahnenerbe, the repository of the secret knowledge of Nazism: here they study the Mahabharata, the I Ching and the same Gurdjieff, hoping to reach the secret Tibetan bodhisattvas and convince them to open their own, esoteric second front . Werner was appointed ambassador to the bodhisattvas; pretending to be an Englishman, he makes his way through India to Tibet, makes a painful journey on yaks through the Himalayas, travels through Inner Mongolia, all this time looking in vain through Zeiss binoculars at Agartha - the Buddhist Kitezh, the abode of the ancient sages. It is they who must help Hitler destroy the dilapidated European culture, subject civilization to a radical fiery alteration, and create a new tribe, of which Werner feels himself one of the first representatives. However, Agartha constantly escapes; Moreover, as he approaches it, Werner moves further and further away from Europe - with all its wars, which in the Mongolian sands, where time slips through one’s fingers, look like some kind of conventional absurdity. The hidden sages are not Roosevelt; they have nothing to do with the second front. However, Werner never manages to understand this; in a dying faint, on the very threshold of the gates of Agartha (either real or illusory), awaiting the envoy of the Great Khutukta, the king of secret forces, the King of the World, he makes the last entry in his diary - about the now inevitable triumph of the Fuhrer. The date under this entry is April 30, 1945.

In other words, it is impossible to retool a culture while being inside it; falling into metaphysical reality, the hero Posse still tries to think in the rational categories familiar to him - which is why his mystical journey is deprived of all meaning. The modern prophets of the recent millennium have heeded the lessons of the age; They seem ready to plunge headlong into the apocalyptic chaos they expect, and with great joy. An example of this is the collection “Disco 2000” published by AST publishing house. Its compiler, the English cultural activist Sarah Champion, in 1997 asked various fashion writers to compose a story in which the action would take place on December 31, 2000. We had similar projects under Soviet rule - twice, in the 30s and 60s, thick volumes called “Peace Day” were published, in which the life of the planet on a specific day was carefully reproduced; in this case, the emphasis, of course, was on depicting the steady germination of the communist future. The English project also turned out to be quite ideological: almost all the participants in the collection, as if by agreement, depicted the same picture.

The world is completely immersed in narcotic, senseless and scary chaos, turning either into one global rave party, or coinciding with an equally global TV show. Crazy - or especially insightful - harbingers of the future periodically separate from the crowd: a guy in Jerusalem climbs into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where the holy spirit is supposed to descend into his old record player (Nicholas Blincoe, “The English Astronaut”); two DJs intend to bring light to people with a rave party (Charlie Hall, “Millennium Loop”); a servant of the new cult of Isis, also a DJ, intends to transform herself into some kind of cosmic energy right on the dance floor (Steve Beard, “Retoxity”). Thoroughly saturated with chemistry and virtuality, humanity walks with might and main, frantically rejoicing at the end of an era - consisting of ephemeral, artificial entities. While people are having fun, they are consumed - literally - by television cameras (Pat Cadigan, “Watching the Millennium”), a genetic mutant - a conglomerate of the DNA of all humanity - realizes its power over reality and extinguishes the stars (Jonathan Brooke, “Identity”), are aliens and dump the sins of humanity on the world - millions of corpses of innocent people killed (Steve Aylett, “This is just the beginning”). Hysterical fiction, initially not very healthy, and now completely crazy cyberpunk is the main content of the collection. The most sane - and best - story here comes, not surprisingly, from Douglas Copeland. Fortunately, his “Fire at the Ativan Factory” contains no fiction. The main character, the creator of alien dolls for second-rate film production, is exhausted by a stupid job, fruitless attempts to have children, and drug addiction to antidepressants. On New Year's Eve, he handcuffs himself to the balcony and throws away the key. The point is to enter the new millennium in a purified form, to throw out the outgoing 20th century, to make sure that the change of eras is not limited to changing the page of the calendar.

The internal apocalypse, the cleansing from the hateful routine into which the current civilization has plunged, is also discussed in the story “Heartbeat” by the Japanese Kenji Maruyama, published by “Foreign Woman”, under the same cover as short stories by the same author. The main character, who threw himself out of society, quit a prestigious position, lost his wife and children, finds a new, strange job, the meaning of which he tries to get to the bottom of throughout the entire story. It gradually becomes clear that he most likely ended up in an organization of some political terrorists - and is now helping to organize a terrorist attack. From surprise, bewilderment and shock, the hero gradually moves to complete delight - it seems to him that now he is finally given the opportunity to commit a real Act, not to blindly obey reality, but to transform it. What goals his new fellow bosses pursue is not important; the main thing is to find a true personality, true emotions, a true meaning of existence.

The matter ends in complete failure. The hero - never named by the author - is left alone with his new, independent, accidentally acquired personality. Vaguely realizing that the terrorist attack was perhaps nothing more than his own hyperinterpretation of far from radical events. The spiritual transformation took place without external reasons. For a small, private apocalypse, it is not necessary to penetrate a secret Tibetan city or celebrate the advent of the new millennium at a universal rave party; but it turns out to be much more productive than attempts to reorganize the entire universe at once.

Books provided by the store "PiROGI on Nikolskaya" (Nikolskaya St., 19/21).