By the beginning of the twentieth century, thinkers were tired of culture. The most sincere of them saw that the human, which had become a common denominator of any orientation, is synonymous with spiritual death. Culture had come to be a graveyard for all gauntlets ever thrown down. Among the latest ones buried there was the tragic Nietzschean riot, which declared the need to overcome the human.
Art had become the most violent theatre of war against everything too human. There is a titanic impetus within an artist\’s nervous system which is a will to overcome form and that is highly misleadingly perceived as a will to overcome matter.
An artist is a stepchild of Chaos, and the human as the form of forms arises as an arch-enemy for him. However ill-fatedly, the battle for the New Chaos, a new Titanic order, takes place in a pre-organized environment, finding itself as part of the whole. Titanism has long become an object imprisoned into culture, the ambiance of which is viscous and homogeneous. It is irradiated with sourceless and even light, like in otherworldly fantasies.
It is horrific that this ambiance is screamingly of this world. Culture is the apotheosis of the Eternal Here, where “loving thy neighbour” shares the same shelf with “loving an outsider”. Gospels, de Sade, Nietzsche are trapped into panhuman amber, open from every side to comparative cultural studies.
Culture is essentially a continuity. As it is like water, it utterly resists splitting. Its inner hierarchy, the steps of which are not separated by abysses, rejects excesses of any sort.
Whatever monster casts a shadow into this Platonian cave, the shadow will still be evaluated with man, “the measure of all things”.
Thus, culture is both the beginning and the end of metaphysical platitude, which represents the all-embracing shelf every document of spirit (that has hitherto survived) is lumped onto by the puppet immortality zealots, those zealots of cultural timelessness. There is only one book left that doesn’t stand in the same row and obviously will not ever do till the end of time. It is the Qur’an, of which all humanity is aware — the last reminder of death that a cultural specialist still takes seriously.
What is the secret, which is inarguably of a miraculous nature, behind its successful resistance against culture?
The Qur’an does not just declare the necessity of an extrahuman imperative, but it essentially is itself such an imperative. All the surviving sacred documents were made by clergy or at best by the apostles. The maximum of authenticity those writings were attributed with was the so-called ‘divine afflatus’.
The author of the Qur’an is God himself. The Qur’an is defined by the absolute exclusion of any doubt or comparison towards itself. Sheer absurdity for culture!
But what about art?
Seemingly akin to idol-making, it would have been a complete nonsense had it not been for the virtue of negation enclosed within. Being blind, art cannot win the battle against the disingenuous church of human-godliness. But this blindness can be cured.
Hatred for culture is an inner fire of art, and the extrahuman imperative, negating everything but itself, is the perfection it will never attain.
The last chance for Titans defeated by Olympians is to accept the Oneness of God. Any genuine artist still has this opportunity…
GEYDAR DZHEMAL
перевёл Надир Фатих ат-Тифлиси