Benjaminista De Casseres
I am always delighted to find a new (invariably old) Jew after my own heart. And so, Benjamin De Casseres, who also shares my name. From an article in Tablet:
An outsider as a Jew and an outsider to the Jews: my favourite kind.
Semitic good looks.
Brilliant to the last!
As is this blog.
I salute you, dead sir.
Benjamin De Casseres was born April 3, 1873, in Philadelphia, to a Jewish family of Sephardic descent. And so, an outsider: This man so vocal about his Manhattan credentials was born out of town, in the sixth borough; not Ashkenazi like the majority of American Jewry, he was a nonimmigrant from comparatively exotic stock. The family name derives from Cáceres, the ancestral capital of the same-named Spanish province, and De Casseres himself liked to speculate that he was related to a hero of his, Spinoza: one Samuel De Casseres married Spinoza’s youngest sister, Miriam, became a rabbi and scribe, and offered the funeral eulogy for his teacher, and Spinoza’s excommunicator, Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera of Amsterdam.
An outsider as a Jew and an outsider to the Jews: my favourite kind.
Physically, De Casseres writes of himself: “I am strong meat; false teeth and babies, lay off! Fat and Jewish; bedroom eyes; voluptuous flesh.” Surviving photographs by Arnold Genthe show a paragon of sly dissolution, tempered by self-seriousness, in precarious pince-nez, dark worsted suit and patterned, probably colorful, tie.
Semitic good looks.
His books and booklets include: The Adventures of an Exile; Anathema!: Litanies of Negation; Black Suns; The Book of Vengeance; Broken Images; The Chameleon; The Comedy of Hamlet; The Communist-Parasite State; The Complete American; Don Marquis; The Eighth Heaven; The Elect and the Damned; Enter Walt Whitman; The Eternal Return; Finis; Forty Immortals; I Dance with Nietzsche; The Individual Against Moloch; James Gibbons Huneker; The Last Supper; The Love Letters of a Living Poet; Mars and the Man; Mencken and Shaw; Mirrors of New York; The Muse of Lies; My New York Nights; The Overlord; Robinson Jeffers, Tragic Terror; The Second Advent; The Shadow-Eater; Sir Galahad: Knight of the Lidless Eye; Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man; The Superman in America; When Huck Finn Went Highbrow; Words, Words, Words.
Brilliant to the last!
Begun in 1925, soon extending to multiple volumes, De Casseres’ diary was dedicated “to the thinkers, poets, satirists, individualists, dare-devils, egoists, Satanists and godolepts of posterity”
As is this blog.
Interleaved with metaphysical whimsy, racism, and misogyny (“God couldn’t possibly be a female, for He keeps so well and so long the profoundest secrets of life”), along with a loathing regard for his own Judaism, is to be found a trove of the most startling epigrams our country has ever known — the work of an American La Rochefoucauld or Lichtenberg, a Karl Kraus or George Bernard Shaw. . . .
A practical man should have knuckles in his eyes; a poet should have them in his images.
To almost any American “thinker”: the feet of your thoughts are always asleep.
All summits are cemeteries.
Art can only influence artists.
If you have no ideas, beware of your tenses and your grammar.
An emotion has more reality than a nail.
Hope is the promise of a crucifixion.
Whatever we do is a remedy.
Beauty is distance.
Only the ugly are modest.
Identity is partisanship.
The difference between Science and Theology is that Science is evolving ignorance and Theology is static ignorance.
We used to say, “It is raining.” Now (1930) it would be more appropriate to say: “The bladders of the atoms have opened and torrents of electronic urine lave the asphalt.”
Symbol. — I live behind a statue of myself.
Esoteric.— If you swallow your jewels you will have to recover them in your excrement.
Things that intoxicate me. — Gardens; the sea; mountain solitudes; great poetry and great prose; abstract ideas; profound sleeps; twilight; music; God, the sense of Wonder and Mystery; Satan; amorous sports; Bio’s love; the peace of death; wine; fastflying automobiles when I am in one; the voice of little children; the word Shelley; the word Baudelaire; the words Victor Hugo; imaged coitions with ideal women of an impossible beauty; well-buttered lima-beans; spaghetti; the flash of a metaphor through my brain; praise from superior minds; the stars; checks, checks, checks.
Keep the masses happy. Unhappiness should be the privilege of the few.
To have written a book that no one has ever read is like having a face that no one has ever looked at.
Pleasure has no eyes.
All life aspires to mirrors.
I salute you, dead sir.
Whitmanesque Underground Jew.
ReplyDeleteHe seems to be in a Baudelaireian way, more than a Whitman one; this man would have fitted best in Europe than in USA as he expresses himself as a civilizated man to the limits. No Whitman here.
ReplyDelete"This man so vocal about his Manhattan credentials was born out of town"
ReplyDelete"Physically, De Casseres writes of himself: “I am strong meat; false teeth and babies, lay off! Fat and Jewish; bedroom eyes; voluptuous flesh.”"
"His books and booklets include: [...] Enter Walt Whitman"
"Things that intoxicate me. — Gardens; the sea; mountain solitudes; great poetry and great prose; abstract ideas; profound sleeps; twilight; music; God, the sense of Wonder and Mystery; Satan; amorous sports; Bio’s love; the peace of death; wine; fastflying automobiles when I am in one; the voice of little children; the word Shelley; the word Baudelaire; the words Victor Hugo; imaged coitions with ideal women of an impossible beauty; well-buttered lima-beans; spaghetti; the flash of a metaphor through my brain; praise from superior minds; the stars; checks, checks, checks."
These are all very obvious Whitmanesque traits.
And as to the "civilizated" European, here's an excerpt from Tropic of Cancer which puts the Old/New World schism in a singular way:
ReplyDelete"In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs for which there is no key. It seems strange almost to mention his name over here. There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped with the German trade-mark, with the double eagle. The serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the drowsy stupor of a German burgeois deity. Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning."
I am Jamel DeCasseres. The DeCasseres family is so diverse now you would not believe that our ancestry started this way. Thank you all for your interest in these great thinkers. This is why I express myself through photography.
ReplyDeleteRead his essays for Benjamin Tucker's egoist journal, Liberty.
ReplyDelete