one.

This and the post that follows were written on Friday, March 9:

Today once would have been the centenary of one of the more troubling figures I encountered in my youth. “Once would have been,” because remarkably, I have just learned that he is one of the people for whom not only public perception has changed, but so has his birthday.

Mircea Eliade was born on March 9, 1907, for this is what my books from forty years ago tell me. Except that he was born on March 13, for this is what all the reference sources online now say. He was actually born on February 28, 1907, Old Style, so say these same sources; but in 1907 that date would not have been, I believe, March 13, but March 12. The discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars grows gradually, from eleven days in the eighteenth century to…what? thirteen days now, the reference sources say.

I’ve recently written a few unposted attempts at making sense of the 1930s, a topsy-turvy world in which Mussolini was promoting the same sort of geometric architecture that Stalin was in the process of suppressing, and, incredibly, Mies van der Rohe was hopeful that the modernist wing of the Nazi Party would win out over the troglodytes and the Reich would march forward into the glass-and-poured-concrete future. In the United States, government reserved poured concrete for functionalist housing projects while the State’s new public buildings were designed along monumentalist lines. Mussolini dictated this style of pomposity only after he handed Haile Selassie his ass and decided that Empire was the wave of the future.

Norman Manea’s essay on Eliade in On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, modified by Ioan Culianu’s acerbically generous opinions as reported by Ted Anton in Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, is a useful summary of the state of the debate re Eliade’s meanderings in those stupefying years.

I find Czeslaw Milosz’s behavior in that time period much more edifying, and believe that the Nobel Prize was awarded to the right writer when it was the year to reward Eastern European émigrés. Not least because though Eliade was a better novelist than he was a theoretician, he wasn’t that much better; he was, however, adept at eliding what had actually happened to him with what he wished had happened to him, beginning with his early fantasy fiction of mysterious experiences in India, where he had apparently done better at backing Indian independence and falling shabbily in love with his host’s daughter than at achieving his sought-for spiritual goals.

I think Milosz is the only one of my early favorites who didn’t disappoint me when new stories came out following their deaths; but this is because Milosz demythologized himself all along, announcing that he was a much less significant fellow that his fans thought he was, and writing the best poem since Yeats about feeling disgraceful lechery in advanced old age.

It is probably better to be excessively self-deprecating in this regard, while providing as much evidence to the contrary as possible. Kenneth Rexroth made himself out to be a rascal as well as an admirable poet, but he turned out to be an even more outrageous rascal in some respects than he had allowed. ( digression )

two

Picking up Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas for the first time in years, I am stunned by a flood of memory along with a realization (probably one I have had before).

I had pretty much planned the 1986 “Art and the Sacred in the Postmodern Era” issue of Art Papers as my farewell homage to the history-of-religions field I was leaving behind and a bridge to the world of alternate art into which I was entering.

It was an issue inspired by a typographical error; Jean-François Lyotard had written a book on Baruchello titled, in translation, “Art of the Secret in the Postmodern Era,” but the French had been mistranscribed by a bibliographer as “le Sacré,” creating a nonexistent book that, in spite of its nonexistence, gave me an idea.

So I went in quest of another nonexistent book, the fourth and final volume of Eliade’s Histoire des Croyances et des Ideés Religieuses, and in due course received a pleasant letter from the Netherlands written by one Ioan Culianu, Eliade’s executor, explaining that a fragment from the book was enclosed and would I make out a check to Madame Eliade and to Messr. Payot, Eliade’s publisher. We duly made out the checks (which were never cashed), I had “American Paradise” translated, and it was published in the November/December 1986 issue along with my commentary.

Only then did I learn that except for the opening sentences, the entire fragment was an extract from an existing essay long since translated and published. But it was intriguing to learn that the book that was supposed to trace religious creativity on through to the atheistic theologies of the twentieth century had begun with a description of the perception of the New World as the Eden in which all things would be made new and yet also as they were in the beginning. (It wasn’t Eliade’s job to editorialize; he laid other people’s metaphors out side by side, for all to see.)

I spent years tracking the destiny of this unfinished volume. Diane Apostolos-Cappdona offered the opinion that Eliade probably hadn’t finished more than ten pages of the book before his death, but Mac Linscott Ricketts (I think it was) said that no, Culianu had discovered a complete outline and reams of notes and had told him that he was proceeding with as definitive a rendition as could be produced.

Eliade had already announced that the final volume would be co-written with his former students, so the question was how much of his particular contribution could be reconstructed. Culianu proceeded to collect the essays of the various professors, and the German version of the book was published in due course. The English version, which was not at all the same book because the essays were by (mostly) American professors, was completed and sent to the University of Chicago Press. Then Culianu was murdered, and the revelation that Eliade had written pre-World War II essays in favor of the Iron Guard led everyone to announce that obviously nothing the man said was worth reading, and the book simply vanished. I have never been able to trace what became of it, or how much Culianu wrote and whether he used any of Eliade’s fragments.

I had long before told friends that it was somehow appropriate that the great convulsions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been reserved for a nonexistent book that it was now up to us to write. Like Culianu, I was beginning to suspect that the task of the master had been, as is the task of all masters, to show us his shortcomings and set us on our way to different visions.

Years later, I began to think that the History was as finished as it needed to be. Unfortunately, I cannot be certain of the exact words in which I expressed that thought, because I have just tonight finished reading a novel that will inevitably shape my perceptions.

In any case, I dimly perceived what I now see is simply extraordinary: the third volume is nothing short of a compendium of the world’s techniques of vision, albeit a dry, just-the-facts compendium like the previous two volumes, which got us from the Neolithic through, more or less, the beginning of our present calendrical epoch.

Volume 3 comprises an account of the shamanic practices of Siberia, the births of Sufism, Kabbalism, Eastern Orthodox hesychastic mysticism, the gnostic practices of the Bogomils, and Renaissance Hermetism, concluding with a side trip to Tibetan religion, where the book comes to an end.

Given the necessity of zigzagging around the globe, the history never was strictly chronological. Taoism and the death of God would have co-existed, or did co-exist, in the final volume, because I know that Norman Girardot (an authority on the visionary folk art of Howard Finster as well as on the history of Taoism) had written the Taoist chapter for the volume that Culianu submitted for publication. Eliade had planned, in homage to Thomas Altizer, to write the atheistic theologies chapter himself, and I have no idea what alternate plans Culianu made.

But as it is now, having the whole enterprise come to a halt with Tantric Buddhism, leaving the whole history of unbelief as creative religious expression floating in the ether, allows us to write our own updatings. Eliade’s summaries of the state of research on the various historic traditions will become dated (and nobody is writing encyclopedic surveys anymore, except as Wikipedia entries), but because it is our own researches and imaginations that fill in the blanks in the great tale of the last four hundred years, the story remains as fresh, and as flawed, as our limited selves can make it.

And that is, on balance, probably better.

And as I say, the unintentionally final volume turned out to contain accounts of the sources from which the creative beliefs and unbeliefs of the past fifteen or twenty years eventually sprang. One would like to believe the old fox saw which way things were trending, but it is more likely that he wanted to come full circle to the Renaissance Hermetism that had taken him to Italy in his youth (where he found ample reason to be disgruntled with Mussolini, incidentally), and tossed in Tibet because it rounded off the volume nicely by coming back to Central Asia.