Category: Literary Matters

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he is more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light, or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag  team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandal straps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

And so in the end Jack returned to the religion of his childhood.

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1)

Kerouac home in October

BEATific October Again

Kerouac barIt's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. 

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses.  The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

And a tip of the hat to old college buddy and Kerouac and jazz aficionado 'Monterey Tom' Coleman who will enjoy Jack and Frank.

For the Kerouac File

Black Like Kerouac

I was awfully naïve once, but never so naïve as Kerouac/Paradise, who understands so little about the lives of black Americans that he wishes he “were a Negro [because] the best the white world could offer was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” It is passages like that—about, for instance, the “happy, true-heart ecstatic Negroes of America”—that inspired me to pull from the shelf another book that expresses much the same desire. It did so, however, with greater honesty and courage than On the Road. It also conveys more pleasure, in large part because it makes far fewer claims for itself.

This was Really the Blues, the autobiography of an endearing oddball named Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. Born in Chicago in 1899 to Russian Jewish parents, Mezzrow fell under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, and other early jazz musicians. He learned to play the clarinet, recorded with many of these better known musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and—here’s where things get fun—decided he too wanted to be black. Mezzrow determined that he “was going to be a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can.”

On the Fear of Death

Heute roth, morgen todt.

I woke up from a dream an hour ago. I was staying with Philip Roth in his New York City apartment where I noticed that my beard had been shaved off. I said to myself, "You look good even without it." The vanity was cover for the fear that I am losing my power.  I made coffee to wake up and to read the final pages of Everyman, Roth's 2006 meditation on mortality. At novel's end, Everyman's lamentations and self-excoriations give way to a certain buoyancy of spirit. Conferring with the bones of his parents at the Jewish cemetery bucked him up. That and a conversation with a black grave digger. Everyman was starting to feel indestructible again.  We are, after all, born to live, not to die.

On the last page, the 71 year old Everyman, a sort of post-modern Adam, though never named, accepts a general anaesthetic for surgery on his right carotid artery.  And here Everyman and the eponymous novel come to their end:

He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

……………………………………………

This morning, at a monkish hour, I penned the following on the fear of death.

What it reveals, perhaps, is that it is an illusion to suppose that one will be a detached spectator of one's demise. The spectator himself will cease to exist! The fear reveals the inevitability of a catastrophic loss. The  fear, whose visitation is rare and typically nocturnal, is hard to recapture for analysis in the light of day because the transcendental spectator re-asserts himself. He would view death as an event in one's life, not as the end of one's life.  

But it may be that such viewership is no illusion. It may be that the fear of death is not revelatory but a groundless fear and that the sense of spectatorship is revelatory. Fearing death, I fear a ghost: I am at my core immortal, and as an individual, not as the universal Atman or the like.  The questions arise: Who am I finally? Who dies? What is death? Can you tell me what consciousness is? You can't. Might it then be presumptuous to suppose that you understand its absolute cessation?

Roth Philip

 

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960. (Source)

Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.

Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives.  Am I being fair?

John Updike’s Christianity

Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added):

In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.” There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.

The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that were not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, forever.”

One cannot help thinking that Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage. Updike wrote of mainline Protestants and their efforts to justify the sexual revolution. Although Updike himself regarded heterosexual sex as normative, his elevation of sex as a way to transcendence would prevent heterosexual Protestants from barring the door to other kinds of sex. Updike told the CBS reporter, “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted.” Once mainline America became persuaded—even in the absence of empirical evidence—that gays are born that way, how could they deny that their sex might be their way to the divine? Updike would surely have agreed. And millions of Updike readers could thank the novelist for helping them see that marriages defined by desire were not only a right but also a sacrament.

'See' is standardly employed as a verb of success. I wonder: does the author in his last sentence so intend it?  'Believe' would work better, no?

More importantly, it is just self-serving nonsense to view sex as the foremost means for conducting the moral and religious search. That sounds like a joke. I am put in mind of Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was its slave.

But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case.  Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit is Rich in the early '90s.

As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in.  It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion. 

Related: A Death Poem at Year's End.  I reproduce and comment on a fabulous Updike poem.

Updike Time

Attributed to Robert Frost

Here:

"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel” is usually credited to American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Frost used the quote in January 1961 (discussing John F. Kennedy, who Frost thought was not this type of liberal) and Frost used it again in January 1962. A popular form of the quotation is: “A liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in a fight.”

William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) wrote this in his book What Man Can Make of Man (1942): “He lends himself to the gibe that he is ‘so very liberal, that he cannot bring himself to take his own side in a quarrel.’” It is not known where Hocking got the phrase, or if Frost (who was an avid reader) was borrowing from another source.

One can be hobbled by one's virtues. There is something noble about being fair-minded, objective, and considerative of all points of view. It is the way of the philosopher, the lover of objective truth, "the spectator of all time and existence" in a stirring line from Plato's Republic. But before a man is a philosopher, he is a man of flesh and blood, brutally embedded in a brutal world in which he must stand his ground and battle his enemies. He must not allow his noble viewership of life's parade to make impossible  his marching in it.  

Readings for Dark Times

When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America.  But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.  

What was it like to live in the Third Reich?  What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.

Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017

Related: Theodor Haecker entries

Bernanos on Prayer

Georges Bernanos has the protagonist of his The Diary of a Country Priest (Image Books, 1954, pp. 81-82, tr. P. Morris, orig. publ. 1937) write the following into his journal:

 

BernanosThe usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!

This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.

But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?”

The above needs no commentary from me. It needs thoughtful, open-minded  rumination from you. I respect a person's right to remain a secularist and worldling, but a measure of contempt comes into the mix should the person's secular commitment be thoughtless and unexamined.

Related: "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without at least one substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end  of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.

……………………..

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.

O'Connor FlanneryThis is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. 

See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

Keroauc barAnd I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!" 

Addendum (11/5).  Vito Caiati writes,

I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton:  “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes,  when speaking of monks extra muros,  “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place,  They do not support the trip.”
 
Vito,
 
Very good observation.
 
While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all?  Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk? 
 
I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton.  As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.
 
I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)
 
There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post. 
 
But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end?  I don't imagine you have an English trans.
 
It is always good to hear from you.

Sebastian Haffner: Totalitarians Intolerant of Private Life

Among the dozen or so books I am currently reading is Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Picador, 2003).  Written in 1939, it was first published in German in 2000. The Third Reich is no more, but the following passage remains  highly relevant at a time when the main forms of totalitarianism are Chinese Communism, the hybrid political-religious ideology Islam, and the hard-Leftism of the Democrat Party in the USA:

No, retiring into private life was not an option. However far one retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible to treat it  merely as a "political event." It took place not only in the sphere of politics but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one option: to remove yourself physically — emigration, Emigration:  that meant saying goodbye to the country of one's birth, language, and education and severing all patriotic ties.

In that summer of 1933 [the year Hitler seized power] I was prepared to take even this final step.  (219)

Haffner did emigrate, to England, then a free country. But where will we go when the whole world is under the yoke of the 'woke'?

Haffner Sebastian

A review of Haffner's book.

Addendum. The totalitarianism of the 20th century was hard: enforced by the threat of the gulag, etc.  That of the 21st century, soft. See Rod Dreher, The Coming Social Credit System. Excerpt:

You think it can’t happen here? As I show in the book, Google, Facebook, and other major corporations already collect tons of data from every one of us, based on how we use the Internet and our smartphones. If you have an Alexa, or any other “smart” device in your home, then whether you realize it or not, you have consented to allow all kinds of personal data to be hoovered up by the device and shared with a corporation. The technological capacity already exists in this country. The data are already being collected. 

And Covid has pushed the United States much farther down the road to becoming a cashless society.  There is an obvious safety-related reason for this. But banks have a vested financial interest in weaning Americans off of cash:

“Big Finance is the key driver moving us to a cashless society,” he said. “You’ll notice banks have been slowly closing branches and ATMs and they’re doing so in an effort to nudge us more toward their digital platforms. This saves them labor, it saves them a lot of real estate costs, and it improves their bottom line.”

What happens when you can’t buy things at stores with cash? It’s already happening now. I’ve been to stores here in Baton Rouge that will only transact business with credit or debit cards, citing Covid, or the inability to make change because of a coin shortage. It’s understandable, but you should be well aware that the move to a cashless society makes each of us completely vulnerable to being shut out of the economy by fiat.

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

The spirit of the Left is the spirit of negativity. Any intellectually honest person following current events can see that the tendency of leftists is mindlessly to destroy for the sake of destruction what it has taken centuries to build. Transgressive of tradition and its wisdom, these 'progressives' are both hobbled and enabled by their presentism. Hobbled, because they know nothing of the past. Enabled, because their ignorance allows them to imagine themselves to be free of the moral limitations of humanity. Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic.

In Faust, Goethe gives Mephistopheles the following lines:

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles was entsteht 
Ist werth daß es zu Grunde geht;
Drum besser wär’s daß nichts entstünde. So ist denn alles was ihr Sünde,
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt, 
Mein eigentliches Element. (V. 1338–1344)

I cannot improve upon Walter Kaufmann's translation:

I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
'Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent —
That is my proper element.

Mephisto Faust

Vito Caiati (7/24) responds:

In yesterday’s post “Negativity: The Spirit of the Left,” which includes an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust and which terminates with the statement, “Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic,” you obliquely suggest a lien [Vito slips into French here: link, connection] between the ongoing leftist annihilationist campaign [against] the Western cultural, historical, and religious heritage and malevolent supernatural forces or entities. Am I right in assuming that this was your intention?  Or are you employing the adjective “demonic” in a more generic, figurative sense to speak of evil?

I mean 'demonic' literally. It is not that the vandals are themselves literally demons, but that they are being used by demonic forces, the "principalities and powers" that St. Paul speaks of.  Here is a short video by N. T. Wright on the meaning of the phrase.  Leftism at bottom is nihilistic, and this nihilism has a metaphysical source in the rebellious spirit who "always negates" and can accept no legitimate authority.  So what is playing out before our eyes is something very deep and metaphysical: Unseen Warfare.  Or is that OTT, to use a going abbreviation?

Your question also raises the question whether there can be evil without agents of evil.  Aquinas held that evil is a privation with no positive entitative status, a lack of good, privatio boni.  A stock example is blindness in the eye: the blindness is a lack of sight. But it seems to that there is a positivity about evil that could only be accounted for by evil agents, with evil free wills, for example, the Antifa or BLM thug that blinds a police officer permanently by shining a laser in his eyes, as happened the other night.