Frans Verbeeck – The Mocking of Human Follies (detail)
Super storms of wind, rain, and fire rage across the planet.
For eons, before us, wind scattered seeds and the world was fructified. Rain the great thirst of life and cleansed, warmed and illuminated.
Yet now the elements admonish us for humankind’s planet-poisoning folly. Men, shallow ones, claim, industry created civilization; the poetic voice of nature is now poised to reduce their noxious worldview to rubble and ash.
All too many among us insist this is normal. Nature rages, how can you be such a soul-banishing banality and yearning-for-pain fool?
Frans Verbeeck – The Mocking of Human Follies
“[A]ll fashionable vices pass for virtue.” —Jean-Baptiste Moliere (2015), “Tartuffe and Other Plays”
The most propitious help one can provide to a pathological culture is to act as a creative antagonist to its heart-diminishing, soul-sucking agenda.
A force within compels me to search over the horizon-line of the everyday, to seek out dialog with rivers and stars and poets on city stoops and philosophers on interstate buses. The silence of stones enchants. But also, within, blood and bone speak. As I age, I’m attempting to devote my hours to the greatness of existence by which I’m enlarged within, and laugh at what diminishes one’s love of life and thus renders a person small of heart.
The thoughts of the heart resonate through one’s being and create one’s character thus bestowing one with a sense of destiny and the things of the world with resonance and meaning; yet, we are induced by the present day, dry landscape of the commercial mind to embrace the contrived dreams of media grifters as our own. Thus the culture does not have a collective destiny, other than a continued decline into meaninglessness.
André Masson, There Is No Finished World
Despite the hagiography affixed to heroism, war, as a general rule, is an act of plunder. Withal, the plundering and attendant destruction of the earth by corporate greed should be regarded as an act of war. The profiteers of which should be in docks of war criminal tribunals.
In diametrical opposition, the life purpose of the artist/poet/human being, compelled by the instruction of the heart, is to remind those who have lapsed, by mindless reflex, into crackpot functioning within a sick, conformist society of the veritable existence of a raging flame and cooling breeze within that is their humanity. It is not to hypnotize their fellow humans to march into a cultural wasteland toward a mirage oasis of their comfort zones. How else could the societal mass remain so indifferent to the suffering of the living earth inflicted by greed?
All too many spend their days anesthetized by perpetual and love-lacking distractions. The contrived spectacle inflicts mortification on a worldview defined by the heart. Conversely, the heart thrives when in ardor and when in the thrall of resonant engagement. The shallow compulsions induced by the profiteers of corporate despotism are anathema to the soul of the living moment.
“But the loneliness, oh Architect Of Desire, the loneliness,” I have cried out. Yet, through it all, I have had visitations by ebullient guides who made suspension bridges constructed of woven ropes of living light across the darkest nights to sanctuaries devoted to renewal. There, I was instructed that acquiescence to the sanctified insanity of a death-enamored society would tear my heart to tatters, and I was called to resist conformist madness by the libido delivered by imagination. “Never be boring or they win,” I was counseled.
Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire
A social milieu should allow for the eros freighted within social engagement to be conducive to forging friendships, for coming upon mentors, and for grappling with antagonists…whereby one is destroyed by catastrophic victories and enlarged by propitious failures.
My heart has been wounded by cruelty; my mind buffeted by stupidity and banality; my soul sickened by cynicism. The sorrow of it all brought me to my knees. Yet when I stood and faced the world, I experienced a sense of renewal. I had endured. There was grace hidden in the ordeal.
Yet an abyss howls between the lexicon of one who has experienced renewal and those who profit by acting as exploiters and destroyers.
Although every individual arrives at a fate uniquely their own, soul-making is a collaborative effort. Destiny only appears to be a solo act. The most noxious insanity manifests in a culture, mirrored by its government, that promotes the lie of the mind: we are singular entities not interconnected to the natural order of living earth.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
The Hollow Men, circa 1949, Anne Lyman Powers
Moreover, a lack of, even refusal to make resonant connections, creates a raging, nearly seemingly unendurable inner emptiness, both on a personal and cultural basis. Insofar as the citizenry of The Republic Of Emptydom, the solution is consumption of MORE. MORE and we must have it right NOW! Yet the elites at the top of the present system delude themselves that they can maintain an economy dependent on unfettered, infinite consumption while residing on a planet with finite resources. The extreme levels of denial, mendacity and manic activity evinced by the mindset is exhausting. Hence, the cultural-wide pandemic of depression will coalesce into governmental/societal collapse.
Trump, Musk et al. are the living-in-the-flesh emblems of a cultural delusion i.e., the remedy for inner hollowness is manic acquisition of MORE. To state the glaring and tragic in nature obvious, these two fools of fortune could not be MORE wrong. If we possess a world of technology but we lack a dominion ruled by the heart’s verities, we have become a threat to ourselves and a scourge to the earth.
Greedheads and technocrats are driven by a convenient delusion: the world belongs to them. When they belong to the earth. Thus they are obliged to be in its service and not manically devoted to the exploitation of earth’s bounty…that was not intended to be theirs in the first place. With that in mind, we discover the reason they lie with such obsession-borne force.
Regarding the rest of us, we are obliged: “to undo the folded lie”. The complete verse:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die. — September 1, 1939, W. H. Auden
Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, 1630, Diego Velázquez
Captured by cultural lies, we die, and drift through the world as a ghost of oneself. Historical lies. Familiar lies. Societal and governmental lies…once accepted take up residence in the psyche and kill our better selves. Henceforth, one shuffles through the living world as a shade.
The fantasy of lost “greatness” haunts the mind of the MAGA nation. Mania persists as true vitality is sapped. The old, bloodless beliefs do not course with libido nor love. One can hardly engage in dialog with MAGA true believers without angry ghosts surging from their mouths. While the Democrats have locked themselves within a collapsing-from-corruption House Of Usher.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red […]
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!’ — Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
When belief systems burn to ash, a phoenix rises. Life beckons us to return to the realm of the living.
Take in the beauty and terror of existence. Nature rises as an inexorable force. Notice: Nature persists by renewal. Allow in its vitality. Ghosts dissipate with the dawn. The architecture of a new day stands within.
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay — William Butler Yeats, Lapis Lazuli
Fire, Adriaen Collaert after Maerten de Vos, 1580-1584.
