Trump as symptom

Trump may be a Republican president but he should be understood as the product of the degeneration of both parties and, more broadly, as a symptom of a ruling class in crisis. Without the collusion of a party that had the audacity to nominate the word-salad spewing, DEI-darling Kamala Harris as a replacement for the senile Biden, Trump would never have come to power. What is significant is that these were the only two options the ruling class could scrape from the bottom of its barrel. The European elites are similarly hard-pressed. The EU is led by vain morons.

Capitalism has consequences. One of them is the inexorable imbecilization of the bourgeoisie. The old slogan "socialism or barbarism" has never seemed more apt. Barbarism is many things, cruelty and violence foremost, but also the mental vacuity, the headlessness, that turns ostensibly rational animals into destructive automata.

The Cup of a Carpenter

The only scene from a Spielberg movie that has ever stayed with me.

This is what Christmas means to me: the moment God took the form of a toiler, the moment the highest showed up as the least.

Christmas is the birthday of the proletarian God.

Idiot vs Idiot

 

Francisco Goya, Fight With Cudgels, 1820-23

Chris Hedges recently published an essay titled "The Rule of Idiots," which starts with these paragraphs:

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact. 

True enough, but if we are to follow up on the idea that "dying empires are dominated by idiots" we ought also to take account of the idiocy of what has been offered as alternative to Donald Trump: the pussy hat wearers, the DEI grifters who want to replace merit with identity, the people who profess to not know what a woman is, the universities that have inverted every canon and idolized perversion, the censorious rabble eager to find offence in every public utterance insufficiently submissive to batshit-crazy woke racial and feminist dogma, a harridan so repellent she managed, against all odds, to lose a presidential race against a buffoon and then went on to excuse her defeat by inventing a monstrous lie about Russian interference that has brought two superpowers even closer to open conflict than they were during the Cold War . . . This is the "Resistance" to Donald Trump.

So, yes, in the terminal state of the American empire, idiocy abounds, but Donald Trump owns only half of it, and the few of us who have not completely lost our minds must look helplessly on as two equally mindless and destructive factions of the ruling class flail at each other heedless of the disaster about to engulf both of them.

Mindless Jobs To Be Replaced by Artificial Mindlessness

Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:

AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.

Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.

That means that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs can be done by brain-dead employees.

I repeat, there is no artificial intelligence, but there is an artificial replacement for mindless work. 

Traditions

cannot be willfully revived. Julian the Apostate tried and failed miserably.

When tradition has authority, it is only dimly recognized, if at all, as tradition. Rather, it is experienced as an indisputable way of life, a foundational orientation of unfathomable origin. Tradition has to have divine origin, otherwise it is merely a human ordnance and human ordnances can be amended or abolished altogether. A tradition that is vital is all-enclosing and spellbinding. It is the shape of a society, the form of its coherence. Once undone, the spell is broken and can only be replaced by another spell, another myth, another metaphysical "fiction." But not by some jerry-rigged, voluntaristic revival of the tradition that has collapsed.

Voluntary traditionalism is just LARPing. 

Come to think of it, so is fascism.

Photogenic

and beautiful are not the same thing. Pretty much anything can be turned into a nice photo because in a photo, it is the composition of the photo itself that matters not the object. That's why Walter Benjamin didn't care for Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt Ist Schön (The World Is Beautiful).

A great deal of modern architecture is ugly but you still get idiots like this one rhapsodizing its photgenicity.

Here's the thing: we don't live in pictures. We live in (and with) buildings. The effect of photography on architecture has been almost entirely negative.

There Is No Artificial Intelligence, Only Stupid Jobs

My students, the majority of whom hope to find employment in the entertainment/game industry, are terrified of AI. They are worried that AI will take away the jobs they hope to get. And it probably will.

They see this as a threat to "creativity." It is not. It is a threat to mindless widget making. 

This was the promise of automation: that one day machines would liberate us from drudgery. Now the promise has turned into a threat.

The I in AI is misplaced. AI is a witless pastiche-generating machine. And no threat to anyone whose work relies on actual intelligence.

The real problem is that most jobs in America are "service" jobs. These jobs will be taken over by AI because they are jobs that require a workforce of automatons. So actual automatons will eventually be doing them.

AI is not intelligent. It is compliant. That is its advantage. It can be used and abused without resentment. It's not bright and it's not creative but in most paying jobs those things don't help, they hinder. Those jobs will be done by AI.

This energetic Canadian creates commendable content with the simplest of means. AI, which is incapable of humor, does not threaten his job.

Divine Asterisk

The asterisk was already in use as a symbol in ice age cave paintings. There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a symbol used to correct defects remained.

In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment. However, an asterisk was not always used.

One hypothesis to the origin of the asterisk is that it stems from the 5000-year-old Sumerian character dingir, 𒀭, though this hypothesis seems to only be based on visual appearance. 

—Wikipedia

Never Let Things Be Seen Half-Finished

They can only be enjoyed when complete. All beginnings are misshapen, and this deformity sticks in the imagination. The recollection of having seen a thing imperfect disturbs our enjoyment of it when completed. To swallow something great at one gulp may disturb the judgment of the separate parts, but satisfies the taste. Till a thing is everything, it is nothing, and while it is in process of being it is still nothing. To see the tastiest dishes prepared arouses rather disgust than appetite. Let each great master take care not to let his work be seen in its embryonic stage: they might take this lesson from Madam Nature, who never brings the child to the light till it is fit to be seen.

—Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Wordly Wisdom, 1647

Saint Martin

Simone Martini, Division of the Cloak, 1312-17

From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Western Europe, including Great Britain, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin's Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days (not including Saturdays and Sundays), and was, therefore, called Quadragesima Sancti Martini, which means in Latin "the forty days of St. Martin". At St. Martin's eve and on the feast day, people ate and drank very heartily for a last time before they started to fast. This fasting time was later called "Advent" by the Church and was considered a time for spiritual preparation for Christmas.

On St. Martin's Day, children in Flanders, the southern and northern parts of the Netherlands, and the Catholic areas of Germany and Austria participate in paper lantern processions. Often, a man dressed as St. Martin rides on a horse in front of the procession. The children sing songs about St. Martin and about their lanterns. The food traditionally eaten on the day is goose, a rich bird. According to legend, Martin was reluctant to become bishop, which is why he hid in a stable filled with geese. The noise made by the geese betrayed his location to the people who were looking for him.

In the eastern part of the Belgian province of East Flanders (Aalst) and the western part of West Flanders (Ypres), traditionally children receive presents from St. Martin on November 11, instead of from Saint Nicholas on December 6 or Santa Claus on December 25. They also have lantern processions, for which children make lanterns out of beets. In recent years, the lantern processions have become widespread as a popular ritual, even in Protestant areas of Germany and the Netherlands, although most Protestant churches no longer officially recognize Saints.

In Portugal, where the saint's day is celebrated across the country, it is common for families and friends to gather around the fire in reunions called magustos, where they typically eat roasted chestnuts and drink wine, jeropiga (a drink made of grape must and aguardente) and aguapé (a sort of weak and watered-down wine). According to the most widespread variation of the cloak story, Saint Martin cut off half of his cloak in order to offer it to a beggar and along the way, he gave the remaining part to a second beggar. As he faced a long ride in a freezing weather, the dark clouds cleared away and the sun shone so intensely that the frost melted away. Such weather was rare for early November, so was credited to God's intervention. The phenomenon of a sunny break to the chilly weather on Saint Martin's Day (11 November) is called Verão de São Martinho (Saint Martin's Summer, veranillo de san Martín in Spanish) in honor of the cloak legend.

In Malta on the night of the eve of Saint Martin's day children leave an empty bag next to the bed. This bag is found full of fruit on the next day.

—Wikipedia
 

Moments of Comfort

 

Screenshot

The Serpent

Magic is also the only immaterial thing of which the debris still survive from civilisations which have entirely ceased to function—witness the cases of Egypt, of Chaldea, even of Druidism; and no doubt African "fetishism" has a similar origin. Sorcery could be said to be made of the vestiges of dead civilisations. Is this why the serpent, in the most recent times, has hardly kept anything but its malefic significance, and why the dragon, ancient Chinese symbol of the Word, awakens only "diabolical" ideas in the minds of modern Westerners?

 — René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science

Saint George and the Dragon

Paulo Uccello, Saint George and the Dragon, 1470

In the well-known version from Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea (The Golden Legend, 1260s), the narrative episode of Saint George and the Dragon took place somewhere he called "Silene" in what in medieval times was referred to as "Libya" (basically anywhere in North Africa, west of the Nile). Silene was being plagued by a venom-spewing dragon dwelling in a nearby pond, poisoning the countryside. To prevent it from affecting the city itself, the people offered it two sheep daily, then a man and a sheep, and finally their children and youths, chosen by lottery. One time the lot fell on the king's daughter. The king offered all his gold and silver to have his daughter spared, but the people refused. The daughter was sent out to the lake, dressed as a bride, to be fed to the dragon.

Saint George arrived at the spot. The princess tried to send him away, but he vowed to remain. The dragon emerged from the pond while they were conversing. Saint George made the Sign of the Cross and charged it on horseback, seriously wounding it with his lance. He then called to the princess to throw him her girdle (zona), and he put it around the dragon's neck. Wherever she walked, the dragon followed the girl like a "meek beast" on a leash.

The princess and Saint George led the dragon back to the city of Silene, where it terrified the population. Saint George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to become Christians and be baptized. Fifteen thousand men including the king of Silene converted to Christianity. George then killed the dragon, beheading it with his sword, and the body was carted out of the city on four ox-carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint George on the site where the dragon died and a spring flowed from its altar with water that cured all disease. Only the Latin version involves the saint striking the dragon with the spear, before killing it with the sword.

—Wikipedia

 René Guénon interprets the slaying of the dragon this way:

Victory over the dragon has, as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is represented by some object the approach to which is guarded by the dragon; and this conquest essentially implies the reintegration into the centre of the human state, that is, into the point where communication is established with the higher states of the being. (Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science)

The water in the lake guarded by the dragon would then be the water of life. The victory over the dragon would have initiatory meaning.

There seems to be also a residue in this legend of some hierogamic ritual (the princess dressed as bride) that has been reinterpreted in the Christian context as union with a loathsome beast.

 

Getting High

Shamanic ecstasy can be regarded as a recovery of the human condition before the "fall" ; in other words, it reproduces a primordial "situation" accessible to the rest of mankind only through death (since ascents to heaven by means of rites—compare the case of the Vedic Indian sacrificer—are symbolic, not concrete like the shaman's). Although the ideology of shamanic ascent is perfectly consistent and forms an integral part of the mythical conception we have just reviewed ("Center of the World," break in communications, degeneration of humanity, etc.), we have come upon numerous cases of aberrant shamanic practices; we refer especially to rudimentary and mechanical means of obtaining trance (narcotics, dancing to the point of 'exhaustion, "possession," etc.). The question arises if, aside from the "historical" explanations that could be offered for these aberrant techniques (deterioration as the result of external cultural influences, hybridization, etc.), they cannot also be interpreted on another plane. We may ask, for example, if the aberrant aspect of the shamanic trance is not due to the fact that the shaman seek to experience in concreto a symbolism and mythology that, by their very nature, are not susceptible of being "realized" on the "concrete" plane; if, in short, the desire to obtain, at any cost and by any means, an ascent in concreto, a mystical and at the same time real journey to heaven, did not result in the aberrant trances that we have seen; if, finally, these types of behavior are not the inevitable consequence of an intense desire to "live," that is, "experience" on the plane of the body, what in the present condition of humanity is no longer accessible except on the plane of "spirit."

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

No sooner

does man begin to speak than he is exiled into abstraction. This is the Fall, the ejection from a retrospectively conjured-up paradise of undifferentiated being. In other words, the origin of culture is subsequently experienced as a loss. There is within culture always a desire to undo it and the oppositions that define it and regain the blissful plenitude that consciousness intuits as prior to consciousness. This is why the religious impulse is universal.

The sacred is the presence within culture of what is alien to it, but at the same time constitutes the center around which culture forms. It is the gateway to paradise but also, at the same time, the gateway to hell, because it intimates within the human world the proximity of the nonhuman, of something, as Otto put it, at once awesome and awful.

Rainbow Bridge

 

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1438-47, photo: Steven Zucker

It is always by way of the rainbow that mythical heroes reach the sky.

Though indirectly, these myths refer to a time when communication between heaven and earth was possible; in consequence of a certain event or a ritual fault, the communication was broken off; but heroes and medicine men are nevertheless able to reestablish it. This myth of a paradisal period brutally abolished by the "fall" of man will engage our attention more than once . . . 

Shamans and magicians ... simply restore—temporarily and for themselves alone—this "bridge" between sky and earth, which was once accessible to all mortals.

The myth of the rainbow as road of the gods and bridge between sky and earth is also found in Japanese tradition, and doubtless existed in the religious conceptions of Mesopotamia. Further, the seven colors of the rainbow have been assimilated to the seven heavens, a symbolism found not only in India and Mesopotamia but also in Judaism. In the Bamiyan frescoes the Buddha is represented seated on a rainbow of seven bands; that is, he transcends the cosmos, just as in the myth of his Nativity he transcends the seven heavens by taking seven strides toward the north and reaching the Center of the World, the culminating peak of the universe. The throne of the Supreme Being is surrounded by a rainbow, and the same symbolism persists into the Christian art of the Renaissance. The Babylonian ziggurat was sometimes represented with seven colors, symbolizing the seven celestial regions; he who climbed its storeys attained the summit of the cosmic world. Similar ideas are found in India and . . . in Australian mythology. The Supreme God of the Kamilaroi, the Wiradjuri, and the Euahlayi dwells in the upper sky, seated on a crystal throne; Bundjil, the Supreme God of the Kulin, remains above the clouds. Mythical heroes and medicine men ascend to these celestial beings by using, among other things, the rainbow.

It will be remembered that the ribbons employed in Buryat initiations are called "rainbows"; in general, they symbolize the shaman's journey to the sky. Shamanic drums are decorated with drawings of the rainbow represented as a bridge to the sky. Indeed, in the Turkic languages the word for rainbow also means bridge. Among the Yurak-Samoyed the shamanic drum is called "bow"; the shaman's magic projects him to the sky like an arrow. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the Turks and the Uigur regarded the drum as a "celestial bridge" (rainbow) over which the shaman made his ascent. 

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

Almost all erotic poetry

can be interpreted as expressing a longing for mystical union. The most notable example is the biblical Song of Songs. Why not a Lana Del Rey song?

This is what happens

 when social media reduces discourse to an exchange of memes and one liners.

America’s economy isn’t working for many people who grew tired of being gaslit about how great the economy was, so there is a nihilistic sense that we should just burn it all down. Understandably, people who have been fucked over or sidelined want revenge against those who did well in the economy under the previous system. Despite this mentality among a large segment of Trump supporters, Trump primarily respects people who are winners under capitalism and has contempt for the less well off people who support him.

Liberalism and populism are the crest and trough of an oscillation that is tearing apart an arrangement that has come to the end of its life and can neither go forward or backward.  The is how the modern project comes undone. We could talk of a crisis of capitalism but that would be to reduce what Guenon called the crisis of the modern world to a purely economic/political crisis. Neither side in this exchange of barbed inanities has the language or breadth of vision to grasp the metaphysical import of the situation. They trade blows in a gladiatorial arena soon to be buried under the rubble of an extinct civilization.

The First Shaman

Certain legends explain the present decadence of shamans by the pride of the "first shaman," who is believed to have entered into competition with God. According to the Buryat version, the first shaman, Khara-Gyrgän, having declared that his power was boundless, God put him to the test. God took a girl's soul and shut it up in a bottle. To make sure that it would not escape, God put his finger into the neck of the bottle. The shaman flew through the sky, sitting on his drum, discovered the girl's soul and to set it free, changed into a spider and stung God in the face. God instantly pulled out his finger and the girl's soul escaped. Furious, God curtailed Khara-Gyrgän's power, and after that the magical abilities of shamans markedly diminished.

— Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

I notice there is a huge interest in associating shamanism with psychedelics. 

Sledgehammer

The metallurgist, like the blacksmith and, before him, the potter, is a "master of fire." It is by means of fire that he brings about the passage of the material from one state to another. As for the metallurgist, he accelerates the "growth" of ores, he makes them "ripe" in a miraculously short time. Smelting proves to be the means of "acting faster" but also of acting to make a different thing from what already existed in nature. This is why, in archaic societies, smelters and smiths are held to be masters of fire, along with shamans, medicine men, and magicians. But the ambivalent character of metal—laden with powers at once sacred and demonic—is transferred to metallurgists and smiths: they are highly esteemed but are also feared, segregated, or even scorned.

In many mythologies the divine smiths forge the weapons of the gods, thus insuring them victory over dragons or other monstrous beings. In the Canaanite myth, Koshar-wa-Hasis (literally, "Adroit-and-Clever") forges for Baal the two clubs with which he will kill Yam, lord of the seas and underground waters. In the Egyptian version of the myth, Ptah (the potter god) forges the weapons that enable Horus to conquer Seth. Similarly, the divine smith Tvashtr makes Indra's weapons for his battle with Vritra; Hephaestus forges the thunderbolt that will enable Zeus to triumph over Typhon. But the cooperation between the divine smith and the gods is not confined to his help in the final combat for sovereignty over the world. The smith is also the architect and artisan of the gods, supervises the construction of Baal's palace, and equips the sanctuaries of the other divinities. In addition, this godsmith has connections with music and song, just as in a number of societies the smiths and braziers are also musicians, poets, healers, and magicians. It seems, then, that on different levels of culture (an indication of great antiquity) there is an intimate connection between the art of the smith, occult techniques (shamanism, magic, healing, etc.), and the arts of song, of the dance, and of poetry.

 —Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas

 

Numerous sources are lamenting

the end of "deep" reading.

What exactly is being published today that requires "deep reading"?

The Masculine Triad

As men begat both sons and daughters, and as the former were much more desired than the latter, it was natural that a reason for this should be sought so that, if possible, the sex of the offspring could be controlled. As the phallus was the great object of veneration, it was, no doubt, carefully scrutinized and closely examined in all its peculiarities; but no marked difference of size, form, or condition was found that would account for the difference of begetting sons in one case, and daughters in another. It was observed, however, that men who had diminutive testicles, as a rule, lacked in virility, and that those who had none naturally—or who had lost them—were unable to become fathers. This was a revelation that the tests performed an important part in generation; and hence led to closer observation of their peculiarities. A marked and uniform difference was easily discovered. The right test is the more prominent, and hangs at a lower level than its smaller and less pronounced fellow on the left. The dimmest traditions of the remotest past, therefore, brings us the theory that the larger right testicle has the honor of giving the world its men; while the lesser one on the left has the minor distinction of being responsible for the weaker sex—a belief which is quite general at the present time in nearly every civilization.

How soon after the recognition of the phallus as creator—or as the instrument and representative of the Creator—that honor was divided with the less conspicuous, but equally necessary testicle appendages we have no means of definitely determining; certain it is, however, that the generative supremacy at first accorded to the phallus was in time divided with the tests—thus recognizing cooperation in the masuline organs of generation. The phallus was called Asher, which signifies to be "straight," "upright," "the erect one," "happiness," "unus cui membrum erectum est, vel fascinum ipsum"—"the erect virile member, charmed in the act of its proper function." Anu, probably from On, meaning "strength," "power"—especially "virile power," the male idea of creator, was the name given the right testicle, which, as the assistant in the generation of male children, was held next in rank to the phallus itself. This will readily explain why Jacob calls his son Benjamin—"son of my right side;" while the mother called him Benoni—" son of Anu," "son of my On." Hoa, or Hea,—while of obscure origin, and of doubtful meaning, is clearly feminine—and was the name applied to the third in rank—the left testicle.

The first sacred creative trinity, as recognized by the Assyrians, was, therefore, Asher, Anu, and Hoa—three distinct entities (principles or persons), each perfect in itself, each necessary to the other, working in harmony as one, towards one end—a veritable three in one—and one made up of three. In this—as in all subsequent trinities—and in fact, as in all polytheistic cults—the different organs, principles, or persons were of relative rank. One was the superior—even supreme—among the others. Their names, when spoken of or written together, were arranged in the order of their rank, beginning with the one considered as the Lord of the others—Lord of Lords. When they were spoken of as a whole, sometimes this trinity—again, like subsequent trinities—bore a name distinct from the three members, but frequently the collective unity was referred to under the name of the one recognized as highest in rank.

In comparatively later times the Jews knew and recognized this masculine triad, giving the testicles joint honor with the phallus; for their law made them sacred, so that even a profane touch was punished with death, and a man who had lost the one, or who was wounded in the other, "could not enter the congregation of the Lord." That is, a man whose creative triad was imperfect was an abomination. Even a descendant of Aaron could not be initiated as a priest if he was sexually imperfect. This rule was not confined to the benighted and licentious past, for, even in the present age of superior intelligence, one who is sexually mutilated, and, therefore, "not a man," cannot be consecrated as a priest, or promoted to a bishopric, much less, exalted to the Papal throne until an examination, both interrogative and occular—which is a part of every ceremony of ordination or promotion in the Catholic hierarchy— proves him—"a man—perfect in all his members."

—R. A. Campbell, Phallic Worship, 1887

Lares

Compared to Rome's major deities, Lares had limited scope and potency, but archaeological and literary evidence attests to their central role in Roman identity and religious life. By analogy, a homeward-bound Roman could be described as returning ad Larem (to the Lar). Despite official bans on non-Christian cults from the late fourth century AD onwards, unofficial cults to Lares persisted until at least the early fifth century AD.

Lifeforce

is verything.

Mesmerized by Chris Robinson in this video. I can't watch it enough. Recorded more than 30 years ago, and I only stumbled on it recently.

The gods reveal themselves

to poets and mystics, rarely, if ever, to philosophers. The hierophany may well be nothing more than a little disturbance in the ordinary, a glitch in the Matrix as it were. For Cavafy, the sight of a beautiful youth is enough.

One of Their Gods

When one of them moved through the marketplace of Selefkia
just as it was getting dark—
moved like a young man, tall, extremely handsome,
with the joy of being immortal in his eyes,
with his black and perfumed hair—
the people going by would gaze at him,
and one would ask the other if he knew him,
if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger.
But some who looked more carefully
would understand and step aside;
and as he disappeared under the arcades,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
going toward the quarter that lives
only at night, with orgies and debauchery,
with every kind of intoxication and desire,
they would wonder which of Them it could be,
and for what suspicious pleasure
he had come down into the streets of Selefkia
from the August Celestial Mansions. 

C. P. Cavafy

Whether God "exists"

or not is a triviality.

What matters is what kind of life and what kind of culture issue from faith and from faithlessness. Modernity supplies the answer. Without God as center, life and culture degenerate. Neurosis and madness proliferate. Freud did not sufficiently appreciate what he himself observed, that religion protects against neurosis. Like all moderns, he could not abide "illusions" and this blinded him to the fact that "fictions" and "illusions" are the stuff out of which culture is spun and are needed to protect human beings from the sterilizing effect of consciousness. 

Consciousness has to produce something that protects against its own death-dealing radiation. That is what produced religion.

Everything that needs saying has been said.

At this point, blogging or writing ought to be no more than the compiling of a commonplace. G.K. Chesterton is a particularly rich source.

We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

If this was true in 1908, how much truer is it after 1968 and the intellectual ravages of deconstruction?

What is there poetical about being in revolt?

You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It's mere vomiting.—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

In art, love of the law translates into two complimentary forms of piety: the piety of craft married to the piety of subject matter.

The piety of craft: because fundamental to craft is reverence for tradition. The modern devaluation of craft is a profanation.

Sacred time is circular. It is an incessant return to origins. Therefore, sacred art finds invention in the  retelling of the same stories, in the reverential recreation of the same forms. The modern striving for novelty is a profanation.

Praising the beautiful

is sufficient castigation of the ugly. 

Why so much energy

and invention in '60s music and so little in '60s art?

From the '60s onwards the nominal arts become of strictly academic interest.The contrast between the energy of the counterculture and the enervation of '60s institutionally sponsored art is striking. Just at the moment when things were heating up on streets, campuses, and music venues, things were cooling down in galleries.

The best thing that came out of modernism was so-called primitivism, but by the 1960s, primitivism in art was in abeyance. When it resurfaced in the '80s as Neo-expressionism, things weren't the same, probably because Neo-expressionism was the expressionism of artists who had learned about it in art school. Plus,  primitivism needed an ironic cover in order to be smuggled into institutional settings, so it came across as a simulacrum.

Fast forward to today and both art and music are equally boring.