There at the Creation

IN WHAT MUST BE THE MOST USEFUL OF CREATION MYTHS we are witness to a spanless, clockless void where the sovereign darkness lies riven with hues, mandelbrot tentacles, arabesque folds, everything coalesces at one line, sinuous and unending. It becomes two lines parallel. The eye follows that path and now focuses upon it, perceives the contour within the span of those lines. Scales do emerge once the eye can properly see: glittering, sharp edge, reflecting and refracting all the wild chaotic patterns about. A thin chimeric mail clothing the girth of this form in the darkness. Look up or look back, either way: this form does entwine with another its alterimage, over and over again, on into eternity— two great and resplendent snakes bound to one another in an infinite helix through the ageless void. Split at one end they embrace: her holding him close with one alabaster arm around him, her broad wings spread to the ends of the infinite, and himself a god of a thousand faces— bull, medusa, lion, more— with his own wings cast back to frame the limitless dark. They look only into the other’s eyes.

Time-Without-Age and his bride, Ananke.

The definition of the universe and the nature of it bound to one another.

The void about, it proceeds to shimmer like lightningcharged mist, separates from itself light from dark and it is this light that Time-Without-Age coils about, drawing it into itself, into a luminous sphere that collapses upon itself growing more translucent. Malleable. Finally solid but incandescent yet. He coils tighter still upon the sphere, loops more and more of himself about it until a line emerges bisecting the sphere, until it opens and opens to light more brilliant than anything the universe has as yet conceived. So bright neither one of them truly sees what emerges. Only Nyx— the Night— with her dark changeling eyes catches a glimpse of that which steps from the sphere:

Phanes Protogonos. Appearance. Final Beauty.

He steps out of the light but for a moment and then he shatters himself before that light fades, a constant reflection of this light scattering, falling, descending into time and into form.

This is what beauty is. This is what is perfect.

____

BEAUTY IS APPEARANCE. It refracts through the eye and into the mind. It reflects from the mind through the eye and onto everything the witness sees. Nothing can be seen but in comparison to it. Nothing escapes our thoughts but in some way is affected by it: a thousand thousand shards of brilliance reflecting upon everything as they fall.

Beauty is. It is its own history and its own witness. It stands before us asking nothing and giving all, perfect as a sphere is perfect and without fault. Beauty terrifies us because it is. It illuminates the finite nature of our existence. There will always be another man after us, as there was always another man before us, but Beauty stood before them all and saw them fall to time and nature and still it stands, wings outstretched so all might see, indifferent in its perfection to the audience that gathers before it.

Perfection itself is infinite, and so it is only fitting Time-Without-Age gave birth to Appearance and by proxy gave us Beauty. The law of the universe— Ananke— is blind necessity. However, within the definition of the universe, at once balanced against and intertwined with blind necessity, there is only Beauty, timeless and seamless. Just as drawn against but never extricated from blind necessity, we labor out our only lasting gifts: our art, our reflection of beauty. We pound it out of metal. We carve it into stone. We pass it down to one another, a neverending helix. A story told by men long since dead. A song played by instruments gone to disrepair and finally dust. Mud huts or skyscrapers, plows or planes: these are merely necessity. Art endures because that which gave birth to it endures: Time-Without-Age.

Yet there are those who believe that there must always be a purpose for things. Everything must fulfill some agenda somewhere, as if they have seen in their dreams the construction of the universe, the foundation of it, and as such every brick and cog must be defined and in its proper place or the architecture of things must be untrue and coming undone. They look upon Beauty, and lacking a definable purpose for it, they suspect everything about it. Something sinister in its affect. Something troubling in its form. The freedom to simply be, to exist without judgment— this mocks them. These are the children of the Law, and seeing Art, seeing offerings made to Beauty, it undermines their authority, casts doubt upon the constitution of Ananke, their own mother.

But there is in most men a natural instinct to be free, independent of the consideration of others. It is this very thing that Art celebrates. Therefore, those children of the Law must find some exception, some small case in Art that all find dangerous to illustrate and pillory, and in doing so give credence to their own fears while justifying their subsequent actions: to legislate Art, to bring it under control.

Too much tending will kill a flower and with so many shadows thrown upon Art, it dies as well. And civilization as a living thing then dies itself because civilization is based as all things are upon the reflection of those two serpents embracing: one the law of balance and one the living image of That Which Is. When Art dies and Beauty is overlooked in an overtipping of the scales, all that is left is the Law, and the Law is not alive; it is merely a cause, not a thing unto itself. Law is nothing but words and circumstance without blood, without appearance, without form, and, casting no illumination, everything before it dies.

But Beauty does not die any more than Appearance is a perishable thing. The lack of it kills, throws life into a shadow play with no meaning at all. In the end, from the ghosthaunted halls of ruins is Beauty found again, appreciated once more. The sacrifices come upon the heels of this discovery almost as a matter of form. There are always men who would marry it. Always women who would take it into their beds and hearths. And this incessant ritual begins the dawn of a new age and a new civilization. This is the history of mankind. It is not trading that builds civilization. Trading can be done in the lowliest crossroads. It is not protection that inspires civilization. A hole in the ground is a safer place from robbers than a city street. It is upon this statue that the city is founded, this altar to a god without a name, without need of a name. A god that simply is.

A god within a statue like the Athena Palladium, arms spread out so wide and a crooked smile asking you as you pass it by: Would you die for this thing, this Beauty?

You would die without it.

Ananke

IT HAD BEEN A BAD summer that year. Nine months already without any rain to speak of and now the lakeshore stood naked and primordial as some postdiluvian plain, an uncertain wasteland revealed in the receding Deluge. The leaves dead on the branches like a premature autumn. There were buzzards them by the score in those bent and sunblasted limbs, more circling in the skies on spread black wings, fluttering funeral cloaks chased by their broad shadows on the earth below: an audience of them. But we live our lives before an audience unseen of some kind or another, often without ever acknowledging their presence and certainly not letting their attentive eyes influence our decisions in any way. The audience of the carrion birds is always there, truly, whether we see them or not.

I was amazed at how silent it was. No wind off the lake surface, no cars passing by. Which was fine: the way it should be. There is a secret whispered in intimacy, something implied but never named: it is the pale and distinct face of betrayal. Betrayal is the flip side to the coin of the intimate. In the clearing there was only two of us, the animal and I, and the instrument of betrayal— the maul— in my hand unnamed and unnoticed, dangling against my side.

We all wear masks from time to time— the Greeks were right, as always, there— because of our need to order ourselves out of the speeding chaos of life, a way to frame an incident into something measurable and nameable. The mask defines. By defining the role of he who wears that mask, it condones the actions the wearer commits. How could it be any other way? A man defined by a certain nature cannot be expected to do otherwise.

I had my mask to wear there in that dry and bitter field. I wish I could say the same for the calf that lay before me. That it was a sacrifice, that it was prey. No. The calf was simply lame in a drought when there was no feed to be wasted and no water to be spared. And now it had lifted its trembling head up as I arrived, me in my mask, and I wondered if, seeing that I had not come to bring the calf its bottle, if it recognized the mask, if it was old enough to name the grim and tight expression on my face. I doubt it. I know people nearly a century old who do not know that mask when they see it, but I know it because I have worn the mask before, never comfortable with it in any way but resigned to it nonetheless. It is Necessity. Ananke. And no man wears it willingly no more than any man bears it willingly when he sees it come for him.

____

I WONDER WHAT RAPTURE early men must have felt seeing horses wild on the floodplains, running like cascading waves against the forest edge as the trees ticked by. Like fire down the wind. Perhaps one of them had become so enamored of that kinetic grace that he had taken to chasing them down the tall grasses, exploding through briars and blooms both to catch one, maybe become one of them simply by joining the fleeing herd. How, eyes whited and teeth bared, all mane and tail, they had run into the forest. Perhaps one of their number had fallen on a treacherous treeroot and this was how the man found it: leg broken, wasted, no wild spirit at all. Maybe he just stood there in the silence of the forest, impressed by the intimacy of this moment, between this beast and himself, before he drew his spear and slew the animal where it lay.

Early man’s first use for horses was eating, not transportation. Sometimes they would run them into an autumn forest and set it afire.

Intimacy and betrayal.

Apparently one day that intimacy was broached again, but this time the man left the weapon behind him, unmentioned among them. Then there was something new that had never trodden the earth before: the rider and the steed. But the weapon was there all the time, the other side of that coin was there all the time. They simply agreed to overlook it until the day came when a certain mask would be taken down again. Men perhaps did not even need a name for that mask then; they knew what it was all along. It was poets who needed to name it. Name it perhaps so that they might distance themselves from it. If such a thing is possible.

____

MY GRANDFATHER HAD a few cattle that he kept, one of which he was willing to let us have butchered on one condition: that I maul it myself. I was thirteen and a city boy and what I knew about slaughtering animals could have filled the inside of a matchbook if you wrote in fairly large print. I was not much on the idea and my mother was dead set against it, but my father— well, my father understood one thing and that was that my grandfather was a pointless man to argue with. My grandfather and my father and I all went into town with this heifer in the trailer rattling behind us. My first and probably best memory of the slaughterhouse was the thick and waxy smell in the air, something I attributed to the butcher paper, but that wasn’t it by a long shot.

They put the animal in a narrow cage with its head hanging out. Overhead there was a heavy steel beam with chains strung on it, some that had hooks bolted into the links and these dangled to the floor behind the cage. I had seen that before, though I couldn’t remember where. A man came and he locked these large metal hooks around the cow’s hind legs and then he spat into the metal grating on the floor and nodded his head. No one had spoken the entire time on the killing floor. No jokes. Nothing. My grandfather handed me the maul and the weight of it nearly pulled me over. “Do it once and do it right,” is what he told me. And they stepped back out of the way.

It makes a rather undramatic sound, mauling something to death. Maybe that’s the worst of it, how unspectacular it all is. But it’s a sound you will remember all your life. There was perhaps a second between the moment I heard that sound and the animal quit convulsing of utter silence and then with quick efficiency, the floor manager released the gate to the cage and hoisted the animal up into the air with the most ungodly racket as the chains passed through the pulley. He slit its throat and bled it into the floor.

Frisson is the word. Looking at that animal dangling in the air, limp now but still warm, its blood raining down into the grating below: I was struck with a sudden and electric frisson. I knew now what that waxy smell was. It was the smell of the dead. And I knew where I had seen that hoist before: it was in the back room of the funeral home my father had worked at. And I knew something else as well and it was this: the killing had all been too simple, too quick and easy for me to assume that I was anything but mortal myself. Mortality, for me, had been defined in that moment, and not as a word or a concept but as something undeniable and paperthin that at any instant could find itself cut short by Necessity.

My grandfather put his hand on my shoulder and nodded to me. Intimacy. Betrayal. My grandfather had betrayed me to something capricious and impossible to argue against. Ananke. Out of necessity he had betrayed me to it.

____

GETTING HER HOSE OFF had been an adventure, but with that finished there had only been the two of us there naked in the pale winter light, on that bed with its jumbled sheets and weak springs. Just the two of us there. Her disheveled hair half in her face. Her magnificent eyes on me, but there was nothing clever in them now, only apprehension, and somewhere in the back of her mind she must have told herself over and over again that she could trust me. Yes. She could trust me.

God, how nervous she was and so helpless to her fear and to that ravenous need in her that she had fought in all our tight, rash encounters before, but this time there was not going to be any staving it off with her fingers in some dark room later, no. This time was for real.

“What if my father finds out?” is what she asked me. I almost laughed.

One would have thought the two of us of conflicting interest, her father and I, but we were the same man, the same hand. The same mask upon our faces. Iphigenia with her pale breast borne naked to the knife when Agamemnon her father had called for a sacrifice. Before, her father had been her consort and her initiator, father with his pale mask of Necessity, but this time he would not hold the blade himself. She would have look elsewhere. To another man. Another conspirator. In the end the same man with the same aims. What if my father finds out? He already knows.

She told me she loved me. And I told her I loved her, and that I wouldn’t hurt her.

Which I did anyway.

Intimacy. Betrayal.

Like that proud horse broken, the wild spirit I had seen in her was gone. Like that animal in the cage, she was helpless and submissive to her own desire. I held her hand when I broke her. Kissed her as I entered her. Betrayed her even as I took pleasure in the warmth of her. Rider and ridden: something that had never trodden the earth before. She bled onto the bedclothes and she cried into my neck. Cried even when she came. She wrapped herself around me and kissed me and told me she loved me while I could feel the warm drops of her blood on my thigh, on my own member as if I were anointed in it. Which I was.

____

THE FOREST SUCCUMBS to fire. The flames are drawn as if by the inward breath of some great titan back through the black and standing cruciforms of the burning trees and the watchers step lightly through the cooling cinders into a landscape ash-hot and unreal. They group in a loose circle around the Horse Grove where the still smoldering ruins of some score of horses lie black in the quivering heat of the earth. There is then only silence. Even the songbirds have fled to the river.

How many of these childlike men drop their burning brands to the ground as if ashamed of them. A caprice, and surely it had never occurred to them that the fires they had set to herald the wild run of the horses would come to this. They look from one to the other to affix the blame somewhere, but there is not a one of them that does not reek of that killing smoke.

There is one among them who steps forward and his jaw is so tightly set, his eyes lost of any levity. He draws out his primitive knife and kneels beside the closest of the charcoal animals and cuts into its flesh. He begins to eat. To devour the animals as if to relieve the trace of this act from the earth as surely as the fire erased the grove itself. The others they balk for a moment but in the end they all join this solemn banquet though none of them will speak of it. Not for long years to come, and then only by allusion, any word but the truth.

In the evening the first man to eat sits before the anticlined wall of the tribal cavern and he grinds down charcoal from the forest fire and ochre as well and these he places into his mouth and grinds them even more, mixing them with his saliva. He leans his mouth close to cavern surface, the nameless rock, and begins to blow out colors dark upon that wall. After a few hours the horses begin to appear again, run wild upon the stone.

Silence, the mother of Art. The silence of the initiated.

____

MY UNCLE HAD TOLD me I could take his .22 rifle out to put down the calf, but I had done that before and it was more unpredictable than anything else. Even a month old calf has a thick skull. I took down a sledge and walked through the brittle haymow to the little place we had fenced off to feed the animal out. It might have worked out, bottlefeeding it until it was strong enough to get up on its own, but the calf had fallen out into the full summer sunlight and hadn’t been able to get up. The afternoon sun had all but killed it and now there was nothing left for it but Necessity, nothing left but the maul.

Poets gave Necessity a name to distance themselves from it, but they gave it another name, under certain circumstances, and this word is mercy. Mercy does not imply a distance but an excuse. Mercy is what you call Necessity when it is not you personally that has to pull the plug, or swing the hammer.

All about the trees were fringed with buzzards. Some had even landed on the grass to stand witness like dark mourners, but carrion birds do not mourn any more than they pray. Still, there was the silence, and the calm clear lake past the reeds before me. It looked like a sheet of glass. It looked like the world had stopped entirely.

The calf struggled its head up and looked at me. And I told it not to worry. I told it that I wouldn’t hurt it.

It hardly made a sound when the maul struck, but the buzzards exploded into the air and the noise of them taking flight was huge, overpowering. Their shadows were everywhere.

I do not speak of what I did to anyone.

The initiated aren’t just those who know how to shake off guilt but those who more than others have reason to be guilty. The complicity between initiates has to do with a shared knowledge, but likewise with a crime. However much we try, we can never quite sever the bond that links the initiated with the gang of criminals.

—The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso

... and of the CBI

from The Burma Road, Donovan Webster

During one battlefield cleanup along the Tiddum Road, ever since Japanese chose to fake death and one by one ambushed a detachment of Gurkhas collecting corpses for burial, the Gurkhas started to take their own precautionary steps. Pulling out their long and razor-sharp knives, called kurkis, which hung on their belts, the Gurkhas ensured all subsequent enemy troops were dead by slashing their throats before grabbing up a supposed casualty. When a passing British officer saw a Gurkha about to cut the throat of a still-living Japanese soldier who—until that moment—had feigned death, the officer stopped the killing with an off-the cuff order: “You mustn’t do that, Jim,” he said.

Hearing the command the Gurkha turned to the officer somewhat disappointedly, held his blade, and—with a pained expression draped across his face—responded, “But, sahib, we can’t bury him alive?”

The apotheosis of the war in the South Pacific

Charles Crary gets a friendly fire wound and a free ticket home:

We reached the portable hospital, but I had to wait. I was given plasma. I vaguely remember my arm taped to a board so I wouldn't disturb the IV. The mosquitoes saw my arm as a "free lunch" counter. It was black with them. Because of the shock and heavy sedation I just lay there and watched them. During this time my clothing was removed and burned. It had been worn unwashed for about three months. Eventually I went into surgery... I woke and discovered my leg in a cast that let my toes peek out and came two-thirds the way up my thigh. I felt really great. I'm sure that much of my feeling was euphoria that I was out of immediate danger of being shot at. On the second day a crew of twelve porters was assigned to take me to the airstrip at Wau.

On the way we chattered and joked in pidgin. But around 9:30 am I began to feel sick. It started with a knot in the pit of my stomach, but gradually grew into a pain that restricted my breathing. It wasn't too long before I began to think I was going to die. My crew began to run with me. We arrived at a way station that had a doctor. He diagnosed my problem as secondary shock and overmedication of morphine. Relieved, all I wanted to do was sleep. Sometime during the night I was awakened by a sharp pain in one of my toes. It felt as though it were being cut with a knife. I couldn't move the leg because of the cast and weakness. I called out and finally someone came. They found a huge jungle rat trying to eat my toes!

Benny Hinn Gets An Ice Cream

or Constant Prayer

Some years ago, I caught Benny Hinn on the TV. I don’t know why I stopped there when I was flipping around the channels, but I did stop, and Benny was talking about the Flood and what God commanded to Noah—using the same words that He did Adam—“to replenish the earth.” This was the first I had heard of this, so I sat there listening. Hinn was talking about, in Isaiah, where it mentions God turning the world on its side because those who populated it had angered Him, and Hinn, understandably, made the assumption that this must have happened before Adam, since there was no record of it in the interim. At which point, Hinn said: “And do you know who those people were, who were cast into darkness? DEMONS!”

At which point my engagement in Hinn’s story sort of faded.

I did stop to think, though, what it would be like, to be in Benny Hinn’s head. “Hmm. I think I’ll stop on the way home from work at Baskin-Robbin’s. I really like their chocolate—DEMONS! DEMONS TEMPTING ME WITH DELICIOUS ICE CREAM!!”

Hinn makes a demon of everything. And fights with them. It is, in fact, common to fight with demons, turning our temptations into them, struggling around. One does not get very far that way. It is, in fact, very close to idolatry. By making our temptations something to be wrestled with we turn away from God. Simply that. Most temptations come and go. There is nothing really wrong with them, per se. They just are. They come, they go. If one simply lets them come and go, and with that much of an attachment to them, then they press with considerably less weight than any other way. But blowing them out of proportion, it is no wonder we find ourselves so hard pressed to overcome them; we give them their strength.

The late Suleyman Loras, dede of the Mevlevi Order, said once: “There is no reason a relationship with God should be some trying task.” And he was right. There is no reason. The only obstacles in the way are of our own making, the only gauntlet is the one we erect between ourselves and the goal. I trusted God and I trusted my spirit and between the two of them, I felt the one could find its way back to the other if I just let it do so. I found that the more I allowed my spirit control, the easier things went, and the stronger it got. It was a process. Everything is a process. And it is a process that begins with prayer. Being prayerful.

One of the things I came to the hard way was understanding just what prayer was. It wasn’t an act or moment or spoken thing, but the nature of the moment. Various people all across the religious spectrum have, at one time or another, exhorted us, as Paul does, to “Pray unceasingly,” something that, when we hear it, we know is right, even if the concept strikes us as untenable. “Pray at such and such a time and so many times a day” is always a more laudable model, from our perspective, since we can be sure to do so and then go on with our lives without having impinged too greatly on them. Praying “unceasingly,” from our generally narrow and selfish point of view, would be an act that would devour our lives. And practiced as most people practice prayer, speaking and gesticulating a certain set of words and motions, that is true. It is entirely unworkable in that way. Which left me with something of a problem, since this was exactly what the Nimatullahi Order was expecting me to do.

One of the things that I found so interesting, when I began to look into the nature of Sufism and to practice it, was how much it seemed to me to resemble the act of creation (and in particular, the inspirational nature of it) that I had been practicing for a number of years prior to all of this. At that time, I didn’t realize that these things resembled one another because they were the same, but the model of what I did understand about the one was awfully helpful in understanding the other. What I found was that to create, it was best to empty myself in that moment, when I set down to work.

Keep in mind, I had no way of realizing why this worked; it just did work and that was good enough for me. But what I was doing, in those years of practice, practice both writing and impelling that inspiration (and here I would like to interject that that practice was a constant, difficult work. Fulfilling, in its way, but very very difficult. People always seem to want some sort of shortcut, which is impossible. Practicing writing or practicing Sufism, both were enormously demanding,) was becoming a good instrument. By that, I guess a good comparison would be when you are just playing the guitar, freely, and the compulsion of a tune comes on and you follow it along, but suddenly, the note you want to play next is one you don’t know how to perform; knowing how to play every note, every intonation, and that automatically, makes you a good instrument. It allows the inspiration to work its way through you and through the guitar, allowing that inspiration to play you. This was how I approached writing, even though there were added layers of work involved that could not (at least not by me) be handled the same way; as much of the work as I could perform in that way, the better everything seemed to be and the farther along I progressed. All art can be handled in this way—there are particular logistical problems to each discipline, and how each artist handles those problems—but, at the core of it, it is all the same. For me, however, this was art, though, not Everything Else. And how, at the time, it connected with prayer, was still a long way distant.

I clung to that common definition of prayer for a long time. I was engaging in other things at that point, and they seemed to have great and immediate benefits, which, compared to prayer (as I defined it at the time,) prayer was looking to be a bad investment. I took a long look at it, especially the question of its function and utility. It was in that that I realized that everything I was doing was prayer.

Everything has its ground, its aspect, and, as I was moving along, the more I began to realize that the important part of those things is that nature, that aspect, because those are the Names of those things through which we impel their appearance. Prayer is a sacred moment, and the sacred has an aspect: this is what we are called to do, in prayer, to impel the sacred and in that moment, on our knees, surrender to it. The words and the gestures are part of an act to begin that process, but those words and motions have no meaning but what we impart to them ourselves, towards the sacred. Because of this, they can be utilized or dispensed with entirely. To be “prayerful” is to be in that state of surrender, before the sacred. One can induce that surrender, through a “moment of prayer,” but from there, one can maintain that surrender, all through the day. Stopping, throughout the day, to pray again is very helpful to support that state of surrender but not absolutely necessary. Practice makes it possible to maintain it, unceasingly.

What that surrender is is the same as “being a good instrument,” an empty place in which the sacred can manifest itself within you, but only through that surrender. The method and means are very much the same as the “inspirational approach” to creating, and it is easy to see, at that point, how one can approach everything one does, in their entire life, in that way. Praying unceasingly.

Question of Classical Canonism

This grew out of a discussion on the value of teaching the classics in schools.


The problem is less a question of simply teaching the classics than it is of how to disseminate them as a lingua franca of cultural imagery. It is a top down sort of operation, but the problem is that, even where they are taught, they are not circulated among the people as a commonality. A hundred years ago, the community was narrow and common, most of all. Most people’s cultural heritage was based upon the Bible and the classics taught in school and, because of that narrow foundation, it was in that common heritage that the forms of the only available culture were expressed.

The Bible is probably the best classical artifact (in terms of utility,) because it not only allowed philosophical and moral foundation, but it also was a treasure of Proper Identification: the story of Job, for example, is one that virtually everyone at some point or another has identified with, either personally (how alike are my circumstances to Job’s) or by contrast (how much better my circumstances are than Job’s,) and it is in the identification and, in some cases, imitation, of those roles that the most common of people absorb and respond to a classical heritage, even if they themselves are illiterate; it is a classical heritage disseminated from pulpits everywhere. Which means it is a classical foundation to everyone in earshot. It was that common, and that is where the absolute utility of these cultural foundations lies: not in the professors and the students in higher education but circulated among common people.

But for the most part, these common people have become the most mobile generation of workers in human history, starting with the automobile factories, and then, because of the automobile culture, following where the jobs were, and in this a cultural heritage can find no root. Movies and radio and television most of all became our popular culture and, because it is aimed (by the market) to the lowest common denominator, it is not given to the interpretation and imitation by those it is to sustain in the same way the classics were so well suited for.

And it is not even a matter of whether culture is devoid of classicism or stupid either one; it is what it is. The problem is its efficacy in large and most examples to the contrary are pretty indicative as well; almost all classical references are left allusions and have no greater significance than allusions because the larger ground is no more fertile than it is.

The phenomenon when it works is more circulatory than anything else: classicism, as a living force, is both the ground (the foundation) and the ceiling aspired as well, and is nourished both above and below. The problem is, for the common people, like I said, their culture is a pop culture that has no illusions of being anything other than that, which means that the ground in this case cannot sustain the efficacy of a cultural system, classical or otherwise. All the “shots from above” of allusions in popular culture are left just that: occasional (if resonant, briefly) intrusions into an empty status quo, that rarely take root anywhere.

But what a classical culturalism used to do was maintain an “authoritative” range of subject and reference which was, while effective, at the same time, rather narrow as well. The exclusionary nature of that was, while deep enough to be interpreted by those capable of such a thing, it was also all the material one had to work with. As such, in a constant state of dissemination and reconsideration, from above and from below, it was the circulatory nature of a living culture, a culture able to adapt by those cultural artifacts instead of simply enshrining them.

What I think we are rather wistfully wishing to do is to enshrine these classical cultural artifacts in a world that has no particular use for them any more; a world that has drifted in such a direction and for so long there is no real means of rectifying it, because these things grow with us, and cut off from that, they become what they always were, relics with no power. They were instilled of that power by us, at both the higher and lower levels of our society.

The problem is that there is no reason to maintain them outside the “educated” culture unless they can be made relevant to the whole. But for them to be relevant on the ground, that would mean narrowing, rather than widening, the artifacts in our culture, which is probably more than most people (outside the church) are willing to do. By now the horse is already out of the barn.

It is important to remember that the question of efficacy is relative. The Iliad was perceived as a religious text; Homer’s means of severing the prevailing Orientialism down to an absolute profile would be the guiding principle of all classical Greek culture for hundreds of years. And that is just a poem. This was its absolute efficacy, at that moment, when it became a foundation for Greek society at the highest and the lowest levels of that society. The Gospels had a similar effect, as did the Koran. And far from simple references and allusions, these cultural artifacts literally bent societies through the prisms of their sensibilities. This is an awfully effective cultural classicism.

Greek mythology would fall in and out of favor in Western society as time went on, but its resurrection was, while nowhere near its original power, powerful enough because it was anti-social in nature and drew its power from that, until it was finally integrated into the very classical canon that it reemerged to counter to begin with. Only Nietzsche would be able to energize it with even remotely the same glamour it used to exercise on the imagination.

Compared to that—and in the relative curve of its efficacy—no matter how resonant the Iliad is to college students now, it is only resonant because we tell them it is so. (In this way it is like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose premiere caused a riot. Fond as I am of it, I never feel compelled to pummel someone while listening to it. But this is the difference, now, between the truly resonant and the canonical resonant. No one had to tell those people to riot. Someone had to tell me this was the reaction, though, at the premiere.) This is the value of authoritative texts (These are Important) but this value is not necessarily intrinsic, and this is no more apparent when the choices for our social value are so wide open with movies and the internet and the plethora of cultural objects of lesser and greater value—how many people, with all these things, can manage to identify with the classics anything other than superficially at best?

Some, certainly, but those are very likely the same number as would always take to them. But beyond that, most of these classical artifacts, regardless of their value, are little more than raw material for popular culture, whose only valuation is popularity. And there is nothing more fleeting than popularity. It is voracious.

Culture

I had given some thought some years back into going into anthropology, but realized that there was a considerable lack in their field of study in the fact that while they studied the culture of whomever it was they were studying— that is, they catalogued it— they didn’t understand it in any visceral way, and did not understand that to grasp a cultural group, it is absolutely necessary for one to perceive on some level the cultural view that they hold. One of the reasons why this is the case is because of the difficulty that this entails, the sheer amount of empathy one has to bring to bear to this task. Another reason is that it is not scientific by any measure. Cultural perceptions are often at odds with the reality of the situation the cultural groups exist in. Since science is supposed to be absolute (unlikely as that is) then bringing in not just one but often numerous conflicting viewpoints that are themselves odds with reality undermine everything that science holds dear. And maybe from their point of view, they are right. Regardless, it still reduces people to numbers and there is really nothing we can learn from a people who have been reduced to a census form.

The reason this is problematic is because a people’s culture is their perception, their shared perception, of everything. It exists in what Ibn’ Arabi termed the creative imagination, the field of imagination on which all our myriad perceptions are laid and are processed into a gestalten All that we perceive the world as. This makes them no less real. Everything is weighed at this point against the standards of our cultural perceptions, ordered by the rules of that perception. Wanting the largest possible overview, the culture’s shared history is here of great import because it allows precedents to be made, patterns to be made to evolve out of those precedents. This is where a cultural foundation is laid and that foundation allows the culture to integrate what occurs now and what will occur in the future without that cultural group having to go through the often painful process of “re-living” what has already happened to them for that integration to happen, or at least without it having to occur in the dark, referentless. Considering how long it was between paradigm shifts, historically, cultures could go a long time without having to modify, dramatically, their cultural perceptions. Ultimately it was only when something of great disruption would force that change, and many cultural groups died as a result of it. That is the problem with cultural perceptions: they are enormously difficult to change, even more difficult to change the longer they have been in operation.

For the native Americans, the tragic results that resulted from the encroachment of the Europeans was ultimately more than their cultures could adequately evolve around; the European culture was diametrically opposite the value system of their own. Had we basically separated them and scattered them from their cultural groups and then integrated them individually into our culture, the American Indians would have been probably in better shape. What we did instead, creating zones in which we intended them to live and in which they could practice their own cultures, really made it worse in the long run because their cultural perceptions no longer worked. To many Indians, the reason why this was so was because they weren’t practising it avidly enough. But a cultural perception is not a car; tinkering with it will not get it to work, getting “original” parts to repair it with will not get it to work more true to its original form. Once the fundamental structure of the culture is undermined, it must change or die. Which is not to say that the Indians should simply jettison their entire cultural heritage, but they should look very hard at their history for what is of use to them now in the world they live in, look at their cultural perceptions for what is useful Now, and put the rest of it either away or practice it ceremonially, that is to say, to recall their cultural past but only on occasion.

To me, one of the best success stories in the US of this very thing is the Scotch-Irish. The Scotch-Irish are themselves not even Irish, as a rule. These Scots who backed Cromwell in his uprising against the throne were, as a token of his gratitude on his success, then relocated to southern Ireland where, one suspects— certainly the Scots did— Cromwell was hoping the Scots and the Irish would wipe each other out and solve two problems at once. The problems in Northern Ireland to this day are based upon this. The Scots, practicality embodied, took in the situation and then decided that they would move to the New World, Pennsylvania in fact, and make a life there. Understand that Pennsylvania is not Scotland or Ireland either one; it was the Great Forest. Their very survival depended entirely on themselves; there was little contact with the Atlantic settlements. To this the Scots depended entirely on themselves and began to adapt to life in the Forest, which they became remarkably adept at. Introduction of the long rifles made a world of difference against the Indians, the relative dearth of food caused an enormous population explosion in their ranks and very soon the Scots were cutting out the states along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, past the Appalachian mountains, almost without any support from the coastal settlements. Their settlements were entirely democratic, more so than the Atlantic states even; the Scots perceiving themselves to be no less in stature to one another but all of them bound together by the precarious realities of their new lives: the Indian attacks and the difficulties of carving out a livable life from the woods themselves.

Ironically, it would be the Scots themselves who would turn the tide against the British during the Revolution. Years of Indian fighting had taught them the guerrilla warfare tactics that they would use with such deadly effectiveness against the British; no doubt considerable amusement could be taken from the looks on the Brits’ faces when they realized it was those sorry bastard Scots they had run off all those years before who were cutting them to pieces. (Certainly the Scots themselves have never been known to forget a grievance; one would think they raise their children on it like mother’s milk.) It would also be the encroachment of the Scots on Spanish unsettled land in the West that would force them to start their colony program in Texas, for the expressed reason of keeping the Scots out; anyone other than them was apparently better than the alternative.

Already you can see a considerable cultural evolution in the Scots in the US in a very short span of time. Fundamentally, the Scots had not changed; they were still the pig-headed, ultimately expedient bunch they had been back in Scotland, even, but virtually everything else about them had changed. They would do so again. Balked against the prairie lands of the West that were beyond their ken and the mounted Indians there that they had no effective means of fighting, the wave of population expansion would stop there and, with the republic and then state of Texas giving away property to all comers, they would turn south, into the woods of east Texas. However, it would not be too long before that would not be enough. Two things would change that. One was the settlement of vast acreage of lands in the prairies and the plains where the only means of survival was the use of range cattle. Learning from the vaqueros the means of this trade, the Scots would learn to live on horseback. For those who did, the cultural shift was an enormous one. The Scots had always dug roots before. Maybe when the time came and they decided to leave, they would leave those roots by the wayside, but they would just as quickly dig in elsewhere, wherever they were. This new culture was a rootless one, ranging far afield on horseback; their entire culture would change once again. With the introduction of Colt’s patent revolver, this culture would carve its roots out over a widespread area as they brought the war to the Indians instead of merely reacting to them. Once again, the Scots themselves, fundamentally, did not change, but everything else about them did. And we are only talking about a couple of hundred years for these two enormous changes in their culture to take place (considerably less for the second change.)

Placing this as a template against other cultures here and abroad, it is easy to weigh how effective they ultimately are. The Scots dragged their culture along with them like an old trunk. What they could use they used, expediently. What did not cost them anything, they continued. Everything else was dropped along by the wayside as they made their way across the US.

As an aside, I think if you look at how so many very distinct cultures that came to the US find themselves cultureless now is found in immigration. When the Irish came along, they were reviled by the people already here. They would ultimately have to integrate to become viewed as “Americans” (the old “You got to go along to get along” philosophy so prevalent in the US) and that meant either giving up their cultural practices or at least do them when no one was looking. In these days when we celebrate the culture of Ireland, it is easy to forget that it hasn’t been all that long since the Irish began to practice it themselves here in the US.

When these immigrating cultures would drop their heritage in the face of the New World (how actually useful they would have been here in questionable anyway) they followed the idea of an American culture that was, itself, a fairly new phenomenon. With the cascade of changes in this country in the 20th Century, one coming on the heels of the next, any culture begins to look ineffective to keep up with the changing times. There has been little time to drop any roots when, over and over again, the technological and political realties wash them aside. Expediency expects a mobile and rootless culture because the gravitation around the changes in fortunes (from farm work at the beginning of the century to factory work in the middle of the century to the fluctuation from city to city as they become centers of industry based on technologies whose centers, themselves, wax and wane from one city to the next) and the only culture that is left to us is what we see on the TV, in the movies, because one can collectively engage in them anywhere in the US. They become the lingua franca of the American culture. So much the worse for us.