by Jon Rappoport
July 6, 2021
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“The greatest sum is no sum at all. It isn’t the addition of facts or numbers. There are mythic qualities in existence that come from us…myths greater than machines…and in order to give voice to the myths we need to go where poets go. We need to go there badly. For our own sake, we have to put that peculiar precision that splits a tiny particle into smaller and smaller pieces on the shelf…” (The Magician Awakes)
These days, people are rightly concerned about spying, snooping, tracking, hacking, profiling. The battle of privacy versus intrusion. The systems that look at other systems.
What kind of language is involved in computer spying and counter-spying and protection? You don’t have to be an expert to see it’s the language of the machine. It’s delineated in fine, very fine, and extra-fine shavings of detail. The Trojan Horse is now algorithmic.
The people who enter and work in that universe are committed to a meticulous process of move and counter-move. Programs above other programs. Look-ins which are processing the strategies of other look-ins.
The past, present, and future of language is involved. A civilization, to a significant extent, rides on what happens to words—not as detached entities, but as the expression of what we invent ourselves to be.
“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
If freedom is placed in a modern context of privacy vs. no-privacy, the war is going to embroil us in a language of the machine. We’re going to touch that language, rub up against it in one way or another, use it, oppose some piece of it with another piece of it.
Children are going to grow up learning it and swimming in it and its effects.
In that way, the creeks and streams and rivers and oceans of machine interaction are going to power human thinking.
“…it is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there…” (William Carlos Williams)
Here’s a strange example. People will take a paragraph out of an author’s novel, extract every key word, and track down their possible references—and then try to reconstitute the paragraph as if it were lines of secret code. They’ll rebuild it by welding together those references.
Because mathematics consists of symbol-manipulation, and the symbols have very specific and tight meanings, there is a growing tendency to assume all language works this way.
It doesn’t.
Poetry doesn’t. But the poet, who was already on the far edge of credibility, is reintroduced as a symbol maker, a mathematician slipping a coded revolution into the matrix.
That might make an entertaining science fiction novel, but it has nothing to do with the energy or intent of a poem.
Poets may be unearthing hidden treasure, but the spoils of their war are everything mathematics isn’t. Every great poet destroys the old order. It’s for the reader to discover and see that, if he can.
The old order, which is always and forever fascism dressed up as “greatest good,” keeps resurfacing in the same pool of decay.
It’s the poets who know how to climb down into the muck and also fly above it, waking the dead parts of the psyche.
Whoever rules the dead, and with what royal purpose, remains constant: he rejects poetic consciousness that can fully restore the human being to life.
Poetry does more than reorder reality. It creates it from the beginning, from the first line on the page of the future.
Society, as it has been shaped, is the sum of illusions that prevent the individual from hearing the first line, even as it echoes in his mind.
This repression is a cooperative exchange in the marketplace. The individual agrees to deafen himself, in order to placate his inner forces.
“Time let me hail and climb, Golden in the heydays of his eyes. And honoured among wagons, I was prince of the apple towns, And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.”
“Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table…”
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis…”
These aren’t instructions or code or habits to be performed, or political improvements. They’re grand intrusions on the commonplace labyrinth. They come in and explode.
As the consciousness of these things dwindles in the era of the machine and all its complications, as the matrix expands to include language-calculations designed to describe what the individual is and isn’t, a sea of metrics forms the illusion of progress.
Caught in nests of symbolic relation, we wait, “till human voices wake us and we drown.”
To the extent the poet is merely taken to be crazy, doom is settling like a shroud around our shoulders.
“…the willingness to give the response to the heroic…gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil.” (DH Lawrence)
But poets always come. They see doom and they use it as fuel for a new fire that ends one epoch and begins another. Who hears them? That is always the open question. We are already living in a new time, if we would recognize it.
“Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race.” (Johann Georg Hamann)
“[Poetry:] Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” (Thomas Gray)
Imagine there were a million new and unknown languages waiting to be discovered. These tongues wouldn’t make things simpler. They wouldn’t make machines run more smoothly. They would lead us into worlds that had remained in the shadows because we had no way to express our perception of them. They would light up whole geographies of consciousness that had been dormant. Every compromise with reality would be exposed as a blatant enormous lie.
Every “thought-machine” would crumble. The absurdity of building bigger and bigger organizations as the grand solution to conflict would reveal itself so clearly, even android-humans would see it and wake up from their trance.
Here’s an excerpt from my unfinished manuscript, The Magician Awakes:
You sit there and tell me about your life, but after a while it occurs to you you’re talking in a blind language. You’re moving below other words you don’t give voice to.
You vaguely think, from time to time, the other words might be in Nature. But Nature is just one part of that expression. There are thousands of other Natures. And each one has a language that unlocks it and spreads it out in a different space and time.
Would you rather pull back in and settle on the words you use every day? Would you rather become an expert in those words, a king of those words, a ruler in that small place? Is that the beginning and end of what you want and where you’re going?
Because if it is, then we can end this discussion and all discussions. We can please ourselves with what we have. We can dodge and duck. We can inject ourselves with a satisfaction-drug and say there’s nothing else to do.
This is how a circumscribed life happens: through a story a person tells himself.
There is really only one universal solvent that will wash away that story: imagination.
The ultimate basis of all mind control is: whatever it takes to deny the true power of imagination.
The exact same thing can be said about the ultimate aim of political repression.
To understand, to get an idea about what imagination is capable of, you need to go to ART.
The creative center of the world.
“After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.” Wallace Stevens
What would happen if the world were enveloped by art? And if we were the artists? And if we owed nothing to any hierarchy or external authority?
Art is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the boredom of the soul.
Art is what the individual invents when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s what the individual does when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.
Art is the end of mindless postponement. It’s what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It emerges from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.
Art destroys the old order and the new order and the present order, with a glance.
Art spears the old apple on the point of a glittering sword and opens up the whole rotting crust that has attached itself to the tree of life.
It shrugs off the fake harmony of the living dead.
Fueled by liberated imagination, it is the revolution the psyche has been asking for.
Art unchained becomes titanic.
There are artists like Stravinsky, like Gaudi, like the composer Edgar Varese, like the often-reviled American writer Henry Miller, like Walt Whitman (who has been grotesquely co-opted into a Norman Rockwell-like prefect), like the several great Mexican muralists—Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros—all of whom transmit the oceanic quality.
As in, The Flood.
There is a fear that, if such artists were unleashed to produce their work on a grand scale, they would indeed take over the world.
Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.
That this has not happened is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.
Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the consensus-shape we now think of as central and eternal?
We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.
But creation is not neutral.
It flows out into the atmosphere with all its subjective force.
It is the transformation we have been unconsciously hoping for, the revolution that would relentlessly make society over, that would eventually shatter the influence of all cartels and monopolies of physical and emotional and mental and spiritual experience.
Not because we wished it were so, but because we made it happen.
Prometheus, the artist who unchained humanity…
Through what mirror are we looking at ourselves in these ancient tales?
The Prometheus story makes absolutely no sense unless we acknowledge there is a reason for rebellion. But not just any rebellion. One man assaulting the supernatural mountain of the Olympians to steal fire, escape, and bring it back to man is more than audacious, if the Greek poets invented the pantheon of gods and their aerie in the first place.
In that case, the theft of fire is an acknowledgment that power is returned home.
“We invented the gods. Now we re-invent ourselves.”
Religion is frozen poetry. The poets began by writing outside the boundaries of the tribe, and the priests appointed themselves the sacking editors.
They hammered and cut and polished the wild free poems into tablets and catechisms and manuals of stern disapproval. They gathered up workers to build the temples where the new laws would be preached and taught. They established the penalties for defection. They staked an exclusive claim to revelation.
They established the false and synthetic universal centrality of myth disguised as revelation, and they sold it, and they enforced it, and they prepared a list of enemies who were threatening the Law of Laws.
And all that raw material, which they stole? It came from the poets. It came from the free and boundless creation of artists.
So Prometheus was setting the record straight. He was cracking the system like an egg. He was bringing imagination back where it belonged.
Of course, in the ancient myth, he paid a high price for his actions. But that’s merely more propaganda. The high priests write that retribution-ending on every story springing from freedom. They call the punishment by various names, and they naturally claim it is brought down by hammer from the Highest Authority. They work this angle with desperate devotion.
Prometheus was the liberator. He was the Chinese painters of the Dun Huang, the Yoruba bead artists, the Michelangelo of David, the Piero della Francesca of Legend of the True Cross, the Velazquez of The Maids of Honour, the Van Gogh of Irises and lamp-lit Arles, the Yeats of Song of the Wandering Aengus, the Dylan Thomas of Fern Hill, the Walt Whitman of The Open Road, the Henry Miller of Remember to Remember, the Orson Welles of Citizen Kane, the Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet, the de Kooning of Gotham News.
He was Tesla and Rife.
Wherever individual human imagination was launched as the fire, Prometheus was there.
Of course, he wasn’t. He was the story we told ourselves about what we could do. That story is meant to remind us that all collective vision is a fraud. It may not begin that way, but sooner or later, it becomes a gargantuan slippage into narcosis of the soul.
Prometheus is the story we tell ourselves to remember the line between what the individual can learn and what he can create, and how many horses have been pulled up to that line and refuse to cross it and drink from the wells of imagination.
Prometheus is the story of a recapture of what we are. We may have buried the understanding deep in our psyches, but it is there. How many ways we try to refuse it!
We huddle in groups and pretend all progress flows from the mass. We diddle and fiddle with this limit and that limit. We adjust and make more room for the Average. We build machines to think at a higher level than we can. We watch theatrical spectacles of “new hybrid humans.” We proclaim healing virtues and forget about what the healing of the spirit might actually entail, what revolution, what vital energies, what leaps of imagination, what assertions of our inherent power.
We keep thinking of peace, when peace means, as defined by the “wise ones,” a death. Their peace is what is left over after the war of the creative human has been surrendered.
Their peace is syrup. Their peace is submission to some Glob of “universal consciousness.” Their peace is a column of grinning idiots guarding a self-appointed tower of learning. Their peace is the survival and organization of damaged goods. Their peace is: “if it is meant to happen, it will.” Their peace is: the universe decides, we oblige. Their peace is a cosmic junk-heap.
From this mob of castrati, Prometheus emerged, untangling himself from wet strands of delusion, resignation, and fear. He soared. He advanced. He took back our basic and vital character. He breathed crackling energy into bloodstreams.
From the Promethean perspective, Reality is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.
Beyond systems. Beyond structures.
Energies churn in subterranean caverns. Where will those rivers run for the next thousand years or thousand incarnations?
What would create an internal revolution?
What would start the water wheels spinning and the torrents surfacing?
How would creation begin?
On that Promethean question rests the fate of every civilization, past, present, and future.
Every thread, atom, quark, and wavicle of this Reality is posturing, is imbued with the impression that “what already exists” is superior to what the individual can now invent. The causal chains of history seem to produce the present and the present seems to produce the future.
These are the grand deceptions. These are the illusions…
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
“The world is my representation” —opening sentence of
Schopenhauer’s ” World as Will and Representation “
Jon,
That is an amazing piece of writing.
I thank you.
Mike
This Piece breathes awash on a sharp razor’s edge.
Talk about Oceanic!
But I will not quit.
Tumble me around.
I will create myself some ground. There are no words.
Yet I won’t allow myself to drown. Somethings’ can’t be past found. But made from scratch. Silence.
You capture my frustration with “modern” life precisely, this is beautiful!
Thank you seems a mere notion.
Motion.
I’ll make up a word:
[“Evocean”].
To Know,
To Will,
To Dare,
To be Silent.
All things, begin with a thought.
Where I see most problems in societies:
Even IF there are those who think of a means or a way, that is ALL they do is think about it – and then do nothing with it.
So, whereas “a thought” is the start of something new, it STILL requires complimentary action to bring it to fruition (or “manifest” as some would say).
So much for all of those “theories” that rehash the trope: “Free will is but an illusion.” – If such truly be the case, then HOW is it that genuinely unique, artful works take on a different appearance and character if created by different people – EVEN IF – the work at hand is the very same thing, done through the very same set of steps and methodology?
“Art” is truly a domain of “being human”.
– Jim S.
Reading this piece fanned lolling embers into fire, Jon. Giant thank you for stirring and saying.
Good Lord this is gorgeous, thank you so much Jon. Ray Bradbury was one of those artists.
Dear Jon,
without blame, the poet behind this article (which itself, at least to me, is not an “article” but an advanced poetry), has been indeed on the far edge of credibility.
He is not only reintroduced as one of the most credible members of our society endowed with intellectual honesty, but a symbol maker, a mathematician slipping a coded revolution into the matrix.
Dear Jon.
Your interview with the president of the El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus has been brave and outstanding at the same time.
The same holds true for this article.
I have submitted your name for a Pulitzer prize.
Thank you for all you have done,
With love,
Herbert Helmut.
Rereading that, suddenly I feel super positive about the state of the world. I could almost sing that other song…it went something like…
“I can’t prance, I can’t caulk…only thing about me is the way I stalk”. If I recall correctly it was from Genesis, right? Well, it may have been or Revelation or Exodus. Doesn’t really matter…
But that’s what makes panopticon such a fun game.
This morning on radio four, BBC UK, before Boris Johnson’s confirmation that masks will no longer be compulsory in shops and pubs and restaurant the two interviewed bosses said that in order to protect their staff they will still require from them to wear them and uphold social distanciation and will advise their customers to do likewise….
Consenting servitude? No, worse thant that… They no longer want freedom
I went to a local supermarket in the UK today. Few were unmasked. On the way I passed the town crematorium. A huge sign outside advertised an OPEN DAY this weekend. Trying to drum up business?
Jon, Again my thanks to you on behalf of about six and a half billion people who are being swept away by a Riptide of future promise. Such “promise” comes by way of human to machine fusion. That promise however is an illusion. Life is so much more than two googols (many trillios) of ones and zeroes. Viz, long ago several people suggested to me that perhaps I ought to get into ‘Computer Science’ as a career. After taking 2 classes in that field it became clear that computers were a useful tool, yet they are absolutely incapable of reflecting the reality in the world around us. The realities of this world and universe can Never be boiled down to an ‘on or off’ dichotomy. And that dichotomy is (or was*) at the core essence of computers: ‘bits’ are a sort of a slot in a computer’s memory containing a one or a zero, and ‘bytes’ are a collection of six of those ‘bits.’ * – Perhaps computers are now being (or have been) developed beyond that stage. If any other commenter(s) are aware of such – then please – do tell the rest of us here, and I shall stand (or sit) corrected. 🙂 Next, on to Poetry.
“The Man in the Moon was recruited from within a Celestial Army Platoon.
And the Cat with a Hat sat down for a Tea Party with a Polka Dot Rat!
A mouse jumped off and floated down from the top of a clock,
Meanwhile, Morrie the Torry was hard at work at a busy dock.”
– by Dr. W!
That string of words does continue on for a bit longer however I type slowly and have many other things to do. Maybe someday, someone might find some of my old notebooks strewn with poetic rhymes and a few full-fledged poems. How could I know? At least now Jon has offered a purpose for my having composed them. This commenter agrees with the hypothesis of todays blog.
Dr. WI; Those two classes in computer science can’t
have been much good. Eight bits make a byte not six.
But agree that life and reality cannot be reduced to
computer logic however complex it may get.
The mad scientists with ‘particle’ accelerators are
on a futile quest to nothing of any value to man or
beast.
Sorry Dr. W.
Great piece, Jon. A Manifesto, really. Kick-ass, for sure.
I too feel that Art (capital A) is important and a Key to our evolution, an ever-refreshing stream that transforms dead cells and rotten patterns. I’ve been a writer for many years.
But I think it goes beyond art, or Art. It goes into Being, simple being, though it’s not so simple. We’re creating ourselves day by day, hour by hour. Are we cherishing our own fire? Are we respecting our own beauty? Are we balancing and moving into harmony continually between ourselves and the world?
Why have so many famous artists immolated themselves on their own flames? See it’s not just “art,” our Outward creation. Art is every moment, it’s being aware, knowing every thought is creative. Remembering who we are and what our power truly is. Art is consonant with life but Being encompasses all.
Jon, what’s your take on the graphene oxide story?
quote
Just recently, reports coming from a team of doctors, scientists, researchers, and professors from the Spanish organization, La Quinta Columna, have stated emphatically that the highly toxic graphene oxide is not only present in vials of ‘Covid vaccines’ from most all pharmaceutical manufacturers, but is also being delivered in masks and through ‘Covid’ testing. This is very startling information, and answers a lot of questions about not only the symptoms present for many, but also may further expose another part of this nefarious agenda that is depopulation.
unquote
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/07/gary-d-barnett/is-graphene-oxide-causing-what-is-falsely-being-referred-to-as-covid-19/
If the imagination is the power we can use to fight against the matrix, than let’s start using it. Let start inventing each day a new way to fight the matrix and the parasites, invent a new way to be free.
All the stories we see in media, all movies we see, reinforce the matrix. It make us think and imagine like the matrix wants. We shall stop thinking like the matrix wants us to and think like we want. Imagine that the police will protect us and not the politicians, imagine that we can communicate without the need of internet, that we can detect when a politician is lying, that a bankster cannot create money out of thin air…
dear mr. rappoport
you do this so well: trying to describe the indescribable: imagining colors we have not seen. sounds we have not heard.
etc.
i’m visualizing the proverbial blade of grass coming up through concrete.
and that blade is
the tip of a giant underground evergreen.
GREAT !
POETRY can say those things which otherwise cannot be said
With some personal Poems in Your Baggage you can survive the hardest misfortunes.
They will resurrect Your spirit when everything else appears lost
They can give You new Strength .. to carry on .. on Your path in this Life .. when there is no other help
Poetry has been my saviour for all that part of my life i became aquainted with them … and they are with me .. wherever I go
With them I am never really alone
“Imagine there were a million new and unknown languages waiting to be discovered…
Every ‘thought-machine’ would crumble. The absurdity of building bigger and bigger organizations as the grand solution to conflict would reveal itself so clearly, even android-humans would see it and wake up from their trance.”
There is only one reason why limitations exist at all. WE PUT THEM THERE. They don’t exist until we erect those prison walls. And then decide to live within them.
“You sit there and tell me about your life, but after a while it occurs to you you’re talking in a blind language. You’re moving below other words you don’t give voice to.”
You can’t ever know what it is to feel what another person feels. You can’t know the reasons why they feel things the way they do. You can’t know what they mean when they use certain words. You can’t know what they intend to convey to you when they share those words with you. Nor can they know any of these things about you.
It’s a miracle that anything resembling actual communication ever goes on. People who feel different things and use different meanings trying to comprehend and convey thoughts and feelings through the fog and confusion of lack of a common ‘language’.
Imagination means that I can feel something that no one has ever felt. Imagination means that I can invent language to try to convey this feeling that no one ever had before. Imagination means that I can travel to places and worlds that never existed before I created them. But if no one else is ‘listening’ to me… or if I’m not doing an adequate job of trying to convey what is impossible to convey… then that ‘magic’ dies beyond my own skin. The lesson? We not only have to live and speak from imagination… we have to LISTEN with imagination as well.
I would love to read more from “The Magician Awakens”. Incredible.
A hoax is a hoax
Of course of course
And no one can talk to a hoax,
Of course
That is, of course
Unless the hoax
Is the famous Dr. Fauxi!
Go right to the source
And ask the hoax
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse
He’s always on a steady course
Talk to Dr. Fauxi!
People yakkity-yak a streak
And waste your time of day
But Dr. Fauxi will never speak
Unless he has something to say!
Oh, a hoax is a hoax
Of course, of course
And this one’ll talk ’til his voice is hoarse
You never heard of a talking hoax?
Well, listen to this:
“. . . I am Dr. Fauxi!”
Rick’s Parody of Mr. Ed 1950s TV Show (about a talking horse) Theme song Lyrics
http://www.songlyrics.com/mr-ed/mr-ed-lyrics/
Where did the song a horse is a horse come from?
• The song was taken after a theme from EmileWaldterfel, a German Romantic era composer. For the very first six episodes of the show only an instrumental version of the song was used, but when a professional singer could not be found, Livingston decided to sing the lyrics himself.
Computer language is binary, ones and zeros, just two possibilities. Artificial, by stringing these ones and zeros together in a certain pattern. Just like the computer-generated C0V1D ‘virus’.
It’s The Artificial Matrix.
Poetry is analog, with infinite possibility. Just like Nature intended.
Mother Nature. Universal. Of which us humans are an intimate part.
Amazing. Grace. Thank you, Jon. That essay ranks in the top ten of all the excellent posts of yours I’ve read over several years.
I appreciate your work on the “COVID Caper” especially. In my 75th year, I congratulate you on your clarity of mind and incisiveness at your age of 83 (if I recall). I hope to follow in your tracks!
Another oft reprinted line, from Randall Jarrel’s “Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner”; “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the state/ and I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.’
Jim Wright stopped the clocks by simply stating, “I have wasted my life.” He and Dick Hugo were drinking buddies and both understood the dramatic value that line carried, and I think each was happy to let that load rest wright where it hung.
You’ve opened a fucking serious can of worms…
Your article deserves the highest rating. The truth was not only condensed but also vividly expressed. The fire of the revolution must spread, so I want to thank you for your creative work.
PAST & PRESENT
HEAR & THEN
CONNECTIVITY OR NOT
There is the old saw “all things are connected.” This phrase, whether purpled-saged or not, was re-evoked years ago, from/within the New Age movement.
Presently, “we’re all in this together,” has become in-vogue, by the Algorithm-ist’s. Nefarious means, may abound, by such collect-ivising.
~
There are equations (F=ma, E=mcc, et al.), that have been discovered-or-invented, depending upon one’s state-of-reference.
Al’s famous quote of an equation was “if it be true, it must be simple.” Which would render & carry a certain elegance within.
~
I think it was Beethoven who said, Music was for the glory of God. And he wrote his pieces with Him in mind.
Other musicians, as well as physicists, have said, mathematics underpin just about everything. Said underpinning, is more supportive, that birthing.
~
I guess it’s the proverbial chicken ‘n egg deal.
Hmm…it’s early morn.
Scrambled eggs “sound” good.
Now I gotta choose between sausage or bacon, as an accompany-ment.
I’m no astrologer, merely a student.
My path has been inhabited by a revisit by particular signs. And so, I’ve become somewhat familiar with their broad & tensing Faculties. (I suspect most people experience such familiarity).
This is the Beauty of Astrology, IMO. To sit & simply watch & experience their particular Vitality, as they sing their particular viewpoints & Powers into being.
To “participate,” in such a Landscape, is nothing but a Gift, to the given.
The Lord’s Sky, is rather expansive.
Correction fluid, to the little nerd, who has taken up un-sought residence, within “my” “spell-check,” OR rather, “word-replacement.”
“Said underpinning, is more supportive, THAN birthing.”
~
“It’s all RELATIVE…”
~ Sayeth Al
I saw a sunrise for the first time this morning. I saw the stolen fire of Prometheus melting Urizen’s nets of convention. The poetry of the sky dispels all the lies.
What do you think the ghost bards of civilization are trying to tell us? They are telling us to set sail on the chaotic sea of the imagination, let down your nets and bring back some nugget of the great mystery that can nourish the spirit and advance the cause of human civilization. Lash yourself to the mast of your vessel and sail beyond the sirens of modernity. Great treasures await us.
ADMITTING
& ADMITTANCE
Years ago, people, when looking upon the unlanded straight line of the horizon, imagined a waterfall at its “falling” edge.
This ideation, curtailed distant venture.
The Vikings slapped on their horned helmets, jumped blind into their ships, & said “F-this, we’re gonna take a look-see.”
Glyphs, hammered into rock, along the northeastern coast of the North American continent, bear long-witness to their contact & earlier claims of courage-d voyage.
~
Far, far ere, the Church-inspired sailings of Columbus.
~
Finding gold & BECOMING gold, does differ.
I love this quote from Jon’s blog. It reveals the true nature of organized authoritarian religion, the methods of which inspire all totalitarian regimes.
“Religion is frozen poetry. The poets began by writing outside the boundaries of the tribe, and the priests appointed themselves the sacking editors.
“They hammered and cut and polished the wild free poems into tablets and catechisms and manuals of stern disapproval. They gathered up workers to build the temples where the new laws would be preached and taught. They established the penalties for defection. They staked an exclusive claim to revelation.
“They established the false and synthetic universal centrality of myth disguised as revelation, and they sold it, and they enforced it, and they prepared a list of enemies who were threatening the Law of Laws.
“And all that raw material, which they stole? It came from the poets. It came from the free and boundless creation of artists.”
“…’Oh no, I do not gloat over my own person, I do not get all hot wrestling with my soul in a darkened room; I have no desires, save the desire to express myself–in defiance of all the world’s muteness’…”
-From the novel ‘Invitation to a Beheading’ (1935) by Vladimir Nabokov.
I keep telling people I’m not liberal, I’m liber-ATED. Know the difference. The philosophy of the enemy, foisted upon weak minds, is an empty, crude plastic fakery. There is no higher responsibility for the liberated soul than to express.
And let that expression take the form of poetry, painting, music, sculpture, or what have you. The only criteria? As Kubrick (the greatest American filmmaker) famously asked: “Is it truthful? Is it interesting?” And I’ve been realizing that he was asking this of the *artist*. Is it truthful and interesting to YOU, the artist? Don’t worry so much about the audience. Kubrick’s movies were often dismissed and disdained initially, but appreciated much moreso upon repeated viewings.
Please accept the deepest gratitude for this essay. I know I will return to it many times.
I used to like inventing new words with their meaning only suggested. I should have kept a list as now I can only remember a few of them….my favourite was ‘sugmented.’
Beautifully wrought, Jon. Which, in the words of Montaigne, would translate simply to beautifully thought. And indeed, things as they now stand can be more clearly understood on a purely aesthetic level, which is to say, one in relation to Art.
Unravel the rich tapestry of Art from a society and you are very quickly confronted with ugliness, which strikes at the lowest common denominator, the wretchedness, of our condition. A life without beauty. And then it remains to be seen what capacity a society possesses to grind along the ugly trail of a life devoid of beauty.
It is entirely possible that people are willing to sign themselves over to a process of universal suicide rather than commit to the Promethean ideal of man which is just far too demanding and confronting a task for most, and in turn, threatens to show them up for their lack of courage, lack of intelligence, perseverance, and callous lack of imagination.