“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…
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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