Oct 16 – The Fall of Civilization (re-edited)

I.

The rise and fall of civilizations, the flowering and wilting cultures, the shining and dimming of peoples, ideas, of so-called “movements”, faiths, creeds, religions epochs, ages, and generations – to include great men and minds and their enthusiating gods – lo, even (and perhaps most strikingly) the procession of time itself is governed and delimited almost exclusively by man’s engagement with, relationship to, appraisal, and moral valuation of his own physical body.

II.

It is not Reason that enables me to inch any closer to God, rather it is those rare, intermittent bursts of Unreason, irrationality, blind instinct, and passion that ferry a man (often without and even against his will) within earshot of God’s celestial throne, the flashing terror of such proximity which would, without Reason to drag my limpen body, like any faithful comrade on the field of battle, far from the fray to the refuge of order, rationality, soundness of mind, and prudence of sense, toward the safety of a certain “materialism” and disbelief as it were; Unreason and Irrationality that would destroy me to the uttermost and preclude thereafter any future attempt to reclaim such an exalted celestial position; Reason which enables man to apprehend Truth not by any “positive” or “affirmative” effects it may elicit but by the negative nay-saying it cannot help but impose upon the facilities of man; “no” which – when coupled with the sensual grandiosity of “yes” – orders, integrates, and reduces – as needed – such grandiosity so that man might do and think and live “better,” which is to say, with a greater intimacy to Truth, according to whatever vantage one’s irrationality might grant him to glimpse its impossibility.

As such, in the “healthy” or “complete” life of a society, just as in the life of a healthy man, allowances must be made to foster, engender, and even in some cases encourage the intermittent expression of ecstatic mindlessness, euphoric delusion, unsoundness, stupidity, folly, innocence, ignorance, and childish inhibition, of the momentary breaking of taboos, inversion of societal norms, and brief subversion of the typical mores, customs, and values of a people, all of which should be ruthlessly reapplied and immediately upheld with the solemnity which is their due once Irrationality has been allowed to ventilate so that neither rationality or irrationality might hold ultimate sway over a civilization and by it, be unconsciously driven – and no less tormented – by that which is in greatest want and most fervent need by the great bulk of its members: Truth in all its disparate forms.

III.

The periods that witness the greatest and most prolific explosion of art, ideas, movements, conquests, advancements, experimentation, and the so-called “progress” of The Individual are those that – by relieving themselves of the chastity, probity, sobriety, and temperance that undoubtedly dominated the spirit and culture of the preceding age – begin to actually recognize the body “as such,” recognition that inevitably leads to the admiration and subsequent obsession with its form, function, and desire to not only upkeep said formality but enhance its functionality so that it (and, by extension, others, as well as the physical world each one inhabits) may be enjoyed and its underlying culture affirmed; enjoyment and affirmation which – in order for man to find greater and more powerful sensual territory to experience and express – increasingly convince a society that it must increasingly cast off and divorce itself from the cultural vestiges that the past used to hem the body in and to hew its unmitigated passions down so as to keep their society from chaos, disorder, and disintegration, those which we, at present, now see now as hindrance whether enshrined in law, duty to family, responsibility to community, values, mores, and the rest; the limitless casting off of the values that have endured most saliently through history (those which, it must be stated, enable the enjoyments of the present), does indeed with each of the aforementioned responsibilities divested and diminished and finally precluded, keeps man from realizing any lasting meaning in the body or purpose of the senses and, by extension, all perceivable “truth” by which a man or his collective mind, might stand and faithfully live his bodily life at all; such preclusion which descends a people toward such psychological, emotional, spiritual, and moral chaos which inevitably lead to full-scale civilizational collapse, that failed people’s fallen ruins which – after untold generations of pain, destruction, austerity, depravation, terror, death, uncertainty, and, ultimately, faith – will supply the necessary justification for the reapplication of the manifold restrictions that must be placed upon the expression of the body, and limit the access between bodies, those limitations which will ultimately view the body and its senses as fallen, broken, depraved, untrustworthy, as the source and receptacle for all evil which, if not violently restricted, brings death yet again by eliminating that which foundationalizes and ensures meaning from generation to generation in the first place: duty and loyalty.

IV.

All beliefs, if deprived of their actualizing potency for too long and sterile a spell, inevitably devolve into hope.

V.

To think is to hope; to ask is to want; to do is to will.