My (re-edited)

I.

The Nihilist, it must be clarified, believes not in the impossibility or inexistence of the immaterial soul, but that, once parted from the subjective body in which it so intermittently dwells, it does not and, moreover, cannot retain the same characteristics it enjoyed when confined therein: physical death which obliterates not only the unique biological, mental and emotional configurations that an individual expressed in life but its every spiritual underpinning as well, forcing as death most certainly does the whole of one’s subjective essence to return to the objective void of indeterminate, eternal oneness of peace and repose from whence it possibly came.

If there is to be any spiritual endurance, any hope of so-called “life after death” it can only be realized through the memory of those subjective entities who will linger in material form beyond the deceased’s life; “The Individual Man” who – as he still draws breath – is thus eminently responsible for the perpetuation of his name among those who will outlast him, leaving as only he can through deed, art, thought and “love” an indelible mark upon the age he lived, the place he homed and people he homed it with.

II.

Hell, at least from the apparent vantage of those particular artists of yore who were concerned about such matters, is always depicted as the uniformed suffering of an unfathomable objective mass of naked, indeterminate bodies whose individual pain goes unheard and by it, unactualized, and is therefore utterly incapable of supplying the existential materials that might enable such tortures to find subjective meaningfulness and worthy consequence.

III.

For only a man living in the fullness of his finitude has the mystical power to attribute and imbue; Life which endows all who actively and conscientiously live it with the power and privilege to bestow more of it and at a heighten intensity than would have been otherwise normally possible without a willful mind to recognize it’s tragic ephemerality: the knowledge of the inescapability of death which is not only the great tonic of life but that which allows the living to draw its energies together so that they may be directed to achieve certain desirable ends.

IV.

The burden of a strong and powerful mind, body and spirit is that each must be employed and daily extinguished in a manner commensurate to the level of their exceptionality in order to eliminate or at least neutralize the excessive accumulation of unspent energy; excesses which will always afflict and torture a man by the very same means, method and measure by which they should have been exercised and put to productive use in light of day.

The Triumph of Venice, Pompeo Girolamo Batoni

V.

My tragedy, that which gravely threatens the endurance of my work (and memory) beyond death, is that I have answered this philosophical calling during the most unimaginably decadent, petty, frivolous, wasteful, irrational, inessential, sentimental and infertile of times: “my” age that bored monotonous gift of fifteen hundred-plus years of bodily and mental hardship borne determinedly by my forefathers, hardship which was overcome and its memory passed down through time in the near unbroken form of unchanging “truth”: the last fifth of the 20th century and on into the 21st which will, no doubt, only be remembered by its unmemorable folly, banality and triviality: an inexpressible desert of creative flaccidity which has and most certainly will continue to witness the common sensibility with all its puerile “goodness” triumph over every corner of earth and hearth of heart where men reside; that desert which is not only bereft of worthy men and first-rate minds but is completely divorced of and alien to the metaphysical conditions that might support, enhance and preserve the glory of such illustrious lives; this desert which requires for its renewal not merely the rage of a decades-long torrent but the seismological shift of the very plate upon which it squats from one side of globe to the other.

VI.

So incapacitating is this foresight with regards to the steadfast endurance of life as well as the earnest actualization of its most delicate qualities that I, as one who has nevertheless chosen to live and affirm it, have no other choice but to dedicate the spirit and blood of my work to the eradication of every condition, precedent and principle that continues to prevent the species “man” from rising above the stunted, inauthentic puerility that so definitively pervades and enslaves the world of spirit, art and thought today; my faith which clings to the hope that my progeny might one day glimpse upon great men of power, glory and unassailable beauty once more.

VII.

Shameful is he who has a difficult thing to say and does not say it, shameful the writer who has the gift of verse but not the will to compose it, the artist of tremendous vision but not the grandiosity of soul to complete it: Shame which in our decadent and worthless age is, indeed, needed more than any other affect to prod and poke such times out of its myopic self-satisfaction, that which refuses to guard itself from its own destruction by believing no such destruction can even conceptually exist.

VIII.

My literary greatness is no strength of insight nor particular power of prose but that I – God willing and body permitting – will outlast with a certain angry intensity every man of letters who has gone before or will.

La battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio, Renato Guttuso