Limitation, Ease, Dilution (re-edited)

I.

Taken from a lofty and broad enough vantage, societies can be seen as the material expression of the collective soul and inner constitution of whatever common sensibility animates the leaders of the spirit of an age, our own time which is tyrannized by the brute passions and apish apprehensions of the mass man who, in nearly every past epoch, was prevented by the foresight and prudence of Nature herself from holding any sway over the destiny of a race given how offensive and contrarian his own essence is to hers; Nature who has always rewarded not the timid and safe but the bold, brave and virile with the burden of authority and responsibility; She who, in a Scientific Age such as ours, now unfortunately finds herself in chains due to the failures of the strong to retain their former hold over those lowly and effeminate emotions which the common man throughout history has always held unconflicted esteem; Emotions which have forever longed to revenge themselves against the ruthless discrimination of Nature who, if not herself the source of want, pain, scarcity and finitude, is at least the sphere in which such travesties are actualized; Emotions which, since their exile from the innocence of Eden, have not slacked in their want to return thereto and with: Eden without history, without memory, without loss, regret, shame, yearning, want or will; without pride, without dignity, without duty, responsibility, authority, power, reason or purpose; Eden of unending sensuality without cost or consequence, without sacrifice or the unremitting spilling of blood that Nature – that ol’ bitch – still requires of the best and brave her suitors and beaus.

II.

Nihilism did not arise in man simply as a means to destroy those values that could no longer maintain their cultural utility, but as the necessary response to the deluge and dilution of those values brought about by man’s civilizational, technological and scientific success which, from a certain vantage, can be seen as the manifestation of the Collective Body of Man bringing forth those moral and material conditions that might better allow it to secure – without opposing consideration – what it always had and still continually wants: ease, comfort, convenience, sloth, laze, largess, indulgence; grapes, figs, pomegranates, chocolate, wine, cake, sex, drugs; warmth, surety, entertainment, titillation and whatever else might elicit a pleasurable feeling at the cheapest and most accessible rate that can presently be conceived; the Present which the Body continually seeks to modify so that the material limitations of the space-time confines of boundary, border, wall, safeguard, prudence, patience, wisdom, heritage, duty, custom, history and tradition may, if not be completely abolished, then at least sufficiently mitigated to ever-diminishing spans of insignificance.

III.

If the Artist intentionally plans anything before he embarks upon a work, it will only be that which his aestheticism will ultimately thwart him from fulfilling.

For if he accomplishes his plan, he has, unfortunately, disqualified himself as an Artist, and by it, a higher form of man: Art by its very nature as that which resists perfection, permanence, determinacy and conscious intent; Art as that which, in fact, essentializes the restrictions that define flawed, fleeting and finite man; the Artist who, through his life and work as a higher being, is charged with raising life’s finitude to some stranger, more obscure and perhaps loftier standard by which the experience of the race might be at all recognized as unique, enduring and thus worthy the endless toil of time on earth.

Flying Fish with Two People, Hieronymus Bosch

IV.

In order for conscious awareness to actualize itself so that it may move beyond mere potentiality and become an enduring reality (in the mind of man or otherwise), it must – according to the teleological purpose it alone seems capable of fulfilling – create as well as apply certain psychological models and existential frameworks upon and over unconscious nature in order for man to successfully navigate her inescapable chaos; consciousness which is inseparable from both the modelling act as well as the models themselves, despite how disparate their apparent functions may seem when viewed in subjective isolation.

V.

Was not the higher activity practiced by the most distinguished types of the Dark and Middle Ages a centuries-long process of defining and redefining a consensual set of civilizational terms intended to reanimate civilization in wake of its demise and prior collapse? – scholasticism as Western Europe’s chosen method and means for forging from the social, moral and cultural vacuum a standardized way of perceiving and conceiving reality by which the Modern Age is but a reaction to and argument against; Modernity which, as any spoiled heir born into right and privilege that they themselves did not earn, defines itself through the continual repudiation of such right and mutilation of such privilege; repudiation which, by breaking with hammers of doubt and skepticism into inconceivable shards the very words those Medievalists fought to establish and reinforce, released the unfathomable latent energies that the fathers had so diligently conserved and accumulated by way of their perseverance through such civilizational severity and cultural hardship; release that even today fuels the production and expansion of industry, scientific specialization and even the so-called “progress” of the arts and culture of the Western European race; Modernity which will no longer be reckoned “modern” whenever the momentum of such energies exhausts itself through the stupefying proliferation of experiential, material and mental objects produced by said release; proliferation which obscures and dilutes the rarity of experience itself, preventing man the power to rightly imbue anything with universal meaning or transcendent significance, our now-inescapable civilizational insignificance that will soon require the race to again define what each far-flung word or concept “actually” means before attempting to enshrine those words which hold actual value to the ongoing evolution of the race, and striking with utmost ferocity those that do not.

VI.

“Discipline”

The practice of self-disgust.