From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
Ghosts and Princes
The Defense of Poesy
second edition
Lord Dermond
Gregg Glory
Published by BLAST PRESS
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INTRODUCTION
‘My grande finale, my goodbye...’--J. Lydon
‘I can do no more with word, for those of you who don’t deserve’--D. Dermond
‘Call me liar, and perjure your enterprise’--Gregg G. Brown
A treatise on the highest and the best; no small undertaking! In fact such a magnificent project, the
stars of which are so grand, so powerful, that only a wisp of blinding
right may be presumed as I humbly but heroically endeavor to understand these
magicians of spirit, these founts of the most radiant gist. From Manfred upon the lonely cliffs of his
own terror to a serious young songstress pouring her heart out upon our blessed
altars of perception, the incarnation of what is highest and best is often
elusive, intangible; it is a matter
that involves the most refined of sacred essences. These highest expressions of the soul vary in intensity but share
the same undying commitment to the noble truths that enwound our human
hearts. Like sweet indigo silks, they
tighten to bleed their sweet lights upon us.
The heroic poet’s attention to the value of ideas is one of
his greatest glories. Such a creator
has what is almost an intuitive understanding of the creative principle in both
spirit and nature. A creative spirit of
this kind operates unbridled, and he remains unbroken by the world at
large. A passion for life, and an
unmoving will to find life in life, to glean the most radiant aspects from
every experience, is central to the emotional approach of such Credent
Regalists. I believe that ideas of the
highest and most spiritual nature are central to each man’s life, and I believe
that these ideas are often ignored or betrayed due to an imposed conformity, or
because of a fear of the life-changes that are demanded of the perceiver when
he truly sees that which is beautiful,—and then integrates that sense of the
beautiful into his entire life.
I endeavor to forgo
all of the fear in my life, to meet each radiant prospect or encounter with the
same zeal that Byron had—all the time.
The gift of fury is a rare essence that the radiant soul
taps and locks into. It is the will to
do something, anything—as long as the action taken burns and ignites our
feelings at their very core! I spurn
those who float upon the easy tide, gliding through a seaweed series of
half-discerned entanglements and mental conflicts,—‘conflicts’ that do not
engage the real challenges involving the highest questions of life, but instead
rehearse the kind of intellectual impotencies that render the reader helpless
and make their author a victim of his own foul lies. A rage for experienced truth can help bring an individual to the
abstract conviction that he has the ability to perceive his own feelings
correctly and meaningfully. Such a rage
has no patience with the easy self-deceit of cliques and fashions—all of the
lies and misdirections that one comes to accept in place of original
convictions.
Often it is a matter of several generations before the rare
‘rage for order’ and originality of such a creator is recognized by those
creators who come after him, and then, eventually, by the public at large. Once recognized and appreciated, they stand
before us as irreproachable and unassailable in their accomplishment. We can
only describe them by naming them, as when some tragic hero’s name
becomes an adjective that indicates the unique crux his imagined experience has
illuminated for the rest of us. Why
does the true poet require this multi-generational ‘judgment of his peers’
before his word is law? Because the
true poet, using beauty as his talk, speaks as an individual to other
individuals and—if one believes in all the fractions of the Hindic system—only
some infinitesimal proportion of mankind comes in each generation to the
light. I myself would throw off such
systems and have each man stand independently and reign over himself as he is,
and as he may come to be in all the scope of his human possibility.
Today, individuals who come to this blinding passage of
perception and self-assertion are confronted by a state of almost mythic
fragmentation. It seems to them that
the unity of being that they feel and know subjectively, on a personal level,
cannot possibly be real, or at least cannot be consciously acknowledged as
real. Taking such ‘subjective’
experiences seriously would demand too many ‘impossibilities’ if it turned out
that they were really true. If my subjective
hopes and feeling participate in reality, then all of reality must respond to
my personal experience; my tears and my
laughter can potentially transform the world—how utterly important then is each
grimace and grin! And so, the first
experience of an individual trying to claim the Credent Regale that is
humanity’s inheritance is often—almost inexorably—mixed with a kind of whipping
self-torture.
Given each Regalist’s gift/curse to perceive, experience,
and codify the sublime graces of the ideal into a voice unbelled from the
heavens, they are unfortunately, much of the time, simply singing to the
deaf. To truly hear and internalized
the power of another’s felt perceptions and to acknowledge their reality
demands that you acknowledge the power and effectiveness of your own felt
perceptions—and begin to take self-conscious responsibility for their effects
in the world. Better to shut one’s ears to symphonies than acknowledge the
challenge that we must raise the baton ourselves! And so, the mass of mankind hears no good, sees no good, and
speaks no good. This is the torture of
the artist and it imbues not only his work but every aspect of his experience,
which demands that a perfected divinity of action result from every rote motion
of existence. The Credent Regalist does
not accept life as it is dealt to him;
he reconstructs life from the spiritual gems of his own infinite
seas—his felt perceptions—and erects monuments of everliving word. This recreation of reality comes to the poet
like the voice of Michael the Archangel telling the devil to go to hell, and it
is his only salvation in a world where LIFE is not held sacred.
I am always held in awe by the tortured furies of such
modern Regalists. The shattered essence
of the artist: born in pain, and destined to die young—who understood
this? Not the watery eye of a rotting Beat
poet, but often those who idolized the Beats.
Many modern Romantics struck their riches by folly or by trainwreck,
often inspired by what they perceived as a Beat aesthetic. Richard Hell, Patti Smith, T. Verlaine,
Colin Newman, Devoto, Lydon, etc, were Romantics and Credent Regalists by
example and lifeforce rather than as self-conscious artists.
I am well aware of all the detailed dickering and sinisterly
infinite mechanisms modern consciousness has imposed upon the anointed joy of
poetry. Such attitudinal or ‘stylistic’
restrictions are helpful in a pinch, and they may keep the modern reader from
wincing. But only the high and mighty
‘frank talk’ that honesty imposes will ever build a civilization out of these
fragments of consciousness again. Our
discussions must be severe and high and sincere—how else can we ever again hope
to be these things ourselves? We must
not fear this seriousness in ourselves because of some morbid or nitpicking
taste; what flower ever stopped
blossoming because it thought itself ‘too beautiful?’
Signed, in the commission of a defense of Poesy:
Gregg G. Brown
Daniel B. Dermond
Respectfully submitted as:
THE LORD DERMOND
GREGG GLORY
THE LORDS OF WORD
HEROIC CREATION
Heroic creation beatifies the creator because of the
creator’s knowledge that, while his creation is eternal, he must die. (This is also why any eternal Creator’s
worlds are a botch.) And yet he creates eternal things—not out of the
possibility that he might enjoy them (as a child might create and think)—but to
assert himself over the universe through effective ethical action AS AN
INDIVIDUAL HUMAN. The efficacy and
truth of this self-assertion also gives rise to the occasional, extreme love of
the artificial, or man-made, exhibited in some decadents; they are smelling their way towards
individual heroism. Decadent
artificiality also demonstrates the individual’s absolute superiority over his
circumstances, etc., and his ability to maintain his own imagined world in the
world’s despite. Assuredly, the
decedent’s is a more cluttered vision, filled with lacquered trinkets and
color-coordinated dinner parties, but it is a vision of individual human
action, value and imagination—over and above that which is merely imposed
on the individual by circumstance. In
this way the creator acknowledges, masters, and defines his situation.
But is the moral question being asked in this situation the
correct one? Namely, that an
individual—in order to exist, must assert his equality to, and then superiority
over, the universe? And, how does
making the assertion that an individual man is superior to the universe define
that man? Why is this the necessary
ethical situation? Is it merely the
ethical situation? Is it the necessary
situation because it is the defining situation, or vice versa?
The cry of definition or asserted awareness of
individual self is the first necessary step to anything else because any action
that follows will require either an actor to execute the action or an object to
be acted upon. Without the
differentiation between universe and the self, which is created by the
assertion of that self’s awareness, nothing separate from (or within) the
universe would exist in the first place.
Lacking individuation, there is nothing to prove its moral equality,
superiority, or failure either to the created individual or the silently
witnessing universe—or to anything else for that matter.
Each man must act heroically—either creatively as defined
above, or tragically as do Oedipus, Macbeth and company—in order to become more
rightly aware of his ethical situation (and thereby exist more deeply and fully
as an individual). Man acts to prove to
himself that he is indeed the individual he asserts and claims himself to
be. This act of ‘proving’ causes the
individual to become increasingly conscious of his situation—and of
beauty. Oedipus becomes fully conscious
of his situation and THEN pokes out his eyes—voluntarily embracing his
suffering. By the end of the Oedipus
trilogy his awareness of beauty is also extreme and he ‘enters heaven’ as an
equal—beatified totally. The tragedies
that express and share these individual examples of self-valuation are among
our most beautiful artifacts as well.
Byron, Shelley and Prometheus (who is a man in the pagan
god-like sense, and not a god in the alienating Christian sense) are masters of
themselves because they have, like Zarathustra, collapsed into their
humanity. This collapse into self is
the result of nothing other than their being in a situation that demands
that they assert their individual equality to the universe or cease to exist as
individuals; each hero decides to
re-affirm or discover his individuality, no matter the terror of his
circumstances; they are re-made,
self-created and defined as Ubermensch thus.
Tie on the cape, pals!
Christ himself was an example of a man performing this same
ethical oblation, but the liberating power of his story was taken away by the
organized church which said that Christ died for the sins of all men. With that being the case, no more Christs
were needed, or indeed, even allowed;
this manifestation of self-redemption was unique. This type of foreknown and foredoomed
embracing of heroic suffering would, in the rest of Western tradition, normally
be termed ‘tragic,’ with Christ dying, not for our sins, but for his own glory:
the cold and ineradicable proof of his existence as an individual, in time, in
the world, for all time.
Christ was the model of an individual man, not an anonymous
godhead.
Is this initial assertion of self itself an act of creation,
or does it instead acknowledge that there may be grace in a universe
that can throw into existence something that is not that universe? Does this assertion create or discover a new
morally independent universe in each individual? The answer to this second question is immaterial—since it is the
conscious assertion of existence that allows the individual to go on and take
actions to prove this assertion true—first to his own consciousness and then—as
a gift almost—to the rest of the world and to the universe itself. In the case of heroic creation, the process
goes a step further and asserts its superiority over the universe, and then
goes on to prove this even greater assertion true.
And it is this created object of the artist—and, in the
supreme case of the poet, the poem—that must bear this stress and perdure
ineradicable in the created consciousness of generations of individuals. How can such an ‘eternal’ object be created in
time, where all must meander or race to the grave, with the sticks and bits
that patch our civilizations together, be they huts or skyscrapers? What are the qualities of such objects, and
of what materials are they made?
A poem is chiseled from the immovable rock of a purified
imagination, and as such it is its nature to be original, i.e. to be what it is. And it is exactly this individuality embodied and made manifest
that may prove the heroically creating individual’s assertion of superiority
over the universe true. In other words,
there is no necessity that the universe can impose on the free individual,
since that which is individual in us is exactly that which the universe does
NOT define through necessity. At the
same time, the heroically creating individual can (and indeed must, to
be heroically, individually creating) impose his volition on the blank eternity
that the universe presents. What the
existentialist might define as a ‘gratuitous act,’ is the only morally and
ethically necessary act (because self-defining) that any individual must
undertake. They defining qualities of
this action will be discussed in greater detail throughout this essay. In the meantime, I will say that the only
thing that is ‘gratuitous’ about such acts is that they occur in a state of
freedom, and they are not necessitated by the circumstances of their
actors. The existentialists, like the
decadents, are smelling their way toward individual liberty.
The imagination that is needed to undertake such a
projection of self, or out of one’s self, is purified by the individual’s
volition to exist as an individual, and as such cannot take part in anything
that is less than one-hundred percent itself, and is therefore, of that
necessity, original. A poem cannot borrow
the vital portions and unique breadth of another’s soul, just as a man of
virtue cannot hide from who he is, no matter how heroic or monstrous the
envisioned shadow his imagination projects.
A lord of word takes no shortcuts to glory when it comes to
his work. A poem can only respond to that
which is an intrinsic part of each individual’s soul, having nothing to do with
the more casual styles or quirks that an age may impose or an individual may
assume. In the end, a poem, like a
human being—which is to say as an independent source of moral and imaginal
excellence and self-existent force—must be true to its own form, bearing in its
being a singular soul that indeed and in every way becomes a living spirit
itself, spinning free in the rational space provided by the radiant vision its
creator upholds.
Such creations endure through time, and beyond, by the
ethical impact their beauty has on other self-aware individuals. The ancients may have seen this increasing
of consciousness as the material worlds aching and progressing back to spiritual
Oneness. I prefer to think of it as the
unity of ignorance being refined and inspired into the manynesses of the
individual.
An unborrowed conscience that consumes all it touches in
blessed magnificence is the spiritual pulp necessary to contain, arrange, and
create such words of unerring vision.
This is the challenge forced upon every writer, and it is what makes him
write in the desperate hope that a sufficient segment of humanity has not
forgotten how to recognize the enduring, individual value in themselves. For if they have, they will never be able to
truly appreciate a great poem, which, as an individual itself, demands the
total response only a fully conscious individual can muster to be able to rise
in the capable sun of a new day and to reach for all that such a self-awakening
might bring.
PUNK ROCK, ETERNAL YOUTH, AND THE BACCHANALIA OF LIBERTY
BLANK GENERATION
Y’know its fascinating the difference between those who have...
There’s those who make it and those who never make.
And y’know its fascinating because its really very clear
Either you’ve got it honey, or you ain’t!
—The Rich Kids, Ghosts of Princes in Towers,
circa 1978
Punk rock tore an ascending arc over the 1970s.
It is an arc that does not falter still, emblazoned in the
permanent whirl that all imaginative exertions trace. Often mistakenly labeled nihilists, they instead codified an era
of the individual more unerringly than any tribe of artists since the flaming
Romantics. There had to be some reason,
some real reason, why, in the cynical innocence of seventeen, when some
anonymous hand put on the Stiff Little Finger’s ‘Gotta Getaway,’ I was trapped,
smiling into the darkness.
There was, in all this ecstatic and angry utterance, no
damning naysaying of the nihilist, but rather an essential stripping down of
all that could not become, or sustain, the single individual in his fierce
pride and abject plight. And once all
extraneous distraction of status or erroneous feeling is stripped out of a man,
or falls into the dust—as with Lear on his bald heath or Richard Hell in the
elemental landscape of Downtown—a man alone must extinguish or soar.
It is only the assertion of self among the
destruction of all else that can allow or compel the individual to then ascend,
alive for perhaps the first time in the Credent Regale of his imagination,
smiling into the darkness. This is
always the inviolable work of the imagination, commanding each of us to make
real the moral infinity of our individual possibilities—that we draw fire from
the dross of this existence. As the
lyricist says, “among our chances there’s a chance we can choose.”
So these ghosts, these princes in towers,
It seems to me they got it made:
Because they sulk, and destruct, for no reason!
Well maybe they ain’t afraid!
When Shelley, in his ‘Defense of Poetry,’ talks about the
“invisible effluence” sent out by the great perceptive individuals of antiquity
reaching into contemporary minds and thus “sustaining the life of all,” he is
NOT taking the Platonic line about how some immensely distant ‘Ideal Realm’ is
accessible because permanently unchanging in any epoch—what he is talking about
are self-created men asserting an ethical effulgency of unimaginable strength:
the strength of an individual. Shelley
is asserting the fact that the ethical efficacy of the individual, as literally
embodied in poetry, can never be negatively estimated. No limit to its effects can ever be measured
because that which is beautiful will never stop having an impact; it will keep effecting things for as long as
things continue to exist. As old Ez has
pointed out: “Literature is news that STAYS news.” This is why punks were never nihilists, and never could be, alive
in their asserted shiver of selfhood.
No limit of the individual is assignable. Poetry and the individual are, in this sense, indivisible.
They’re ghost of princes in towers,
They’re the sharp ones, then and now.
And it’s ONE: that we’re one of them.
TWO: and it’s true
that THREE: it’s free and easy that
beFOUR too long, [they’ll] come back to THIS!
Its as simple as the song: “before too long, come back to
this.” Only those who truly live and exist as individuals can move in any
direction at all, take any direct action, or have any effect on either history
or themselves. The history a true
individual makes, or creates out of the infinite moral imagination of his mind
can never fade or fail to have its effect;
we must, if sincerely asserted, “come back to THIS.” Only when executed
sincerely is the infallible returning to “THIS”—the ascendant assertion of the
individual over the context of history and into the creation of it—a creation
of that returning self as well. Each
man must, with noble and self-loving divinity, consecrate himself to this
awesome task. To return to the sacred
assertions of others without the supremely conscious intent to undertake the
creation of oneself, is merely to read and not to do. This is the ethical nullity of the archivist, and not the
victorious ascendancy of the Credent Regale.
The assertion that is necessary to make the undying return
to the permanent words of an individual, and to truly touch those words and let
them pinch yourself open, is itself an assertion that is in accord with the
initial assertion that resulted in the creation of the selfhood of the
recording poet in the first place. This
is reading with intent. The recording
poets, or Credent Regalists alive only in the assertion of their imaginations over
the universe, are the “sharp ones [who] got it made,”—which is to say, they built
themselves; they are asserted
individuals, created as individuals by the grace of that assertion. How did they come to find that grace and
build themselves? “Well, maybe they
ain’t afraid.”
Just a singing ‘bout the ghosts of princes in towers
Said some boys, and how!
The princes in towers are ourselves, when, and if, created
by the gilded assertion of selfhood.
These princes are the self-created individuals of every clime and time
talking to us in the permanent poetry of their consciousness recorded. And that poetry documents that
consciousness’ self-creation. But, it
is more than a document—that poem is an object of beauty that calls on us to
create ourselves anew so that we can experience the beauty that it talks about
firsthand.
And it is the act of saying, and thus seeing, in the trim
minute of the poem the “boys” speak—that makes them princes of themselves. To know and create oneself the first time is
the model of all other returns to or re-experiencings of that act of
creation. Any such ghostly visitation
of the “past” (or recurring assertion of infinite self over the dim universe),
costing not less than everything, the individual necessarily stripped to his
skinny essence in order to even understand the creation he is witnessing and participating
in, is itself a recognition of that divinest self the erring world perpetually
masks and plunders.
The boys saying, or singing, about the princes in towers, is
the HOW of the princes in towers as well;
it partakes of their principle of self-creation. The doing, the saying, the singing, and the
recognition that demands not less than everything, is itself the ethical
act of creation: the observation, understanding and act of creation co-occur in
this single action all at once. It
cannot be divvied up into heavens of elsewhere or dim dreams of
afterdeath. Everything must happen in
the individual’s undying instant of self-recognition. Time is the illusion that we cannot shake, and the one challenge
that let’s us take a chance on dying forever or truly existing as deathless
individuals in the moment. Without
time, which undercuts us all, all actions would carry an equal value; there would be no way to sequence or prioritize
anything at all; having nothing happen
would be exactly the same as everything happening at once; in fact, there would be no ‘at once.’ Any Zen ‘now’ would be equivalent to the
Apocalypse. Each thing and every
experience would drift effortless and defunct, a wasted day at the beach
immortalized in unpurchased acrylic—the picked shells arranged for easy
remembrance.
Time is supreme over us in this way. In this way, as Richard Hell would say,
Only time can write a song that’s really really real.
The best a man can say is how it’s played or did this feel
And he only knows as much as time to him reveals.
But once man is aware of time, beauty is made possible
because a large part of ‘beauty’ is expressed in the sense of beauty’s own
perfection passing away. As Wallace
Stevens defines it, beauty is “the fitful tracing of a portal,” the immortal
memory of inextinguishable glory alive again for an instant in the brain of an
apprehending individual who knows that he must die, and that his death will
shatter his perfect apprehension of that still vital perfection.
Heroic suffering is beautiful because the sufferer,
asserting himself over the universe, is beatified by this assertion. The hero then embraces the voluntary
‘inevitability’ of this new beauty’s death heroically, in time. This final act of embracing volition serves
as icing on the cake of asserted selfhood, proving, beyond doubt and beyond
time, that the individual’s case, or assertion, is TRUE.
Johnny Rotten—and later John Lydon—made this same vital
assertion twice under two names: an unrehearsed man knowing himself individual
and capable against anything the world could throw at him. His burning theatre prayed for the audience
to create themselves alive—one self-creation insisting on a myriad others. This would reveal the original creator’s
regale as real, so that he might then ascend and never dissipate. To exist enough as a self-asserted
individual that another person creates themselves as an individual in order to
meet you or your creation in the Credent Regale of your rational liberty,
proves that you have truly lived, at least once, as a self-created
individual. The only social community
that such self-created individuals can possibly share is the community of
beauty. It is only through the
individual perceptions of beauty that they share a mutual world of beautiful
objects—which includes their own self-created, self-asserted
individuality. Any of Richard Hell’s
fabled performances are equal to this test.
And to the degree that each performance was a creation of self, the
audience’s reaction could be dropped as an insignificant afterthought. Only those who re-invented themselves to be
more capable of appreciating and responding to another individual were really
able to witness anything at all anyway;
so, at least, I would assert. W.
B. Yeats created himself as an individual by having his living creation Red
Hanrahan respond to him within the bounds of yet another creation of his, the
poem ‘The Tower.’title="">* This is how Yeats
ascended into the ‘second heaven’ of his imagination, his asserted
individuality, to ‘never dissipate.’
Punk music is beautiful because in it is encoded the actual
ACT of individuals asserting themselves over the universe. The music was never it. As Sid said: “Who cares about the music?”
I am always held in awe by the tortured furies of such
modern ascendance.
REASON AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CREDENT REGALE
Reason is that which identifies and integrates the material
provided by the senses. This process
results in the guiding rules of a rational life; this ideational integration of the senses and meaning provides a
purified fount for both our rational actions in the world and our most sacred
gestures about the world.
Reason ferries information from the senses (which is not
accessible to unmediated questioning) and holds that information rightly before
the mind that can then, without distortion, find in these blocks of world that
have entered us banners to blazon forth ourselves. The act of creative identity (allusion being its lowest form) is
a property of the mind proper. This is the
heroic creative essence of man, undimmed by time, and endowed with the grace to
express itself in this dying realm.
Reason finds meaningful action in man to the extent that it takes action
upon that which is permanent in him.
It has been widely held that those partaking in any Credent
Regale discard personal experience in search of broader themes. This subordination of the individual to some
amalgam of vague understandings or half-understood abstract ideals can never
truly be expressive of individuality.
This is a flawed and dismissive understanding that, surprisingly,
garners serious consideration to this day.
The Romantics, when acting as spokesmen of the Credent Regale, exalted
the idea of the individual as one of the highest of stars; only matters dealing with the highest and
lowest emotions were utilized by the Romantics. Such emotions have troubled and encouraged man and been at the
center of artistic endeavor since day one.
It is nothing less than the attempt to give meaning to a human’s life on
this planet and to understand the emotions that are universally acknowledged as
providing that meaning.
‘The chain of linked thought,’ unbroken through the ages—and
of which the Romantics form a participating link—is, as Shelley knew, the
understanding shared as human beings that lends permanent value to poetry and
life.
This chain of linked thought is composed of the expressions
that individuals have given of their individual existences. Such expressions, called beautiful, have
permanence imposed upon them by the creative faculty of the individual which
shapes and transfers these expressions into the world through reason. The proof of this permanence manifests
whenever another individual brushes across the individual’s expression and
grasps the essence of it. This is the
chain, an understanding embodied and then ‘shared’ or re-experienced by
subsequent individuals. The links are
embodied expressions of self themselves, the radiant nodes of dutiful
beauty. More than reason alone is
responsible for the outflux of such expressions—they are a rare touching of all
three aspects of our total reality: outer world, ferrying reason, and inner
creative self. All creativity, all
self-consciousness, and all communicable human experience come down to this
self-defining power we have to willfully recognize the individual essences that
we bear burningly within us, and then to powerfully say: I am, and will be! Or,
as I would submit, to recognize this pre-existing condition.
Man’s most noble and glorious purpose, his ultimate goal, is
to seek and secure his own happiness.
The will of human imaginative conception expresses an undying commitment
to what the mind perceives. Intuition,
leaps and guesses, are greatly explored in Regalist works. It is, however, the
unwavering commitment to what the mind perceives to be true that is at
the forefront of Regalist concern. A
poet of the highest order trusts his senses before any claims of supernatural
inspiration or ‘automatic knowledge.’
True Credent Regalists recognize no god who is said to exist
separate from their own faculties, rather they embody God in each line of
radiant verse, and in each sacred gesture of their self-consciously lived
lives. Any limit placed upon this
individual freedom to experience and express anything—even God—is evil, a devil
exacting a minimizing obedience from the unencumbered mind. We reject a god of qualified charms and
instead embrace our own divinity and idealism.
Does God exist? Credent
Regalists don’t know any more about this than any given handful of mystics
sticking around their own dark caves of delusion. God may absolutely exist! Some varieties of the Christian
religion state that God is alive inside of each one of us. Bon Dieu!
Exactly! Define your terms and reveal a god unto the soul of each man, every
soul its own savoir, reveling in the moment of its conscious apprehension and
self-conscious expression.
Reason as it applies to the artistic endeavor of the
Regalist poet is as vitally necessary as air is for the proper operation of the
lungs. Reason is the unique faculty of
the human mind that perceives the material provided by the senses and through a
process of integration gives meaning to that material. A Lord of Word has a heightened capacity in
this regard, since he perceives more and from that can derive more essential
truths from that raw imagery. Reason as
the guide of all rational human action is even more essentially awakened in the
mind and voice of the divinely exalted poet.
Perfection. The
thinning glimpses of a light so uniquely purified in the opalescent lens of a
beheld tendency, a grace so obliquely denied to all—except to the Lords of Word
who revive this tendency in each undying breath of a renewed grace. The true Regalist of this modern age
perceives and recreates experience as it might and ought to be—which is the
essence of Romanticism—rather than wasting time mired in the mundane,
non-participatory superfluities of this imperfect spectre. Simply accepting experiences as they come to
you denies your part in those experiences, or at least does not
self-consciously apprehend your part in them. The human will and imagination
are ever-active, and are never the slave of what some would try to pass off as
“mere fact.” To consciously participate, with the imagination, in reason’s
integration of facts into meaning indicates a perfection of spirit, a
symmetrical angel unbound in a revelation of truth so indomitable—so
spiritually exact that not to realize and revel in its discovery is an
abnegation of your humanity to a degree without limit; and yet this blindness is, and remains,
artistically, the moral code of our day.
What purpose does reason fulfill for the self-activated,
self-achieving and self-asserted individual?
Reason is the noble faculty that carries into action all
that makes an individual himself.
Without this fiction, or function, we would be no more than wraiths
crying aloud to the unlistening air.
This leads us instantly to the mental state—and to the
eventual reality of the states of being or surpassing moods of Hope and
Expectation. Hope and expectation. First consciously recognized through a life
of triumph and then fully realized by a triumph of life, the act of living
through a pure imagination and unresigned will. This is the individual’s triumph over tragedy, a purely human
thing that is the highest expression in art of man’s ultimate purpose.
Expectation, in terms of the poetic vision’s relationship to
life and death, can acquire the character of a faith. This is so because true poetic vision apprehends a confluence of
realities that endures beyond ourselves.
The assurance that such a vision gives takes on a prophetic character in
the foreknowledge that that which we undertake today with our truest selves
itself partakes of that which will still be true tomorrow. Such permanent creative acts embody a beauty
which will still speak to any individual at any time in any future. Such acts proclaim the existence of
individuality—and of that individuality’s victory over the decaying
universe—all within the scope of a single lifetime; the fulfillment of such a
prophesy requires no agent outside of an individual life’s experiences. And if death is all that intervenes, how can
such a victory be different in any individual’s future?
Hope and Expectation are necessary constituents of any moral
stance to be adopted by an individual who recognizes himself as an
individual. To know oneself as an
individual capable of glories equal to all the visible feast we feed on, and to
then not have such hopes and expectations of oneself that would make
skies blush would be a matter of intimate, and nearly infinite,
self-degradation. Indeed, one would not
demand such uninhibited victories of oneself, but rather expect their
ready accomplishment.
Any such victory and all such accomplishment is essentially
moral in its character. It embodies a
directed meaning that includes self-consciousness, rather than a simple
meaning which can never be more than a mere fact of consciousness. Such a victory has the quality of an
individual’s enhancing stance toward the world. This does not mean that the victorious Credent Regalist thinks
that his imaginative apprehension of the world can magically control that
world, as when a child thinks that he can magically move an object just by
wishing it would move. That is a caricature of the Credent Regalist position,
not its living aspect.
The hopes and expectations one has for oneself move by an
instantaneous sympathy to all other humans—what is true for me can be
true for all. These others have only to
claim this individuality for themselves to become self-fulfilling harbingers of
the same hopes and equally great and human expectations. But so many spit the manna from their
mouths. This vast self-devaluation of
others in the world can easily become a consuming contrast for any vivified
individual. With Byron, the perception
of such a contrast led him to imagine the world was a desert with no objects
great enough in it on which to express his individual moral force. Indeed, there is tragedy in such
circumstances. But it is not material
to the individual’s self-revelation.
Language, however, is always equal to any individual’s expended effort
because it, like reason—though superior to it—language partakes BOTH of
individual consciousness and uncolored reality.
The effort to establish a Credent Regale here on this earth,
in this life (was there ever any other heaven?) is crucially facilitated by the
right use of reason.
Reason is that faculty that helps to maintain the
sovereignty of the creative, individual essence in a man. It feeds the source with outer realities and
carries back to the world images of itself colored by the sovereign rarity of
man’s central sun—his self-consciousness.
This is the radiance that we feel in unblasted moments, deemed mystical
by the unapprehending, but recognized as personal and real by all who feel
it. It is, in the scope of this essay,
the frank talk of one individual to another.
As the sun brings forth every lifeform of the earth out of itself for
its yellow eye to witness, as in a perfecting, infective and creative mirror,
so in the same way does the individual release unbounded fragments of himself
into the world with fertile grace: In this way he has an immortal, infinite,
individual moral effect. Scraps of this
violent wind that shakes our souls we name ‘the beautiful.’
Reason keeps the connection between the creative self and
the world alive, letting our moral center have its actual impact in the
world. It is through reason that we
live, in the moment and in this world, not in another; and it is the right use of reason that saves
this existence from being nothing but vanity.
REALIZED DESIRE AND THE INFINITE BOUNDED
Credent Regalists make the hugest statements imaginable
utilizing the infinite elysium of the mind.
This is part of the expected hugeness of any
Regalist statement: that individuals eternally exist, or will come to know
themselves as existing, and that this self-percieved existence will be
permanent and universe-annihilating in any time past, present, or to come. It first descries and than cries out about
the infinite moral value of its own individuality self-discovered and asserted. It then trusts, and, rationally, through the
senses, with art and sensual cunning, stunningly demonstrates and states that
this individuality can affect the universe and subvert to some extent the time
that rules it, BY THE ACT OF ITS OWN CREATION.
For the asserted perception to
be valid, this must be so, since any morality perceived or created only
has its value to the extent that it tells us correctly How To Act.
These creations, once apprehended, provide the blossom and
the proof of the present argument. For
the individual they provide the substance of his self-salvation and the
ultimate context of his existence in this world. They embody his personal moral force and tell him how to live!
Out of the living context spawned by the making of these
“hugest statements,” several realizations consistently recur. These realizations are some of the necessary
markers of individual consciousness;
milestones of that arrive at the defining self out of experience’s
undifferentiated fog: When a man has
his distractions stripped from him, how much more clearly stands before him the
grace of his individual wish!
To realize or expand in the moment as much as the soul
intends is both the obvious and only goal of any extant consciousness.
The situation of the individual reveals each man as absolute
lord and disciple of his own divinity—the master of an unnamed fate. Art is a process involved in this
revelation, good art is a process that assumes its glorious incarnations
through what may be termed a sculpture of the soul.
Through the wished incarnations of an art of realized desire,
an individual may step into his self-created existence as an ineradicable
entirety—his moral force intact and his imagination brilliantly in place: his
immortal mind will have come to some perfect expression in this world—in a
victorious moment that can NOT, strictly speaking, be imagined, but must be
lived before it can be conceived. An
infinite individual manifestation of that individual’s moral force embodied in
the bounded world of time. A
miracle? No—it is the Credent Regale’s
reasonable and expected vivification and experience of life. And it is by reason that this credent regale
is erected.
This is how an individual man, defying time, becomes at once
both ghost and prince.
The immortal mind and the infinite bounded—these oxymorons
point to the ethical essence of the new Regalist spirit this essay unfolds in
enduring simpleness.
The motive for metaphor—the desire to be Other, to be other
than, to be elsewhere, is included in an individual’s hope, and in the hero’s
capable expectations he has of himself.
All that Plato and Kant were doing with their abstractions was rescuing
metaphor for rational contemplation.
With these philosophers there was a permanent elsewhere to which we
could never, by definition, ever have access;
for Plato it was the realm of Ideal Forms, for Kant, it was reality
itself, the so-called noumena.
As long as these realms existed, possibility existed, and imagined,
metaphoric indentifications remained possible;
all tables might indeed be Table.
The sympathetic metaphor of compassion in Sanskrit’s ‘tat tvam tasi’
(thou art that) is one moral expression, or use, of metaphor. Plato and Kant reserved hidden, or
inaccessible, realms where these metaphoric identifications could still take
place. Religion retained its ‘heaven.’
The importance and impact of properly operating metaphor
should never be underestimated.
Fundamentalism is the death of every religion. A metaphor is desire encoded, not codified. Fundamentalism codifies the metaphors of
various religions and thereby kills the very faith it claims to be the fiercest
proponent of. What was a living
fountain becomes a frozen cage—encasing and killing an alienated
individuality. When prisons are used
for punishment instead of rehabilitation, it tolls the death-knell of a
society’s imagination. Society no
longer has faith in the individual’s ability to re-imagine himself as a
productive member of that society—Charlie Manson wins his argument when he
abjured personal responsibility for his actions and claimed that “you [society]
made me.”
Instead of this failure and death, the Credent Regal demands
that every self-consciously self-asserting individual retain and express their
ability to be an other self—a self self-imagined. The heavens of the Credent Regale are the possibilities
of one’s future self, and the necessity of its moral manifestation in time. Such a self must die in order to have its
final definition. Without death, there
is no grace in life. This intense focus
on individual selves and independent imaginations and histories lends a
poignancy to our missions that an external heaven, or reclusive realm of Ideal
Forms, or and inaccessible noumena, could never give. To live this newly created self, this
manifested metaphor, is an act of realized desire that brings our heaven home.
Plato, Kant, and the dry philosophers of mind have always
solved the dilemma of the readily apparent truth of the “immortal mind and the
infinite bounded” by dividing the world into visible and invisible, or
perfected, or spiritual, realms.
Instead, the individual asserts moral unity, AS AN INDIVIDUAL, allowing
us to see and feel the singleness of every impulse and creation and expression
this life drives into us and sparks from us.
The true and utter independence of this spirit must out!
It cannot be contained, even by imagining a heaven of
infinite perfection ‘elsewhere’ for it to wear itself out in. This is one of those dull scabbards Shelley
spoke of when he wrote that “Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed,
which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”
Zen’s no-heaven and the bhuddists’ “the defeat of desire is
the imagination of desire’s ultimate expression and purpose” is another haggard
scabbard as well. Any comfort or
distraction these thesises provide must disappear the minute a man wakes up to
himself in asserted, conscious, blessed and perfected independent life.
Poetry, more than any other art, confirms this magisterial
joy and commission of honor, and damns the pernicious waste of every other form
of swaying evasion because it is conscious, directed, and articulate. It comes from a specific, asserted
consciousness and MUST enter another to have its effect. Nothing less than a total response is
required of the reader—or co-creator of the imagination’s means and
meanings.
A theory of ‘misreading’ or misprision in circulation in
these late decades misses the point entirely—claiming that each goofed up
reading of a poem creates a second poem, etc.
Instead, each correct reading of a poem creates a second INDIVIDUAL!!!!
Not one inside the reader, but the reader himself, dragged into his divinity
for the first time. A poem DEMANDS that
it be read with exact clarity before it can even exist--- because it is one
with consciousness. It is the indelible
jello of this life’s susurrations.
NOTE: “the infinite bounded”: it must be bounded and bonded
by the length, love, and example of a single individual’s life. There is no “infinite” or “perfected” realm
as Plato proposes. In this specific,
limited sense, the poetic ideal is ‘bounded’ and made ‘real’ instead of being
invested with a dead spiritualism. And
yet, the individual is infinite in a very real sense since, when weighed in the
balance, the universe itself cannot lessen or desecrate him by gross
comparison. But what sort of infinity
are we talking about? We are talking
about what a man does in life, and therefore we are talking about ethics, and
morality, and society to the extent that individuals touch, colliding their
highest of worlds in harmonious union.
BEAUTY IS THE ONLY MORAL COMPASS
A dancing pageant, or any instance of the beautiful, assumes
its ‘intellectual beauty’ on the basis of its divinity in real experience. The perfection of such a perception
artistically embodied is an intellectual achievement of the highest order. A poet of the highest order is an evolving
individualist whose imagination is composed of heightened perspectives. Chance, death and human misfortune are
considered the ruled pawns of a reflective spirit and self reveling in an
imaginal bound. Only this imaginal
bound, an aesthetically imposed moral definition, is real to the self-creating
individual creator.
Once the individual and the independent spirit, as defined
in this essay, are held up as a real ideal, a manifest perfection touchable by
everyone willing to create himself in the assertion of that self’s existence,
anarchy becomes an easy necessity, as does atheism. Anarchy is simply the lack of imposed, instead of discovered, social
rules or conventions; atheism, in this
case, is the lack of social rules or conventions that others claim exist as a
result of God’s existence. In this
state, what is to be the moral or social compass for man?
The apprehension of beauty.
Every poet who has ever lived and generated genius has done
so in a sober, well-lived life; when
this is not the case, he is not creating.
His evils are as dust in the balance.
Individual creation is the only redemption that can occur in time. The degenerate king or unprincipled despot
is locked into the manifestations of sin (and the confining network of the
social contract) far more irreparably than any independent layabout. Those of individual genius who have
apprehended their moral case and its inherent freedoms arrange their brief
lives automatically around the apprehension of beauty, since that is the
highest and best use of all that is highest and best in man.
But what makes these individuals the highest and best?
Their apprehension and forceful claiming of themselves as
individuals in a universe of nulls.
All this talk of self-claiming, self-asserted creation and Will
gets taken by the Hitler idiots as ‘will over others’—the mass—instead as the
self-mastering ‘will over oneself;’ it
is a mastering of the inertia of birth, at least to the point of
self-creation. After that, all other
activity gains its moral credence, as activity even, from that initial willful
apprehension.
As soon as any man understands and/or asserts his value and
existence as an individual, he naturally addresses himself to eternity, since
death instantly sets itself up as the last block the unthinking universe can
throw up before him to interfere with his individual’s perpetual, unique and
value-creation-oriented existence. Then
what does all the spastic and hectoring spectre of death become but another
inducement to beauty and all the highest and best productions and reminiscences
of those imperishable moments of ecstatic consciousness?
It was said of Shelley that: “By calling the heart to an
ideal, and by bringing about what Shelley describes as ‘transforming
enlargements of the imagination,’ poets become ‘the unacknowledged legislators
of the world.’” This ideal, towards which
we are constantly either called or corralled, is constantly—and I think
incorrectly—labeled the same Ideal that Plato preached: a separate and
untouchable heaven of ideal forms. I
would like to draw a distinct difference between any such realm and the Ideal that a poet must hold in his heart to
have an effect on his life that would
allow him to undertake these meaningful ‘transforming enlargements of the
imagination.’ Shelley’s own experience of this Ideal realm, as described in his
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, itself argues against this realm being described
as ‘untouchable.’
The completeness of the visitation enacted upon the speaker
of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ is almost a rapture that, instead of taking
the raptured person to heaven, brings heaven to the person, argues against this
beauty being remote at all, and is a witness against its existence being
thought of as a mere ‘shadow vision’ and not as a palpable reality. The ideal that the heart is called to in the
poem, and in the hearts of all poets and, as I think, in the heart of every
individual, is the complete acknowledgement and apprehension of that
individual’s own freedom. This is an
immediate and life-altering experience of ethical liberation that is anything
but remote; it is instead intimate in
the extreme—as is the style of experience described by Shelley in his poem.
Plato’s Ideal Realm may only be considered as irreparably
separate these days because of the complete imaginal hegemony of Kant—who split
the world into mind and body, or spirit and form, and whose philosophy demands
that they never touch. Plato’s
metaphors, however, may quite possibly not have been understood by the Greeks
or Shelley as quite so untouching, but rather as taking on more of the sort of
meanings and sense this essay undertakes.
Shelley’s ‘transforming enlargements of the imagination’ may
also be understood as those inter-changing and inter-charging leaps of the
individual’s asserted sense of self and the moral beauty which draws that self
into the universe by its claims. The
transformations can then be understood as part of the ongoing life-process of
heroic creation, constantly calling on the imagination to claim its invented
universe. This claiming and inventing
then takes on the organizing characteristics of legislative order as the ideas
of Beauty, Individual, and Created System become more and more
indistinguishable—the beatification of those saints indwelling in ourselves.
The apprehension of beauty becomes the moral compass of the
individual because that is the only way that heroic creation can take
place; the only way that bits of soggy
reality can be organized into permanent representations of the absolute
consciousness that races in us as the universe races in God’s mind. It is a principle of organization that
supercedes and precedes any conception of ‘the good.’ It includes the Good as a fire must include fuel, to refine for
use to produce the brightest flames.
The Good only has active meaning for humans as an incentive to morally
good future acts; it is not some dead
substance that can be hoarded or spent.
Only individuals can perform meaningfully original actions—and the only
self-conscious individuals that exist understand that the only actions worth
taking are ones that are beautiful, or which result in beauty. Death is meaningful in this context only in
that it gives a definition to what is done, an endpoint to one life’s
possibilities. Death helps to shape the
moral meaning of individual acts of beauty.
It is a sort of spectre and goad to goodness, meaning and beauty. What happens after death is not of immediate
concern for the living; death is
meaningful not in and of itself, since it is a place beyond or other than life,
but because it gives us a place to stop being.
An abstract, ineffable, and unapprehendable heaven is even more useless
to living humans—since it only gives us a place where we may one day continue
being, but never in life. Neither death
nor heaven put meaningful limits on the self-consciously willful individual; neither the grave nor the cloud participate
in human possibility.
Heroic creation, in this way, gives man the chance to ‘flirt
with death,’ and still claim, ‘but I don’t care about it’ with an undying
cry. To the degree that his deep
apprehension of beauty guides and decides an individual’s behavior it is the
ethical force of the universe. Shelley
saw Milton’s excellence and moral suasiveness in the energy imparted to Satan
in ‘Paradise Lost.’ This excellence is
perceived exactly to the extent that that energy and excellence are given to Satan
to make the poem more beautiful and fill the brilliant individual’s defeat with
defiance. So the creation of a
brilliantly individual and defiant Satan becomes a moral act of beauty.
Morality is the flower of beauty in the world.
So,
what then might avail in man’s pinching circumstance where false heavens and
the distraction of death have been deleted of their abstract and compelling
characteristics?
Beauty. Beauty draws
each man to it to the extent that its vitality increases each observer’s liveliness. It sweetens without sickening and ever gives
pleasure to the purest portions of an individual, which it helps to awaken for
the purpose of having that pleasure more greatly enjoyed and received. There is no model for this concept in
history or life other than the innate idea of unending and increasing pleasure
and beauty called by the godless LOVE.
The greatest harmony and order of perceived beauty reaches so far into
the individual that it eventually demands that the individual create harmony, order
and beauty out of himself, so that this interpenetration may have completeness
and demonstrate the reality of the original creation. That which is beautiful, creates beauty in those who correctly
perceive that beauty. The only ‘proof’
that the original creation’s beauty has been perceived is that those who come
in intimate contact with its beauty themselves become more beautiful. This may seem to resemble a religious
conversion, but it is more like the act of falling in love. If there is any insistence in this
co-creation of the beautiful, it is
only that of our own ardency; that
which is beautiful calls on that which is beautiful in us.
Beauty demands of the individual only himself, never
subservience or bland acquiescence.
When a man is excited to the point of genius, he is the most
himself and the most universal in terms of vital individuality. Because only the most self-asserted
individuality can create beauty, and because the most beautiful is that which
is created and partakes of the intimate eternity of the individual, the two
quickly consummate an inseparability in the history of genius. How could anything from a lesser source give
true pleasure to the free individual?
Beauty can begin the siren call at any and every level of perceptible
pleasure, and if that call is followed it will eventually demand the abolition
of God, predetermination, hate, and all that debilitates the creative faculty
in the individual. Beauty will demand
to be answered by beauty, nothing less will suffice.
When an individual claims himself and his freedoms, poets
become the acknowledged legislators of the world because poetry is the only way
free consciousnesses can communicate, via the eternity of beauty which heroic
creation produces—individual to individual.
Therefore, beauty is the only moral compass for the
individual because it is the only outside agent that can actually reach his
independent center and demand that that center respond. It is, perhaps, the only real object in the
universe for the individual to respond to, act upon, etc. In a world of beautiful objects, every
action becomes a demonstration of Love, every commitment a simple entirety as
deep as ourselves.
Ethics is all about what a man does in this life, and what
he should do: if beauty is the only object sufficiently real and individual for
a man to act upon, then it is obviously intimately tied up with all ethical
action.
Beauty is the moral compass of the individual because it is
the agent, result, and object of all truly individual activity.
THE DEATH OF THE BEATS AND THE AESTHETIC OF THE VILE
BEAT GENERATION
The age of the Beat poet has reached its unacknowledged
terminus.
No single human emotion or phase of thought is of strong
enough composition or duration to serve as the prismatic foundation of any
really revolutionary artistic movement or expression.
And yet, this is exactly what, in essence, the Beats have
attempted to accomplish. The emotions
and domain of their concern are exclusively those of the social outcast and the
improvisationally personal expressions of the ‘unedited’ mind. Only what has passed uncritically, and
unedited, from the ‘true’ self is permissible.
This is not the Romantic ‘look into your heart, and write’ type of
creativity—the kind of creativity that
explored exalted, heightened, and supremely human moments of a ‘spontaneous
overflow of feelings’ that were then ‘recollected in tranquility.’ No, not at all. Although they would claim some of these tactics to be their own,
Romantic expression is too centered in the human to satisfy the Beats’ need for
authority and rule. They claim the
status of lawless outcast only to make other systems of meaning less
competitive—to discredit the ‘competition’ at the outset of their new
empire-building mania. No inherited rule
of society or previous expression of greatness in ourselves or beyond ourselves
was good enough for the Beats. They
must first destroy all in order to create anything—or so, at least, they told
themselves. By trusting nothing, or not
enough, of the wide vagaries of what previous human experience had brought to
order and beauty, the Beats were driven, almost inexorably, to seek for example
and guidance almost exclusively in the religious mindset. Only that which jumps beyond our human
context could be saved for their system;
they rejected the experience of others, and were left cornered in a
burnt-out nave with some bastardization of Plato’s ‘Ideal Forms.’
They have spread
their insidious notions through every subsequent generation so that even the untempered
vitalities of the youngest in society can see no cohesive form of self-purchase
or individual expression outside the dead forms imposed by their grandfather’s
rebellion. And this rebellion was
instantly, as with almost every effort to eschew the wide vagaries of the
lawless heart in man, converted into what amounted to a monastic cult, complete
with anal exercises, the eating of dirt, and the subjugation of the flesh’s
revelations and mind’s pure emanations to an iron rule, an aesthetic of the vile,
taking the place of Loyola’s indignities.
There is little left for us to save from among their languid
utterances; little that is not void of
man’s sense of being alive in the world, and joying or despairing in the face
of that.
Among its best phrases and contortions there is always the
appeal for outside help, a despairing wish to have some immortal judgment
imposed to save themselves from their own thoughts or feelings. Or occasionally, and equally despairingly,
there is expressed a wish for God. Even
the most famous of their lines carry this limitation:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection...
Saints are always most at home among the rats and
fleas; the mental wards are full of
divine personalities.
It is as if the fit, the fever, the contagion of this
despair had gone into the home of every prosperous nullity of our society and
settled on his children. Raised in a
masterless house, they tried to find some system of thought that, nullities
themselves, would save them and damn their parents.
But, guilty themselves of what they considered the ‘sin’ of judgment,
what they hobbled together took themselves apart.
An entire, sickened generation occupying their precious time
shaking off the ‘dust of this world!’
In their bland spiritual hunger, they are driven to taste of discredited
religion. For shame! A generation of
preachers selling ghettoized (as they always are, obscure at the start, squalid
to the end) lives of the saints—too often themselves!
Of course, this eventually led to the airless rapture of
disincarnation, and the philosophical stance of a no-self void-embrace
mentality. The sinuous East had
captured their too tranquil souls. All
of this activity holds our fascination only to the extent—and in the same
way—that each man’s damnation is different.
From my pie-eyed perspective, it seems we’ve had a silly five decades of
lotus-eaters.
Beat poetry. An
appropriate title. Although poetry of
this order is not entirely without anything to redeem it, the guiding reason of
its creations is corrupt in its inception.
Because Beat poetry seeks to debase its own art form with a religious
aesthetic of vulgarity and emptiness to the exclusion of all other sensible
objects, any of the more delicately differentiated emotions that have ever made
human beings feel like living spirits with value and purpose are thrown out in
favor of kowtowing to an absent divinity.
Indeed, they are necessarily excluded in favor of some more
strictly ‘personal approach,’ that, because of its very narrowness, can never
truly speak to the soul of man, the visionary individual triumphant and
self-redeemed.
Clothed in the gilded will of the artist they endeavor, from
whatever the psychological—possibly schizophrenic—source (and all of their
energy is of no deeper or greater source than that), to destroy the purity of
those actions undertaken from a ‘tragically’ exalted point of view and embodied
by the reason in the world as faultless totems of the individual.
Symptomatic of these destroyers is their sainted adherence
to the aesthetic of the vile. Drugged
revelations of the needle or the knife constitute their entire range of
experience. No music swoons the
temporal ear to increase the dose of their vitality.
Most Americans find their escape towards poetry in the
regimen of a chosen or imposed religion, their sacred texts a bizarre
outpouring of the human heart. The
Beats, concentrating on a single color,
or ‘effect’ able to be extracted from human experience and put into poetry,
have constricted the bandwidth of the individual spirit, emaciating through
rigorous doctrine even the supple body of the texts they turn to. This has happened in many instances
throughout human history, and the result is always an impoverished aesthetic,
the construction of a few rotting temples in the hills (or rank tenements in
San Francisco), the tortured religious impulse of a degraded youth desecrated
to the rote behavior of idle worship.
A more essential, Regalist, doctrine must leave no faction
of our experience untouched. There must
be no quarantining of humanity for an increased ‘effect;’ there must be no single, supreme purpose
deemed sacrosanct merely for the sake making some obscure, cultist ‘point’ in
argument. At the same time, neither are
order and beauty to be deleted from the ecstatic sum of what we are, but the
hierarchy revealed, if any, is to be one discovered, not imposed.
CODA
2003. We have been
largely engulfed over the latter portion of the last century by the will to be
modern at the expense of everything that gives art value, i.e. real
meaning. I have been the unfortunate
witness to the worst kind of adulation heaped upon the sour, rotting corpses of
those who hide behind their wrinkled beards spouting some foul diatribe about
their miserable lives in a pernicious attempt to escape reality. Such a critical fallacy has removed us from
any true dramatic elevation of the self and thus an elevation of the
senses. There is a deliberate avoidance
of the a soul’s primary intransigence and in its place there is merely a mature
recognition of human limitation.
HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY
In my experience it seems that there is a perception among
the masses that the creative hero (and the Credent Regalist essence of art) is
often has its reality dissolved by some supernatural osmosis into the vacant
aether. They argue that the protagonist is not fully realized since he does not
suffer and destruct from his own despair.
This is a grave perversion of how Regalist art actually operates. Yet,
it was via this negative image of beauty and hope, through this despairing
critique, that I was first introduced to the unaging muse of the Credent
Regale. The true hero, whatever
suffering he endures, uses his pain to elevate himself and his imagined world
above and beyond that suffering, perhaps viewing his life’s wreckage from a
heightened vantage, seeing the images of his wreckage with an aesthetic
sharpness that burns more clearly and more cleanly into his revivified
consciousness as pure form. The
Romantics knew that the tender attentions the consciousness feels, granted by
these elemental shadows of pure form, could be codified by tongue, note or
brush into angelic glimpses that supremely enter our temples of solitude on the
perfected wings of holy return. I must
endeavor, always, to receive such sweet communion at the altars of this
infinite entirety.
The modern ‘despairing critique’ of the Credent regale was
most often expressed as an imitation, or failed, tragedy. The modern ‘tragedy’
had the individual suffer and self-destruct from his own despair—helpless in a hopeless
circumstance. Imagination, if it was
called on at all, was called on to magnify the impossibility of salvation—the
necessity of self-extinguishment became all.
The modern ‘tragedy’ misunderstood the whole point of ancient tragedy—or
remained willfully ignorant of its graces.
In ancient tragedy the suffering and destruction of the protagonist
invites him to re-imagine his experience in a way that rescues meaning and
dignity from the tragic ‘deconstruction’ of his character. Tragedy is an example of an individual whose
self-truth is discovered by means of a creative self-expression of his
individuality under severly straightened circumstances. In ancient tragedy, the individual found a
way, through suffering and self-destruction and despair, to embrace his
fate without suffering the additional loss of his individuality, often at the
cost of his very life—dead but individual in a hopeless circumstance.
Tragedy finds its self-definition in the heroic endurance
and embrace/acceptance of a ‘fate’ halfhidden from the protagonist. This frail victory of the individual despite
death displays the greatness of that individual as measured against the entire
killing universe. Tragedy is, in this
way, essentially a type of glory play bursting radiantly from the unrivalled
depths of the Greek imagination’s respect for the human mind.
The protagonist’s personal fashion of facing his exquisitely
unraveled and eventually revealed ‘fate’ demonstrates the moral equality of the
two halves of the proving equation: man = universe. This demonstration is both excellent and powerful, in its
way. But still, it is a tragedy—what of
the victory? Why not have the
individual change history and fate, triumphing finally in a radiant spate of
expelled imagination?
A victory would be another sort of proof that the
individual, self-asserted and self-revealing, is equal to all that impinges
upon him, the universe and time, all things past and present combined. Once again: man = universe, in terms both
infinite and moral.
What different qualities, other than the uncircumscribed
striving of the protagonist, are called into existence by the vital notion of
creating a Victory? There is called
into necessary existence, it seems to me, not heroic suffering fatally
embraced, but heroic imagination joyfully triumphant. To change history requires that the universe be reimagined. As in Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound,’
self-definition is derived from the hugeness of the imaginative leap heroically
undertaken by the protagonist. This seems
related to the notion of a paradigm switch in the history of science where
entire fields of knowledge and understanding are suddenly revealed to us as
existing in an entirely new and credible relation, replacing previous
assumptions.
In the Victory, this process would include a radical
touching of the infinite in ourselves (through the protagonist’s willful act of
asserted self-awareness of individuality) and then impacting the world with
that moral inner-infinity. The
well-known ‘butterfly effect’ in weather forecasting is one demonstration that
the individual is indeed capable of such hugenesses. The fictional possibility has a basis in reality’s own
flexibility—its capacity to change and be re-arranged. The butterfly effect relies on an inherent
chaos or freedom in things themselves that allows the individual to have a sort
of ‘cascading’ effect on reality. One
act influences another act, which influences another act....
Heroic endurance, the self-acceptance of one’s ‘fated’ role,
and the depth of volition conjured in all tragedy give us plenty of examples of
the ethical necessity for the initial existence of the individual within and
AGAINST history. Individual imagination
and self-consciousness remain unimpaired despite the rotten circumstances—the
circumstances themselves often cast by the Greeks as semi-conscious operatives
such as Nemesis. Consciousnes is a
quality pervasive in the universe itself then and not simply a human intrusion. The necessity of individual existence to
assert itself, however, makes it possible for the individual in a tragedy to
change history—to alter his ‘fate’ and master his impinging circumstances. Without this ability, this power, and this
freedom to choose on the part of the protagonist, his eventual embracing of his
own suffering would be meaningless—a forced and foredoomed choice. In a victory, the emphasis on the
individual’s situation changes from: Can one man retain his imaginative
capability to change history despite his circumstances (in other words, can he
sufficiently demonstrate his potential for individual existence) to: Every man
MUST change history.
By the end of a tragedy, the hero has successfully
engineered a way to have imagination invest his own existence with value and
self-understanding. Usually he is
standing at death’s deep gate: this is tragedy’s hectoring victory. The imagination is revealed as real and
powerful, defining and saving an asserted individual under tragic
circumstances, in spite of all.
Shakespeare’s King Lear only begins to discover and value himself after
every passing tidbit of life’s superfluities has been tossed away—at first
neglectfully (his kingdom to his daughters) but then and increasingly and with
increased consciousness and conscientiousness (eventually giving even his very
clothes to the raging howling storm).
It is then, naked and alone by choice as much as by
chance, that Lear discovers that he is an individual MAN and invents and saves
himself. Circumstances have, in rare
configuration, combined to convince him to allow Imagination’s victorious
invasion. I exist! The I of ‘I
exist’ is infinitely real and my own.
My ‘I’ is imaginatively and morally capable, despite the roaring
storm. It is now that he can again kill
and eat, and sing about going to prison.
He is, as captain, king or prince, freest and first in the undominated
landscape of his own imagination.
A man alone must either extinguish or soar.
I think that man does change history all the time. The trick of it is to become conscious of
this impact/creativity—thus proving one’s volition and individuality: to give
meaning to Byron’s cry: “Shelley, I WILL do SOMEthing.” Byron was an individual
intimately conscious of his potential, his ethical situation, and his capacity
to have a meaningful effect. Oedipus
suffers and saves his individuality, Byron and Shelley create and change
history out of their individuality.
Dadaists ‘do anything’ and still have their impact, because they have
self-consciously involved man’s blessed volition as did the Greeks et al,
proving the ethical equation (man = universe) true and vital still.
But Shelley and Byron were the masters. When they ‘did anything,’ they did what was
highest and best. They were the most
themselves and the most of themselves, the most human, the most man-like, and
greatest. Taking their superiority over
the universe for granted, they created a second one out of themselves almost
out-of-hand, unavoidably. This
continual, effortless self-creation would be the Victory’s area of aesthetic
exploration. This exploration would be
done not in some solipsistic wish-fulfillment dream-world, but in an active,
sympathetic involvement of all with all resembling something more like
Love. The Victory is an image of the
Credent Regale made manifest. As
Lautremont has said, “Poetry, if it is to be made AT ALL, must be made BY
all.” The Victory would show such
poetry in its evolving state of lively co-creation. Individual worlds would be interactively shared and would impact
on each other with a vital growingness—all the richness of Shakespeare’s
pageant AND all of the singularity of a Richard the Third. It is a matter of each character’s
vital self-assertion of individuality in circumstances where all of the other
characters are also self-consciously themselves. And, since everyone has this impact on
everyone else all of the time anyway, it is really just a matter of each
character becoming self-aware of this impact.
Each bit player must elevate himself to a playwright in a world without
pre-determined limits. And, as for
realism, wouldn’t this be the truest picture of our lives in time anyhow?
Time itself, without the assistance of any other agency, may
lend poignancy and tragedy enough to all of our imaginative self-assertions,
even in the Victory. Memory gives time
reality to man, birthing beauty’s possibility.
It is almost sufficient to retreat into that alternate eternity of the
past, which has total meaning and is capable of absolute, fixed and resolved
beatification. But, of course, as
aesthetically perfect as the past is capable of being re-made in one man’s
mind, it is only the ACT of sharing that past in the present and the future
that can share that vision of things with the world at large and thus express
and ‘prove’ that individual’s vision to be aesthetically and morally true. There is no selfhood without acts of
self.
“Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,” because beauty comes as
a result of a man’s recognition of this conscious nexus—time itself adding a
necessary, proving and ephemeral poignancy to the eternities we play with, the
bright universes that WE shelve or unjar.
Today: The situation remains unchanged.
Done in the knowledge that that which is best can never
fail.
Gregg G. Brown
Daniel B. Dermond
THE LORDS OF WORD
Poem and Essay Order of the previous edition of Ghosts and Princes
The Invoking
INTRODUCTION
The Damned
HEROIC CREATION
Heroic Creation
In Holy Illume
PUNK ROCK, ETERNAL YOUTH, AND THE
BACCHANALIA OF LIBERTY
A Temporal Exhalation
Hymn
REASON AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
A CREDENT REGALE
Penitent Skies
To Tenderest Purity
REALIZED DESIRE AND THE INFINITE BOUNDED
I Marysa
II The Winter
Princess
III Ariel in Excelsus
BEAUTY IS THE ONLY MORAL COMPASS
Renegade Pearl
To Her Asleep
Night Storm
THE DEATH OF THE BEATS
AND THE AESTHETIC OF THE VILE
A Mortality Enclosed
HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY
The Immortal Words
Apollo Belvedere
* The
complexities of this trick pulled by Yeats are explored more fully in another
essay.
