A RUINED OIOUSION

Unscientific Preface of The Wellspring

Progressus Vicit Omnia

The shadows have grown long as all transcendent horizons have begun to set. What weird forces have led us here, at the death throes of Christendom? Of course, the forces of secularization, modernization, the advance (and decay) of the liberal order, and the advent of a gnawing nihilism in its wake are well understood. Or at least, oft-discussed by the diagnosticians of our cultural malady, making noisy sense of all this nonsense. My aim is not merely to add yet another a-pathetic voice to this chorus on the current state of Western decomposition. Feckless, ineffectual prattle! Such dispassionate analytics may have had utility. But it has proven, or so it seems, a wholly disproportionate response to the magnitude of the hour. No, we rightly stand astonished, Job-like, deaf to the explanatory babble of the learnèd. Preferring rather to tarry a while in the problem and let the defining absence of resolution set in. Sitting deaf and dumb.

This should not be confused with acquiescence to this sad state. Resignation is not befitting the heirs of even our exhausted patrimony. We are not that sort. Nor am I interested in “sounding an alarm;” that hour has long passed.

Indeed, there were no shortages of warnings of the impending collapse of Christendom. Yet all proved impotent in forestalling the inevitable disillusion. No outcry galvanized the will and focus of a confused, distracted, and fragmented Western Christendom in that bewildering and disjointed epoch: ‘modernity.’ As Søren Kierkegaard—himself writing when it was only dawning on European consciousness that the maladies of Christendom were quite terminal—expresses the logic of the alarmists (the premise-authors):

If only an outcry is raised in a loud voice that can be heard all over the land, and it is read by everyone and is talked about in every company, then surely it will turn out all right.¹

The alarms were raised.

It was an age “in such [a] baleful oscillation” as Thomas Carlyle thundered, “afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations.”² All the alarms rang but were unheeded.

And even if heeded, what could have been done against such titanic forces?³ For there was no coherent diagnosis let alone any unified response. That shrill key in which Carlyle sermonized was so shrill precisely because the sense of vertigo he described, “European Society…swaying, disastrously tumbling, painfully readjusting…”, was not widely shared.⁴ There were of course fits of tumult and outbursts of revolutionary unrest. But these were almost dwarfed by the fateful transitions occurring at the heart of Christendom, masked by the dazzling spectacle of progress. Kierkegaard, picking up on the same phenomenon, notes; “A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down.”⁵ But we need not locate the real transformations in these outbursts. It was a Revolutionary Age par excellence, but paradoxically and “at the same time reflective and passionless” and thus transforming everything but in so doing it

“leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit, privatissime, it supplies a secret interpretation—that it does not exist.”⁶

The previous generation had witnessed the Napoleonic Wars and the disillusion of an order, but few realized the greater warfare being waged in the spasmodic peace of the post-Napoleonic order—the birth of our age.

Indeed, outwardly, the age of revolution seemed to have failed. The religious institutions were, in popular perception, more or less at first unscathed and more powerful than ever. The various monarchies of Europe had managed to absorb and withstand all the torrents of revolution. Revolution gave way to a reasserted monarchy. The outward forms and sociocultural superstructures tottered but held and a far more pervasive revolution set in.

The world had settled in a kind of entente with the new science and democratization advancing in steady and cautious progress, punctuated with fits of impatience, but it was progress nevertheless. Hence the sense of bewilderment among such prophetic malcontents as Carlyle and Kierkegaard thundering as they did in an age of unprecedented political, economic, scientific, and technological advance. Contrarian misanthropes! Nietzsche could at least come to admit he was one untimely born: “they do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears.”⁷ Meet it was to address his prophecies to other men. Perhaps only Dostoevsky could render plain and articulate the schism between the newly respectable godlessness and the psychopathic terror it masked and legitimized. This was not just French excess in revolutionary zeal or Danish melancholy; it was a fateful and looming specter. Bad air! They all knew well that the revolutionary age had submerged in a subterranean, no, supra-terrestrial plain...gone to seed it had to rot and root that noxious doctrine: Omnia Materia Sunt et Omnis Materia in Motu Est.

The tectonic convulsions that were shaking the very foundations of Western culture would take time…as it turned out, not too long a time…to volatilize and percolate up to the surface as Europe found itself evacuated of spirit. Bad air! the stench of some murder laying just under the surface. In the midst of that Age wherein the revolutionary instinct had been directed inward, toward the very foundations, what could have been done? There were only pathological descriptions, with greater or lesser acuteness, of some ephemeral sickness rotting at the heart of European culture and its multitudinous tributaries. All these voices achieved in the end were to write histories, quite in advance of the impending future. What could have been done? Nothing.

And all this sounding, sounding, sounding, amounted to a veritable apothecary shop stuffed full of competing brands and peddlers of discordant remedy. Prophecy is always bitter medicine. Why not miracle cures? Here’s one: ‘positive science;’ look another: ‘rational political science.’ Now here’s the fix: ‘the science of economy.’ All of these as well were on offer and had much wider purchase. What a dizzying age of clamor that modernity was wherein “making an outcry” only magnified the distracting cacophony of noise.

But now the alarms are silent, save those few who have come late to the dreadful realization, all freshly disheveled and bewildered. “Dialogue! A new discourse is needed…come now, let us reason together” they say…as they clamber to salvage their dead and broken god. Fools and dead men, let them bury their dead. But their god—that chimera Progress—is not dead at all. Alas, he, though a corpse and by no means even an automaton, has conquered. Progressus vicit omnia! animated by some unseen force.

A disquieting quiet has set in as murmuring lamentation becomes a distant drone high in the violet air. Bad air! and mustard haze upon a violet sky. The whole genre of ‘outcry’ is woefully outmoded. The sole form left to us is perhaps prophecy, seeing the vision and speaking a world we do not inhabit...yet can be. For “we are the ghosts of a war that we have not fought” as Paul van den Bosch quips.⁸ The battle was fought, and won, and lost, and consummated not in the fields of Flanders but in the depths, in the heights, in the heavenly places, and the hidden recesses of the earth—a noomachia, a spiritual conflagration.

Having opened our eyes on a disenchanted world, we are more than any other the children of the absurd. On certain days, the senselessness of the world weighs on us like a deformity. It seems to us that God has died of old age, and we exist without a goal…We are not embittered; we start from zero. We were born among the ruins.⁹

It is meet and right that we terry a while in these ruins. Survey them—not dispassionately but with that temporary bifurcation of the soul that graces such tragedies—and let the silence settle upon us. Here can we cultivate some measure of active reflection that only myopically can be mistaken for stupefied lassitude.

As Kierkegaard continues in his qualitative contradistinction between out-criers and those with something to say; “to find the conclusion, it is first of all to observe that it is lacking, and then in turn to feel quite vividly the lack of it.”¹⁰ For, “the outcry will certainly be made anyway” and has been made, “therefore it would be better for me to abstain from it and collect myself for a more concentrated reflection.”¹¹ There is no revival coming, there is no deus ex machina, only the dark night of Christendom, the eclipse of the sun. Let us terry a while, and if we can muster it, prophesy in the dark.

***

A Night Vision

What have we done? Oh, that someone would make us afraid of what we’ve become! Even Sophia’s fount is robbed us! Neptune’s storehouses are expended and there is only bone-white and flaking dust with which to make our ablution.¹² We have no ocean in which to cleanse our crimson and crusted hands of botched deicide.¹³ We can only and have only dipped them into the dry gravel of ruined worlds and disintegrated men. Unreal city!¹⁴ This endless expanse of cracked earth that yawns before our vision. “Everything is empty, everything is one, everything is past!”¹⁵ All is consumèd—‘post-’—and we all are become last-men. Yet another turning.

We have gone to the depths—nay, fallen to the depths as if our subterranean explorations were ever the Faustian quests of our romance! No, it was all Icarus-like folly from the start—not overcoming and alas less than human, toppled as we are from that pretentious tightrope and cast into the abyss.¹⁶ What have we found? a wasteland rather than the waters of chaos upon which to blow a blustering becoming.¹⁷ Have we birthed the new man? No, we have spent our regal lines with seed spilt—coitus interruptus—upon unreceptive earth. And alas, perhaps by some grace, the half-man chimera of our botched autogenesis has proven sterile. Botched, botched, and broken all. Best raise an anti-paean:

“Oh, God of Progress

Have you degraded or forgot us?

Where have your laws gone?

I think about it now…”¹⁸

As if we ever could author our own theogony. “Remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hope!”¹⁹ Quite right, no god-in-the-machine is coming to save us. And terrible will be the advent of the god-in-the-machine. Likewise, granted, we have banished those unmanly peddlers of evil virtue. But at the expense of gods and virtues? A costly bargain.

And what bankrupt liberty…freedom unto no end…listless autonomy! Have we become free as birds to be and make ourselves? No. But rather, we are adrift in without a center to hold our feet in their place. Be true to the earth!? Without gravity, our feet are planted firmly in midair. Have we finally become men, men great enough to justify deicide? We have not become more than men but are no longer even men but atoms. Atoms in the void, no longer running a circuit round that unspeakably primordial star. Devoid of rival claimants, it was not the new men who deemed themselves authorized—as a law unto themselves—to destroy “what exists in the name of better things,” and “if it is necessary…to march over corpses, or wade through blood;”²⁰ but, the last men. The fires of the last men burn and consume, but alas this fire gives no light.

Instead of our Sun King and the great chain to of the cosmos that well-orders all things and binds all to that luminous center, we have dark matter with its weird action from afar. For there is no banishing gravity, only exchanging one center for another. And now our courses run along hidden non-Euclidian orbits. Broken tablets indeed and not even a lush-faced and luminous lawgiver come down for the mountain top to make up for such a cataclysm. Only the hideous unveiling of all those laws at work in our members. Shades and not men have we become deprived of our light. Shadows of men. Not even shadows of men, but the shadows of the most deformed specters that haunt the darkest impulse of the collective. We have become all shadow puppet show. As Jung describes our predicament as (post)moderns:

The individual will never find the real justification for his existence and his own spiritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass…the road to the atomization of the individual.²¹

Atoms in the void…caught in the gravitational pull of some murky singularity. Always down, always base, always leveling and cutting the great chain that would lead us beyond, always quantity, always hurling into the end of history, always de-construction. Omnis Materia in Motu Est. All is atoms in the void, falling, sinking, and laid out in perfect equity upon that abyssal plain. If only this amounted to the mere rule of mediocrity. Something worse is here.

Lo, our weird spectacle: Dust and crimson and gravel sea, a waterless sea, with all the turbulence but none of the wind (as if we should accredit some agencies to the turbulence of atoms!), ever aflux and churning and lapping upon of half-woke psyche in a deafeningly silent tumult signifying nothing. Solve et coagula is the dictum indeed. Nothing unto Nothing. “‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’ / Nothing again nothing.”²²

The Neon Dystopia

We have come to the womb of the earth, bare and mere earth devoid of heaven sent rain, sky fallen seed, and the light of the expanse. Only the barren womb of the earth with no exogenous potency. All is progress, all is matter, all is Mater—a third turning (Oh, for a retvrn). Where have they placed my sun? My orient? Oh to bound and tethered and rooting and placed religionis. What weird gravity this is to be self ambulant, the dizzy vertigo being the sun of my own sky. Yet bereft of light.

I have seen the dark universe yawning

Where the black planets roll without aim—

Where they roll in their horror unheeded,

Without knowledge or luster or name.²³

But we are not alone in the dark. If only alone in the dark. For I tell you a great mystery, here awake and awoke to this disoriented vista my eyes have seen a whole galaxy ablaze, aglow with luminaries all aflame in phosphorescence. Lesser lights and day stars alas seen—unmasked in naked disclosure. The wasteland gave way to night and now, now behold, our neon supra-normal dystopia here in orbit round our extinguished center at the edge of a dissolute cosmos. What weird gravity!

The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.²⁴

Oh, and what have we a-woke in the deep?

Ecce magnum mysterium! Cthulhu stirs…that vial Tiamat from the nauseating depths of eons, quite before the Titanomachy that ushered in the golden age. She moves and quakes, the Great Mother ever ancient and all-encompassing. Omnia Magna Mater Sunt for she has become all and is all in our dysgenic and neon matriarchy.

Where is the sun, my *djous patēr? And the heaven, and the right-ordered and ordering beyond? Abscondísti faciem túam a nóbis, et allisísti nos in mánu iniquitátis nóstræ. Where are our suns? Have we offered all things and all futures to the son-gobbler—lusty Kalia bright-eyed and woke—bedecked with lifeless youths in garlands draped round her neck? As Neumann describes her worship and its victims, they are always

dying like adorable flowers. The youth has at this stage no masculinity, no consciousness, no higher spiritual ego. He [the victim of the Great Mother] is narcissistically identified with his own male body and its distinguishing mark, the phallus...in castrating him, take[s] possession of it to make herself fruitful, but he too is identified with the phallus and his fate is a phallic fate…with their weak egos and no personality [they] only have a collective fate.²⁵

We see a mass of glinting glitching bodies on flickering fluorescing screens: disembodied, beyond meat, beyond human, and transhumane. What perfect carnival! and dance of flesh machines, meat suits animate yet uninhabited. Fake! Fake and gay in feigned jubilation is that marred and malformed mascarade of the human. Oh, that someone would make us afraid of what we’ve become. This fearlessness before the void is the true author of entropy and the will to death!

If only the nothing were empty, but we have found it possessed of strange and ancient deities and haunted by the ghosts of the machine. And found ourselves inhabited by some strange spirits and powers.

***

Close your eyes to the neon night and this torrent of emptiness, this failed futurity. I must close my eyes. But even there, the neon dystopia glows its counterfeit seared into the psyche! There is no unseeing, no flight into naiveté, no turning back; only a hard retvrn through all post- and ruined worlds. And with eyes wide shut still seek a more perfect emptiness. Only this emptiness could birth that sweet angel hesychia. At least this nothing is a pregnant silence. This is the prerequisite to any speech that can be differentiated from so much bluster and noise. We must foster theoria (θεωρια)—sight in the burgeoning emptiness. All we have before us is to foster theoria. That clear-sightedness of the moment capable of mobilizing all those resources of prophetic imagination.

Even words can have the force of action if born of the genus of quietude when all that can be said is spoken and hangs stale. Only silence can speak a new word. Behold our wilderness, hear its silence—τῆς ἡσυχίας αὐτοῦ ἀκούειν—and speak if we can endure such an audacious charge—from within our ruined oiousion (‘house of being’).

We have come and could only have come here. For it is not given us, god-begotten yet desolation-born, to hover over the many waters. We have only to cast our prophecies over bones and dust all aflux in liquid becoming. Call out a destiny: “O cosmos arise, O world become! If only to name thee so bereft of form would invoke thee.” Speak a world that cannot be, that must be, that can be if it must lest we true have arrived at an end. Either way, that task at hand proves the same. Sounding and singing from empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Roráte caéli désuper,
et núbes plúant jústum.

Oh, the fire inside! Dust, and crimson, and the neon and fire, and the pining for the crack of thunder, and the cloud-bust, and the damp gust, and the lightning!

There is a well-spring.

Such audacious words can only be spoken in silence when all other possibilities have been spent. Only the hard retvrn lies before us, the only turning still left.

There is a wellspring.

***

1. Søren Kierkegaard. On Authority and Revelation (The Book on Adler, or A Cycle of Ethoco-Religious Essays). Trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 6-7.

2. Thomas Carlyle. ‘The Present Age,’ in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), 7.

3. I mean this in the technical sense, Titians unbound and wielding that hideous power of demos, this is no figure of speech.

4. Carlyle, ‘The Present Age,’ ibid.

5. Søren Kierkegaard. The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle. Trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Haper & Row, 1962), 42.

6. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, ibid.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 45.

8. Paul van den Bosch. Les Enfants de l’absurde: Essai (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1956) 11, quoted in Julius Evola. Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul. Trans. Joscelyn Godwin and Constance Fortana (Rochester: Inner Tradition, 2003), 25.

9. Ibid., 25.

10. Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation, 4.

11. On Authority and Revelation, ibid., 7.

12. Cf. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2, 2, 55-61.

13. Cf. Fredrick Nietzsche. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, Section 125.

14. Cf. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” I, 60.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 155.

16. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 43, 215.

17. Contra C. G. Jung. Cf. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Second Edition. Trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 2006), 17-18. Also, cf. Genesis 1:2.

18. Sufjan, Stevens. Come On! Feel the Illinoise! (Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition), verse 5.

19. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 42.

20. Feodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Jessie Senior Coulson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 221.

21. C. G. Jung. The Undiscovered Self with Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol 10, 18, Bollinger XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 14.

22. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” II, 119.

23. H. P. Lovecraft. “Nemesis,” in H. P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2011), 999.

24. H. P. Lovecraft. “The Call of Cathulu,” in H. P. Lovecraft: The Compleat Fiction, 376.

25. Erich Neumann. ‘The Great Mother,’ in The Origins and History of Consciousness. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Bollinger XLII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 51.