Poetry and Posterity III
Failure and Sabotage of the Permanent Things
The other parts of the series can be found here: Part I, Part II, Part IV, Part V
In Part I, I mentioned that we ought to pass on the Permanent Things to our Posterity. In Part II, I described an immense, subversive project that the taste for annihilation has wrought. A project which has helped interrupt the handing down of the Permanent Things. Now, a question: Why has the substantiation of the Permanent Things failed? First, I take it as given that the Permanent Things are not a real part of our culture. To be clear, the permanent things1 are, approximately, the content of Tradition. When we hand on Tradition, the permanent things are the individual things we teach, along with the very concept of permanence. Our culture does not care for Tradition. Despite the limp-wristed protests, we prefer innovation, efficiency, technology and power. Why then, even after a century of warnings, prophecies and lamentations, have the permanent things continued to lose significant ground? Honestly, the question may not have a full answer. There may very well be some mystery at play.
Let us examine a few basics. Tradition can not be preserved, conserved or kept. It must be continually renewed. Each generation must re-learn the permanent things, that they be re-ignited within themselves. Every traditionalist will readily admit this. And so we have our basic conundrum. Permanent things won’t be canned up in jars like ripe peaches or suspended in formaldehyde as an odd specimen. Year after year, we must cultivate them on the vine. This is the reality of the task. It’s laborious and prone to innumerable ways of failure. Just as a crop will be consumed by locusts, struck with disease or starved of nutrition; So do the permanent things succumb to devourment, pathology and wasting. This will suffice to chart the ley lines of our pursuit.
An initial fault may lie within the traditionalist himself. He may begin to romanticize the ruins; Another basic conundrum. With tragic paradox, he may, out of a desire to perpetuate the greatness of the past, fall to worshiping the past—that is, worshiping something which has died. Ruins may have an allure to them, but no man builds in hopes that one day his buildings will crumble. Ruins are beautiful to the visitor, but tragic to the architect. Only broken kings sit on broken thrones. When the traditionalist worships the past, he readily accepts the hardships of his labor. No one cares about his efforts and his work may be pointless, but he carries on anyway. He bears the burden upon his shoulders; An Atlas that stands athwart history, upholding the colossal weight of humanity with the strength of his ever further slouching back. Sadly, he does this with smug pride; Truly a man against the world. A striking figure cutting a silhouette against the dying of the light. I was smug once.
I will refrain from showing how this failing traditionalism manifests in poetry, as the reader will make the connections without much difficulty. In brief, new poetry is bad, simply because it is not old; And because the poems a traditionalist cares about go unappreciated, he returns the favor with unappreciation of his own. Let’s move on to the traditionalist perspective extremes: The Pessimist and the Optimist. The former overstates our current challenges; The latter understates. It will be adequate to say that the Pessimist believes that poetry does not exist and can not exist; And so, all we can do is read old verse, and that’s that. I’ll leave that as it is. The Optimist, on the other hand, does not give sufficient credence to the difficulties that the permanent things face. He believes the permanent things will take care of themselves—they won’t. He thinks the permanent things are self-evident—they’re not. He trusts that, in the marketplace of ideas, the permanent things will ultimately triumph and win the acclaim they deserve—good luck with that. The difference between the Pessimist and the Optimist is that the first refuses to wage war while the second foolishly wages war. The issue is that the Optimist fights for symbolic victories because he fights on a simulated battlefield. Which brings us to sabotage—among the foremost reasons for traditionalist failure.
Unwittingly and not, the permanent things have been sabotaged. The promulgators of the permanent things, the very defenders, have often destroyed traditional success. Almost always because the traditionalist desires to be respected and accepted by his enemies. The traditionalist wants to be seen as beneficial to the establishment. Not to mention that he will be rewarded for serving as token opposition to the establishment. The token traditionalist wants to be nice, he just wants everyone to get along. It’s a sheer fantasy. He will be jammed down the barrel by the ramrod of progress and blasted out, aimed to destroy the very thing he wished to protect. The traditionalist—the conservative—does not appreciate the totalizing nature of our counterfeit system. Look at the movement towards formal poetry in the second half of the 20th century. It was all pointless and produced godawful verse. The reintroduction of form into poesy was flatulent, flaccid and unfulfilling.
Why didn’t the form help? Because the problem is in the poet, not the poem. Mere form is not very constructive, it’s only appearance—facade. The conservative seems to think that a skeleton needs no heart, that a vein needs no blood. And so, tradition has been championed by pinheads, imbeciles and traitors. They have, to tradition’s deterioration, pridefully chosen self-appointed bullshit principles over the prudential well-being of the permanent things. Finally, the figureheads of this movement have continually been shown, upon enough introspection, to have been saboteurs. If we examine basic motivations, the reasons for sabotage are clear. The leaders of truly counter-cultural movements are rewarded for failure. Their purpose is containment, not success. In the public eye, everyone needs a boogeyman who’s worse than them. That is the purpose of tradition; Counterfeit tradition to serve as a counterfeit boogeyman in a simulated war over symbolic goals. A seemingly perfect system.
These are hard things but they must be confronted. Traditional movements can no longer afford to be duped by exploitation and sabotage. Traditionalists must come to their senses by recognizing their own interests. They must stop fighting against their own welfare for the sake of appearing principled. Unfortunately, what conservative taste fails to fully grasp is that the purpose of our culture is to produce sublimated suicide. Negotiation with our culture is negotiation with surrogate suicide. The conservative naturally desires to operate within the rules of the game. However, he has not yet realized that the game is won by killing yourself. That is the horrific truth of our current tectonic cultural motivations. In the face of this, we must remember: Principles are not suicide pacts, Poetry is not a suicide pact. The traditionalist needs to identify and affirm his own motivations, if he is to survive.
An opportunity is presented before us. How well defended has the establishment left poetry? Are there weaknesses to be exploited? Perhaps. There are three permanent things which promise the possibility of transcendence. They are Eros, Death and Poetry. Despite the world’s commodification, massification and falsification, those three things remain. We Love, We Die, We Sing. The human being yearns to be more fully human. These three permanent things continue to offer a chance at self-actualization. We must ask ourselves if these are unguarded castles in the establishment’s counterfeit simulation. Beyond delusion, man’s power has hard limits. Man’s power has not been able to enter the porticoes of poetry. Poetry’s walls stay standing, a protective garment of something more precious—sacred even. There still exists, in the white spaces of poems, a point where a man perceives his heart as a man. He knows for a moment that he lives. Just as when he narrowly escapes his death or becomes enraptured by beauty, he is overcome by the weight of existence. He knows, in that moment, that he is a man and that he lives; And that it means something. In the stillness, he knows there are miles to go before he sleeps.
Despite the flogging of traditionalists that I gave above, the fight has not been in vain. And I am grateful for the effort. The anger displayed above is, first and foremost, anger with myself; Anger at having been a fool. Also, anger towards what I believe to have been betrayal. Every man who gave the appearance of championing some part of tradition, but then turned around to purge his fellows in arms, has inflamed my ire. Additionally I have in mind men who have carried the legacy of past traditionalists, but then subverted them by sanitizing or belittling their beliefs. Therefore let us remember the many good men who have labored to pass on the permanent things. I will not besmirch their work or memory. Whether it be a Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Pieper, Kirk, Brooks, Adler2, Lawler or Schall, I’ll remember them. I’ll remember what they taught me. However, today we have our own challenges and those men have all gone. We can’t waste the gifts they’ve given us. We can’t indulge our egos and we can’t afford to be fooled any longer. Be wise as serpents, innocent as doves.
The Posterity must be protected. They must know what they’re up against. They need categories of thought which will solidify and defend them. The spells of poetry as propaganda as mass ritual as politico-psycho-spiritual-suicidal-necrosis must be broken. The greatest thing we can do for them is give them confidence in their soul—the confidence to sing. We should continue to introduce them to the men listed above; And not only them, but also to Wyatt, Spenser, Donne, Milton and Dryden. It must be remembered, however, that we live now. No man should live in a simulated past, and no man should kill the present that the past may live. We must have vigor, passion and vitality. We must be up for the fight. So often, the traditional man has balked at poetic coercion because propaganda has pushed him back. I say, no more. As Mars, So Mercury.
Cf. Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observation of Abnormity in Literature and Politics.
I almost begrudgingly include Mortimer Adler here. He’s probably not really a traditionalist. He certainly had one foot in simulation, but the other was firmly planted in his attachment to humanist curiosity and enthusiasm. While I’ve come to disagree with his model of education (He was overconfident and naive, it seems to me) his work has remained quite valuable. It very much was to me personally.