Op. 30
THE WILL TO TRUTH
Multigenre Philosophy
Copyright © 1983-2009 John O'Loughlin
____________
CONTENTS
PART ONE: DIALOGUES
1. The Freeing of Art
2. Of Jews and Israelis
3. Feeling and Awareness
4. Relative Perversion
5. From Gravity to Curved Space
6. From the Personal to the Universal
7. Petty-bourgeois Art
8. Religious Evolution
9. An Ultimate Universality
PART TWO: ESSAYS
10. Future Religious Progress
11. The Evolution of Art
12. Human Extremes
13. Post-Atomic Progress
14. Two Approaches to Salvation
15. An Absolute Aspiration
16. Concerning Swearers
17. The Future Absolute
18. Two Types of Criticism
19. Between Two Gravities
20. Understanding Jazz
21. Philosophy - Genuine and Pseudo
22. The Ultimate Music
PART THREE: APHORISMS
23. On
Sexuality
24. On
the Self
25. On
Racism and Anti-tribalism
26. On
Religion
27. On
Literature
28. On
the Arts
29. On
Jazz
30. On
the Psyche
PART FOUR: MAXIMS
31. On
God and Evolution
32. On Being and Doing
33. On
Ideology
34. On
Sex and Gender
__________
PART ONE:
DIALOGUES
THE FREEING OF ART
DEREK: If,
as you claim, art evolves from the mundane to the transcendent, from
materialistic sculpture to impalpable holography, and does so via a number of
intermediate stages ... like murals, paintings, and light art, it must have
begun bound to the Diabolic Alpha and only gradually emancipated itself from
that ... as it tended towards the Divine Omega.
Thus the higher the development of art, the more free must it be from
utilitarian concerns, which pertain to the mundane.
KENNETH: Oh
absolutely! The lowest stages in the
development of art were, by contrast, the most utilitarian, as in the case, for
example, of ancient Greek sculpture.
DEREK: But
how was this sculpture utilitarian?
KENNETH:
Through its connection with pagan religion.
The ancient Greeks, particularly the earliest ones, were given to
idolatry, both completely and partly. By
personifying their gods in sculptural form, they acquired a concrete
reference-point for purposes of religious devotion. The simpler Greeks would have worshipped the
statue as the god, which was pretty much the religious norm in
pre-atomic times. Especially would this
have been so in the earliest phases of Greek civilization, before statues
acquired the lesser status of images of the gods, who dwelt elsewhere.
DEREK:
Presumably on
KENNETH:
Yes. But whether these
statues, these sculptures, were worshipped directly as gods or indirectly as
images, their function was strictly utilitarian, in accordance with the
nature of art in its lowest stages of development. Besides worshipping gods, however, the
ancient Greeks also worshipped heroes, who would sometimes become gods in the
course of time, and they built additional statues personifying abstract
virtues, such as Strength, Courage, and Fortitude. There was no free sculpture, as we understand
it. They would have been deeply shocked
by the concept of art-for-art's sake!
Art had to be connected with a utilitarian purpose, even if one less
exalted than the worship of natural phenomena.
Incidentally, although the Renaissance attempted to revive certain Graeco-Roman values and to reaffirm the importance of
beauty as a creative ideal, the resulting sculptures weren't used for purposes
of worship, as their pagan prototypes had been, but stood as a kind of Renaissance
art-for-art's sake in revolt against Gothic iconography. The men of the Renaissance honoured the form
but not the spirit of Greek sculpture!
They wanted to create a free sculpture.
DEREK: And
succeeded admirably! However, as the
utilitarian must precede the free, it is evident that art continued to be
largely if not exclusively utilitarian throughout the pre-atomic age, and even
into the atomic age of Christian civilization.
KENNETH:
That is so. Or if not directly then, at
any rate, indirectly connected with utilitarian ends, as with the vase
paintings of the Greeks, who naturally made use of their vases for carrying
water and storing wine, to name but two uses.
The concept of a free vase wouldn't have appealed to them. Yet vase painting definitely marked a
development beyond sculpture which was closer to murals, since a combination of
the two, in that two-dimensional figures were applied to a curvilinear form
resembling, and doubtless deriving from, the human body, with particular
reference to the female. It was left to
the Romans, however, to develop murals and mosaics to any significant extent,
thereby beautifying their walls and floors.
DEREK:
Which could be described as the raison d'ętre of murals and
mosaics.
KENNETH:
Yes. Just as the Greeks had beautified
their vases with figure paintings commemorating heroes and battles or,
alternatively, referring to aspects of their religion, so the Romans adorned
the walls of their dwellings with murals depicting much the same thing. Even explicitly erotic figures possessed a
religious significance, insofar as paganism was nothing if not sensual and,
hence, sexist. But a mural signifies a
superior stage of aesthetic evolution to vase painting, because the figures are
applied to a flat surface, namely a wall, rather than to a curved one, which
stands closer to nature in imitation of the human form. There is something partly transcendental
about a flat surface, even when it forms part of an
utilitarian entity, like a wall.
DEREK:
Doubtless one could argue that, considered separately from the overall function
of a dwelling, a wall is less utilitarian than a vase, which may be subject to
direct use.
KENNETH: I
agree. And for that reason the mural was
a stage before painting ... as the application of figures to a flat surface not
directly connected with utilitarian ends, because forming the basis of an
aesthetic entity hanging on the wall.
DEREK: And
yet such an entity could be indirectly connected with utilitarian ends,
couldn't it?
KENNETH:
Yes, to the extent that its owner may look upon it as a means to beautifying
his house, rather than as something which exists in its own right as a
completely independent entity. It would
then be like a kind of removable wallpaper, existing in a transitional realm
between the mundane and the transcendent, the bound and the free.
DEREK:
Though presumably this would only be so while its content appealed to the
aesthetic sense by actually being beautiful
or, at any rate, partly beautiful, which is to say, until such time as art
became either ugly or truthful, and thereby bedevilled aesthetic
considerations.
KENNETH:
Precisely! Though while art remains
attached to canvas it can never become entirely free from aesthetic
considerations, even when it aims, as some modern art does, at Truth, because
the very medium in which it exists - the canvas, oils, et cetera - suggests a
connection with the past, with past phases of painterly development, and is
itself to a certain extent materialistic and naturalistic. A modern painting may intimate of Truth
rather than approximate to the Beautiful in one degree or another, but, in
hanging on a wall in someone's house, it won't be entirely free from utilitarian
associations. It will be less free, in
fact, than an identical or similar painting hanging in a public gallery, where
it would be absurd to suggest that its presence there was intended to beautify
the gallery.
DEREK: You
are suggesting that one should bear in mind a distinction between the private
and the public, between art in the home and art in the gallery.
KENNETH:
Particularly with regard to modern art, which will approximate more to the free
or transcendent than it would otherwise do ... if attached to the wall of a
private dwelling. A truly free art,
however, could not adopt canvas form but would be detached from walls, floors,
et cetera, in a medium which transcends the utilitarian and thereby exists in
its own right, in complete independence of its physical surroundings. Such an art to a certain extent already
exists in the context of light art, which has no connection with the
utilitarian use of artificial light but, quite the contrary, shines
independently to the lighting necessary for the illumination of a public
gallery at any given time of day.
Indeed, such art is never better served than when displayed in
conjunction with the utilitarian use of artificial light, its presence thereby
being shown superfluous by any utilitarian criteria. And yet, important as this art may be in the
gradual liberation of art from the mundane, it is still connected to its
surroundings, if only to the extent that it hangs from the ceiling or is
supported on a tripod or has an electric current flowing through it via an
insulated wire that connects to the mains at some point in the gallery. The evolution of art is incomplete until the
illusion of a totally free art is created through holographic techniques, which
should project an impalpable image, or hologram, of a material entity into
surrounding space, and thereby present to the viewer the arresting spectacle of
its detached transcendence, the image, independent of floors, walls, wires,
pedestals, et cetera, having no utilitarian associations whatsoever! Thus not, in its ultimate manifestation, a
representational image, like a telephone, but a completely abstract one, such
as would intimate of transcendent spirit.
DEREK: And this ultimate stage in the evolution of art would have
to be public, like the preceding stage ... of light art?
KENNETH:
Yes, and preferably within the context of a meditation centre, which is to say,
as an ingredient in religious devotion - at any rate, certainly if abstract and
thus unequivocally religious in character.
DEREK: But
wouldn't that make it utilitarian, much as Greek sculpture was when housed in a
temple?
KENNETH:
No, because not an entity to be worshipped, either directly or indirectly, but
simply to be contemplated, as an intimation of Truth. Both the pagans and, to a lesser extent, the
Christians worshipped statues; but Transcendentalists would simply contemplate
an appropriate hologram from time to time during the course of their meditation
session, not as an alternative but in addition to meditation, kept mindful, by
its presence, of the goal of evolution in transcendent spirit.
DEREK: So
that which, as sculpture, began publicly in a religious context would, as
holography, end publicly in such a context?
KENNETH:
Yes, the distinction being one between the mundane and the transcendent,
sensual public art and spiritual public art, which is nothing short of an
antithesis between the bound and the free - the former approximating to
Absolute Beauty, the latter intimating of Absolute Truth.
DEREK: Just
as a similar antithesis presumably exists between vase painting and light art.
KENNETH:
Yes, the vase being an opaque container illuminated externally by paint but
intended, all the same, to hold sensual phenomena like wine or flour in a
predominantly utilitarian context. By
contrast, light art may be defined in terms of translucent containers, whether
bulbs, tubes, or tubing, illuminated internally by artificial light - which,
depending on the type of light art, can be regarded as symbolizing the spirit -
and not intended for any utilitarian purpose.
Quite a contrast, when you think about it!
DEREK:
Indeed! And yet, despite its association
with utilitarian purposes, vase painting was presumably a fine art during that
pre-atomic epoch in time when it was especially fostered - as, for that matter,
were murals.
KENNETH: And quite unlike modern vase paintings or murals, which
correspond to a folk art. The
distinction is more one of chronology in evolutionary time than quality of
work, though the latter will still of course apply. I mean, the vase paintings and murals of the
ancient Greeks and Romans respectively, being an integral part of evolutionary
progress in the development of art from highly materialistic origins, were the
work of the most aesthetically-gifted people of the time, whereas modern vase
paintings and murals are the work of relatively uncivilized people, i.e. the
folk, and therefore devoid of chronological relevance in the overall evolution
of art - the foremost developments of which having attained to the level of
light art and, to a limited extent as yet, even gone on to that of
holography. A typical modern mural, on
the other hand, whether on the gable wall of a house or stretching along a
public wall in some street, suggests a creative affinity with ancient-pagan and
early-Christian times, and is more likely to be the work of someone whose
creative disposition corresponds to the relatively primitive level of the
ancients ... than of a civilized artist who has temporarily abandoned light
art, or whatever, for murals.
DEREK: One
is reminded of what Freud once wrote concerning the unequal levels of spiritual
development which exist in human society - some people virtually living on the
primitive level, others in the Middle Ages, yet others
in the eighteenth century, and so on.
Only a comparatively small minority of people truly live in their age,
as its creative masters.
KENNETH: A
situation that will doubtless continue so long as class distinctions remain
inevitable, as they will do for some time yet - certainly until such time as a
post-atomic civilization gets properly under way. For where there is a distinction between a
civilized class and a folk, a distinction will also exist between fine art and
folk art, the latter embracing not only vase paintings and murals, but certain
types of sculpture and painting as well.
Such art may be described as barbarously naive, because it doesn't
pertain to civilization in its successive transmutations. Now since contemporary Western civilization
is predominantly petty bourgeois, it follows that the foremost art of the age
will be produced by petty-bourgeois artists, whose religiosity - and
civilization in any true sense is inseparable from a relevant religion -
derives, as a rule, from the Orient.
They pertain to the leading civilized class of the age, a class which
has taken over from the middle and grand bourgeoisie in the evolution of
Western civilization. One day, however,
the folk will become civilized, and when they do it won't be folk art but
holography that will appeal to them.
Their art will be completely detached from material constraints. Their religion no neo-Orientalism but full-blown Transcendentalism, the religion
of an ultimate civilization - one antithetical, in character, to that of the
ancient Greeks. Not the alpha of
Beauty, but the omega of Truth! Not the
bound appearance, but the free essence!
OF JEWS AND ISRAELIS
KEITH: Of all peoples in the West, Jews strike me as being the ones
who most cling to Creator worship, to a religion which stresses the Creator, or
Jehovah, rather than some avatar, or Christ-equivalent figure, who stands,
chronologically speaking, in between the Creator and the future Ultimate
Creation ... of the Holy Spirit ... in the overall evolution of gods. Judaism would appear to be a largely
alpha-oriented religion, a religion anterior to Christianity in terms of
evolutionary development and, as such, many of its adherents would seem to be
biased towards materialism and more capable, in consequence, of pursuing wealth
as a desirable end than most of their Christian counterparts - much as though
the pursuit of material gain was of moral value in itself.
ROBERT: I
agree that Judaism is fundamentally more alpha-orientated than any other
so-called World Religion, with the possible exception of Islam, and could
therefore be regarded as pre-atomic rather than atomic. Now if there is any connection between a
people's lifestyle and their religion, then it could well transpire that there
is some truth in what you say about Jews being more disposed to the pursuit of
wealth in consequence of their paganistic cast - not
all of them, of course, but still quite a fair percentage, and irrespective of
whether or not they still cling to religious devotion.
KEITH: But
what makes them like that? I mean, why
should they continue to cling to a pre-atomic faith when other peoples have
long abandoned such a thing in favour of an atomic faith, like
Christianity? Why must Jews be so
materialistic?
ROBERT: A
very difficult question, but one that I am not entirely bereft of ideas
about! In fact, I have only recently
come to the conclusion that the tradition of clinging to Judaism stems, in
large measure, from the Diaspora, from the fact that Jews took their religious
roots into the countries to which they were obliged to emigrate and, not
possessing a national state of their own, had to cling to such roots if for no
other reason than the preservation of a common ground between them.
KEITH: You
mean that rather than becoming Christians or Mohammedans or whatever, and
thereby severing connections with their principal form of cultural identity,
they clung to Judaism even in the face of persecution, in order to retain a
cultural identity with Jews everywhere, irrespective of to which country they
had migrated.
ROBERT:
Yes, I broadly subscribe to that contention.
For although I am aware that Jews were often prohibited from becoming
Christians or Mohammedans in the various countries to which they migrated, the
fact that they had been forced into exile by the Romans must have produced an
inhibiting effect on the degree to which they were prepared to assimilate
themselves to, or be assimilated by, the country of their hosts, with a
consequence that, ever desirous of a future return to Zion, they determined to
cling to their religious roots in the interests of ethnic identity. Thus whilst other peoples were acquiring and
furthering a semi-transcendental religious perspective, Jews remained, and to a
significant extent still remain, fundamentalist at heart,
clinging to alpha-oriented criteria in the hope that, one day, they would
regain their homeland and become a united, independent people again, with the
prospect of a new religious development, once the Messiah had come to lead them
forward. Of all the civilized peoples in
the world, they are the only ones who, Second Comings notwithstanding, are
still awaiting a Messiah, having rejected Christ and other such atomic messiahs
in loyalty to their people, traditions, and apocalyptic hopes, not to mention historical
antipathy to the Romans, who of course became Christians.
KEITH: And
yet we live in a century when, after nearly two millennia, the Jews once again
have a homeland, which is the State of Israel, and are enabled to return to it
if they so desire, that is to say, if they have remained loyal to their people
and want to fulfil Biblical prophecy by returning home and awaiting messianic
redemption.
ROBERT:
That is so. But, of course, not all of
them have remained loyal to their people after all this time. Some have become Christians and thus
abandoned the religious hopes of their ancestors; some, while remaining Judaic,
have become more closely integrated into the country of their adoption, or,
more usually these days, birth; some, preferring to abandon all religious
traditions, whether Judaic or Christian, have adopted atheistic positions in
loyalty to Socialism, and thus become still more closely integrated into the
country of their adoption or birth, be it Western or Eastern; and some, of
course, are of mixed descent and thus hardly Semitic at all by any racial
reckoning. There exists a whole range of
Jews who aren't particularly interested in Zionism and a possible future return
to
KEITH: Yet
many Jews, whether in Israel or the Diaspora, whether Zionist or
Internationalist, European or American, are still basically materialistic,
given to the pursuit of wealth as a kind of virtue in itself, and consequently
despised, not least of all for their unwillingness to substitute Christian
criteria for Judaic criteria.
ROBERT:
That may be so, but while they live in atomic civilizations, as in the
Christian West, they cannot be persecuted outright, as by the Nazis both before
and during the Second World War, since Christian nations are still partly
pagan, or alpha-stemming, and therefore disposed to tolerate, if not openly
admire, Jews in their midst, irrespective of how un-Christian or pre-atomic
some of them may happen to be. Only
nations tending away from atomic civilization in a barbarous political guise
would be inclined to persecute Jews for being pre-atomic in cultural
allegiance. For such nations tend,
whether or not they're aware of the fact, towards the transcendent, and must
find fault with what they take to be pagan or, in the Jewish case, quasi-pagan
alpha-oriented 'laggards'.
KEITH: But
surely the Nazi persecution of Jews, to which you are doubtless alluding, was
conducted on a racist basis, without regard to moral or religious criteria?
ROBERT: To a large extent it was, even given the fact that one can't
wholly separate religious from ethnic considerations, bearing in mind that race
and culture are deeply interwoven. Yet
while that may have been the case on the surface, as it were, of the Nazi
persecution of the Jews, I incline to doubt whether there wasn't a deeper
motive underlying it which many Nazis may not have been consciously aware of
themselves, but which they were fated, as tools of malign history, to enact - a
motive, I mean, connected with the moral implications of leaving a
predominantly pre-atomic people at large in a world tending, from a barbarous
base, towards post-atomic criteria.
Admittedly, it is easy for civilized Westerners to see nothing more than
a racist dimension to Nazi anti-Semitism, since this was the apparent dimension,
the one most superficially recognizable.
But history often makes use of superficial means to attain to profounder
ends, and uses, in the process, unsuspecting accomplices in the pursuit of its
ultimate goals! Wasn't Nazism supposed
to be a quasi-religious ideology, opposed to 'Bolshevik materialism'? And might it not be that such an ideology was
fated to pursue policies which Marxists wouldn't have understood, since subject
to a different ideological prerogatives, but which history nevertheless
required, if only on a short-term basis?
KEITH: Your
speculation induces one to suppose that, despite its inevitable failure, Nazism
may have been of some service to history whilst it lasted, and primarily as
regards the liquidation of approximately six million covertly or overtly
cultural adherents of a pre-atomic religion who would not have been dealt with
in such fashion by Marxists!
ROBERT: Ah,
but the point is: Who were those six million Jews? Were they the cream of their
race, those who had fulfilled Biblical prophecy by returning to
KEITH: Yet
even though millions of Jews succumbed to Nazi persecution and were
exterminated in a variety of hideous contexts, one could nevertheless argue
that many Jews who would not otherwise have returned to Palestine did in fact do
so in consequence of Nazi pressures, and that the Nazis accordingly assisted,
if indirectly and in the crudest possible terms, in the fulfilment of Biblical
prophecy ... by inducing the more sensible or courageous or fortunate or fit
Jews to escape to freedom.
ROBERT: Indeed, and many Jews would doubtless have required such a
radical incentive for leaving
KEITH: You
mean the State of
ROBERT:
Yes, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that they should set such an example
to the whole world. For, speaking as an
Irishman, I would like to see
KEITH: So
while you don't have a particularly high moral regard for Jews ... conceived,
in a way, as exiled tribalists, you are prepared to
concede Israelis the possibility of spiritual redemption, even though, in the
present circumstances, many of them cling to Judaism for want of anything
better.
ROBERT:
Yes, I would rather Israel became a bulwark of transcendental progress in the
Middle East, and thereby fully justified its presence there, instead of simply
existing in an open-society context, as at present. After all, the adoption of Transcendentalism
by
KEITH: Yet, presumably diaspora Jews
would be more subject to harassment than Jews or, rather, Israelis in
ROBERT:
That always remains a possibility.
Though if such Jews aren't specifically intended, by historical
necessity, to be in the Diaspora to further Transcendentalism among European
and other peoples when the opportunity of doing so arises, then most of them
would probably be better off going to Israel and working for Israeli freedom,
or the right of Israel to exist. For it
seems to me that the more Jews there are in Israel, and the less Jews in the
Diaspora, the better it will be for Israel, which still hasn't entirely
convinced the Arab world of its entitlement to exist, and could therefore do
with all the able-bodied help it can get.
KEITH: So
you are convinced that the State of
ROBERT:
Provided the conditions to which I have alluded are eventually met and Israel
thereupon takes a lead in affirming Transcendentalism, as taught by the New
Messiah, the 'Anti-Moses' of universal civilization. Unfortunately, like Moses in the desert before
him, this New Messiah, who in Christian parlance loosely corresponds to a
Second Coming, won't personally enter the 'promised land' ... of the
transcendental civilization himself, because its global realization is only
likely to come to pass in the future, quite some time, in all probability,
after his death. But he must
nevertheless point the way forward for his subsequent followers, of whichever
race, to tend towards and eventually enter this spiritual 'promised land'
themselves, to be set firmly on course for the post-Human Millennium and what
lies beyond that epoch ... in the heaven of literal transcendence. If some peoples are destined to start along
the road to that ultimate civilization ahead of others, well and good! There will continue to be a distinction
between 'the quick' and 'the slow' for some time yet, and he sees no reason why
Israelis, in conjunction with peoples like the Irish and Iranians, shouldn't be
among the former. After all, Jews have
been dragging their feet, metaphorically speaking, for a sufficient period of
time now to suggest that a radical leap to higher things is timely! The Diaspora may have held their religious
aspirations in check, but the State of
FEELING AND AWARENESS
EDWIN: Since you are a self-proclaimed philosopher, what is the
distinction between awareness and will, as applying to the spirit?
TONY: The
distinction is between the negative and positive approach to and/or
application of spirit. When we use
spirit actively it becomes will. When,
on the other hand, we use it passively, which I interpret in a positive light,
it becomes awareness.
EDWIN: But
isn't will awareness?
TONY:
Yes. But it is awareness directed
towards practical ends and does not result in the direct cultivation of spirit.
Awareness directed towards no other end than greater awareness makes for Truth.
EDWIN: Then
what is spirit?
TONY: The awareness aspect of the most positive use of electrons,
as when they are in a majority over protons in any atomic integrity.
EDWIN: And
when or where do they exist in such a majority?
TONY: In
the new brain. Now the new brain is of
course a physiological entity, but, like all such entities, it has a psychic
aspect, which we call the superconscious. This is synonymous with spirit or, rather,
the superconscious is that part of the psyche in
which spirit exists, just as the subconscious is that part of it in which the
existence of soul is to be found.
EDWIN: What
is soul?
TONY: The
psychic aspect of proton-dominated regions of the body, which manifests in
emotions.
EDWIN: As
all emotions?
TONY: Yes,
good and bad, or positive and negative. The strong as well as the weak, the lasting as well as the
transient. Soul pertains to the
flesh and thus stems from the Diabolic Alpha, which is to say, from the cosmic
or natural roots of life. Spirit, though
lodged in a material entity, viz. the new brain, can be encouraged to reflect
an aspiration towards the Divine Omega, which is to say, pure spirit as totally
free electrons.
EDWIN: Thus
our spirit and our soul are alike impure?
TONY: Yes,
they are dependent on and connected with matter, which, as we both know, is
atomic. Pure soul, however, is subatomic
and manifests in the proton-proton reactions of flame. Pure spirit, by contrast, will be
supra-atomic, as manifesting in the electron-electron attractions of
transcendence.
EDWIN: You
say soul is feeling, but would the sun, as a cosmic manifestation of pure soul,
be capable of feeling?
TONY: Not
in the conscious sense! The sun or, for
that matter, any subatomic absolute would be unconscious of itself as
feeling. So, incidentally, would mineral
formations, in which protons greatly preponderate. Consciousness of feeling only arises at that
point in evolutionary development when atomic formations are less radically
proton-dominated than with minerals - in other words, with plant life which,
although still proton-dominated, is capable of feeling pleasure or pain by dint
of a higher electron content than is to be found in stone. But so much does the proton content
preponderate over the electron content of this particular mode of life ... that
feeling is only registered subconsciously, never breaks into actual conscious
recognition, as with animals and men.
EDWIN: Thus
there is a difference between being unconscious of feeling because either
absolutely or near absolutely proton-constituted, and being subconsciously
conscious of it, as when the electron content increases slightly?
TONY: Yes,
a distinction, primarily, between the inorganic and the organic - the former
being beneath even subconscious receptivity, the latter on or above it.
EDWIN: If,
unlike a stone, a tree is capable of feeling pain or pleasure subconsciously,
would a dead tree or a log also be capable of doing so?
TONY: Of
course not! To be conscious of feeling,
on whatever level, one must be alive, and this applies no less to a tree or
plant than to an animal or a human being.
A dead tree would be closer to the inorganic than to the organic - indeed, it would literally become inorganic, as when wood
turns into coal, and accordingly be beneath the subconscious recognition of
emotions. A log would feel no pain from
an axe-blow, but a live tree certainly would, if subconsciously. We, too, feel pleasure and pain
subconsciously ... in sleep, which is the nearest we can get to understanding
what a tree would feel. Plants are a
life form that sleeps all the time, though if they dream they would have no
consciousness of the fact, because there are too few electrons in their atomic
constitution to enable a separate or viewing mind to emerge.
EDWIN:
Would you describe positive emotions as good and negative ones as evil?
TONY: I am
no Platonist, but I will concede to positive emotions the status of a relative
good, that is to say, good in relation to negative emotions without, however,
being good in any absolute or literal sense.
EDWIN: So
still basically evil?
TONY: Yes,
because dependent on and clinging to the flesh.
Whatever appertains to soul, whether negatively (as pain) or positively
(as pleasure), is inherently evil because temporal. Pleasure may result from the electron content
of flesh responding to positive stimuli, but the fact that it has to do with
the electron aspect of the flesh doesn't make it good in any absolute
sense. It is certainly preferable to
pain, and we recognize as much. But it
remains sensual, quite distinct from any absolute good (of awareness) in the
spirit. Indeed, the spirit itself falls
short of Absolute Goodness by dint of the fact that it is impure, or dependent
on the new brain for physiological support.
We aspire, if virtuous, towards Absolute Good from the relative goodness
of spiritual awareness. But, by
comparison with positive emotions, even the lesser degree of awareness to which
I have just alluded, which appertains to the superconscious,
is closer to an absolute good, and we customarily regard it as such.
EDWIN:
Clearly, you are no aesthete! For, if I
understand you correctly, the contemplation of beauty would, to your mind, be
but a means to effecting the relative, or lesser, evil
of positive emotions.
TONY: Yes,
and therefore not a means to transcending soul, such as any genuine aspiration
towards the Divine must be all about.
Beauty in art is only practicable or acceptable for a given period of
evolutionary time - in other words, until such time as men turn away from
emotions towards the cultivation of awareness through one or another degree of
transcendentalism. Art then becomes a
matter of Truth, a mode of intimating of Absolute Truth in the interests of
increased awareness. We don't want
positive sensations from art in a developing transcendental age but, au
contraire, something that encourages us to transcend emotions through
passive contemplation, something, in short, that negates or stills emotions in
deference to the spirit.
EDWIN: Yet
not all twentieth-century art does so.
After all, there is a fair amount of ugly or anti-beauty art around,
while some of it still appeals to our aesthetic sense.
TONY:
That's true, and as far as the latter kind of art is concerned I have nothing
to say, preferring not to lose my cool!
But ugly art, as you call it, is certainly an important aspect of modern
art, reflecting the fact that contemporary man is at a further remove from the
Beautiful, regarded as an abstract virtue, than were the ancients or, for that
matter, his nineteenth-century predecessors, and is more disposed, in
consequence, either to interpret beauty in a relatively ugly way or to
consciously turn against it in a determined attempt to undermine and slander
it. I suspect that most petty-bourgeois
artists who create a relatively ugly art are really interpreting the Beautiful
in their own rather modernist way, and so extending the aesthetic tradition
into increasingly rarefied regions of Being which, in some people's minds, may
seem inseparable from ugliness. I don't
think we need criticize such artists for having a different concept of beauty
than the ancients or their bourgeois and/or aristocratic predecessors. Yet, regardless of their respective
intentions, the art they are producing will be on a lower level, in my opinion,
than that which is being produced in the realm of transcendentalism, or an art
exclusively concerned with Truth and, as a corollary of this, the cultivation
of greater degrees of awareness in the public at large.
EDWIN: So a
distinction exists between 'emotional art', irrespective of the quality or type
of emotions it encourages, and 'awareness art', which, by contrast, is the
truly modern art.
TONY:
'Feeling art' is never absolute, nor, for that matter, is most 'awareness art'
completely detached from feeling-engendering qualities, as we discover when we
respond to, say, a Neo-Plastic work as though it were intended to reflect a
higher concept of the Beautiful. But to
the extent that a distinction of sorts does in fact exist between them, then
yes - aesthetic art pertains, even when only tenuously beautiful, to the
tradition, whereas 'awareness art' pertains to what is truly modern, as
signifying a post-atomic bias for electron freedom. One could speak of materialistic art on the
one hand and of idealistic art on the other - a distinction extending across
the entire spectrum of petty-bourgeois creativity and even into the, by
comparison, nominally proletarian realms of light art and holography. From a proton/bound-electron distinction in
atomic art, we progress towards a quasi-electron/free-electron distinction on
the post-atomic levels of much twentieth-century art. From works in the former contexts that
directly appeal to the emotions and indirectly to awareness ... towards works
in the latter contexts that indirectly appeal to the emotions and directly to
awareness.
EDWIN: You
are alluding, I presume, to works, in the former contexts, of concrete beauty
and concrete truth respectively, but to works, in the latter contexts, of
abstract beauty and abstract truth respectively.
TONY: To be sure, and to works, in the latter contexts, of
abstract beauty that may well appear ugly and give rise, in consequence, to
less than positive emotions! Perhaps
they are a better incentive than more concrete works to our turning away from
emotions and embracing awareness instead?
I, at any rate, have always found so, which is why I prefer them to more
traditionally aesthetic works, despite the difference in quality of the
emotions engendered. Even a negative,
indirect incentive to awareness is preferable to no incentive at all!
EDWIN: Ah,
I'm almost afraid that I shall have to agree with you, incorrigible aesthete
that I am!
RELATIVE PERVERSION
CARMEL: You
give one the impression, Graham, that you don't much care for women, that women somehow annoy you.
GRAHAM:
Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I have long recognized in women a
vicious streak and predisposition to sensual indulgence that, as a spiritual
man, I tend to despise. I don't greatly
admire beauty these days, and find the attention or, rather, importance which
women ascribe to appearances somewhat contemptible. For instance, they are more disposed than men
to taking umbrage at some defect in one's clothes or footwear when one passes
them on the street. I agree with
Schopenhauer that they value appearances too highly, partly, I suspect, because
their understanding of spiritual values is so little developed in comparison
with the more sophisticated men. You, I
concede, are an exception to the general rule.
For not many women are as liberated, liberated, above all, from
themselves!
CARMEL:
What it really comes down to, with you, is that the only women you really like
or admire are the liberated ones, the feminists, whom you have at various times
called traitors to their sex.
GRAHAM:
Yes, I agree! I prefer women who, in
their capacity as quasi-Supermen, are working against women ... to those who
are all for upholding traditional values and behaving - dare I say it? - all too poignantly like women! My impression is that the sooner the sexual
dichotomy in life is overcome, the better life on this planet will be. For such a dichotomy is by no means an ideal
thing, contrary to bourgeois prejudices and superficial appearances to the
contrary! No more ideal, in fact, than
the so-called balance between freedom and social justice that certain
ideologues are fond of citing to justify the opposition between Tory capitalism
and Liberal socialism. Such deluded
souls imagine that this opposition signifies the best of all political worlds.
GRAHAM:
Admittedly. But not for ever, contrary
to what they would have us believe! And the same of course applies to the
opposition or, rather, dichotomy between the sexes, which, frankly, is a
wretched thing and source of centuries-old misery, not the least aspect of
which may involve unrequited love! No, I
do not admire women. I look forward to
the day when they will be overcome and only quasi-Supermen exist, in harmonious
conjunction with Supermen-proper in a context of post-atomic sexuality. Such a day isn't all that far off; for even
in the bourgeois/proletarian West there exists a
growing tendency towards post-atomic criteria in sexual, not to mention, social
matters. You would object to being
discriminated against as a woman, and, willy-nilly, for the very sound
reason that, to all intents and purposes, you are now a quasi-Superman.
CARMEL: Yet
not, on that account, the complete equal of a genuine Superman, I presume?
GRAHAM:
Objectively considered, no! Though it
would of course depend on the Superman in question and the context to which one
was referring. It is possible for me to
consider a highly intelligent woman like yourself superior to any number of
comparatively stupid men. That is a
relative distinction, I'll admit, but not one I find obnoxious.
GRAHAM:
No. But, then, absolute distinctions
between men and women, no matter how anachronistic these days, cannot permit of
any equality, which is one of the reasons why I prefer to ignore them. It suffices me that you are a lesser equal
rather than a different and, hence, quite unequal creature. For long centuries women were regarded as
inferior to men, not as social equals.
Yet the marital tradition presupposes the enslavement of a
bound-electron equivalent, viz. a husband, to a proton equivalent, viz. a wife,
who sustains an atomic integrity in which she figures as the husband's
so-called 'better half'.
CARMEL: In theory, yes.
Though in practice it is usually the husband who dictates matters - at
any rate, since the days when marriage became patriarchal in character. You, however, prefer to regard me as a
'lesser whole', since there is no marital bond between us.
GRAHAM:
Indeed! And that is the way of things on
the post-atomic level. Our relationship
is in effect quasi-homosexual, since a liberated woman and a married woman are,
to all intents and purposes, two quite different creatures - the difference
being between a quasi-electron equivalent and a proton equivalent. Well, as you know, I don't mind the former,
but I despise the latter! I shall never
allow myself to get maritally involved with a woman
and thereby run the risk of becoming her bread-winning slave in an atomic
relationship. I intend to remain free,
and to share my freedom with a lesser equal - namely you.
GRAHAM: And so it will become again, if ever you get any ideas of
marriage into your devious head!
CARMEL: As a liberated female, I could hardly do that! Marriage and children are equally
objectionable to me.
GRAHAM:
Well, they can't be so for everyone, least of all where children are concerned,
else the human race would quickly die out.
Children aren't necessarily incompatible with free sexual relationships,
though they may tie the woman down a bit.
Sooner or later some artificial and communal way of producing and
raising children will have to be introduced, in order to rid liberated females
of the responsibility. There is no
eternal justification for producing and raising children on a family basis. Neither, for that matter, is there any
eternal justification for people remaining together throughout their
lives. If we are truly liberated, we
should be able to change partners fairly frequently, since there will be no
strong emotional ties binding us together, like prisoners of each other's
souls. Some men are so liberated that
they don't even bother to form temporary relationships with women in the flesh,
but rely on artificial or pornographic stimuli alone. As you know, I was once similarly disposed
and thus, in a sense, freer than now.
GRAHAM:
Perversion is a relative term, a value-judgement reflecting an individual's
point of view as he stands in relation to nature. What less-evolved people regard as perverse,
someone like me sees as a more civilized type of sexual behaviour, a mode of
sexual sublimation in which sex is elevated from the body to the mind, from the
concrete realm of the flesh to the abstract realm of voyeuristic contemplation,
as in various kinds of pornography.
James Joyce once said that madness, or what is sometimes taken for such
by less-evolved people, can in fact turn out to be a higher form of sanity. Certainly there are contexts in which this is
true, as when a man is given to sexual sublimation because, in response to a
combination of factors, environmental as well as personal, he becomes too
spiritual to be content with merely natural or palpable modes of sex. Perhaps, in certain cases, schizophrenia is a
higher form of sanity, as when the intelligence draws away from the senses in
anticipation of and response to an evolutionary drive tending towards the
complete severance of intellect from sensuality at some future point in time,
namely the Superbeing Millennium, when the new-brain collectivizations of the truly classless, stateless, free
society of Superbeings ... will be hypermeditating towards transcendence and, hence, the
attainment of pure spirit to the heavenly Beyond in the most absolute context
conceivable? The split between
sensuality, i.e. emotions, and intelligence, i.e. awareness, which we witnessed
in the twentieth century ... seems to me but a crude foreshadowing, a
rudimentary intimation, of that ultimate split between the old brain and the new
brain which evolutionary progress will require on the threshold of the Superbeing Millennium - the second stage of post-human
development.
GRAHAM:
Precisely! But radical and long-sighted
as that perspective may be, it should at least suffice, in the short term, to
underline or expose the crass short-sightedness and conservatism of people who
now imagine that pornographic indulgence is a kind of sexual aberration not to
be countenanced by right-living individuals!
To my mind, however, the use of pornography reflects this emerging
cleavage between intellect and sensuality by transferring sexual stimuli from
the senses to the intellect, and thereby endorsing the sovereignty, from an
evolutionary viewpoint, of the spirit over the flesh. It is clearly a manifestation of evolutionary
progress in terms of sex.
CARMEL: Which
is why, I take it, that you cling to pornographic erotica in spite of
occasional - dare I say it? - relapses into concrete
sexuality, compliments of myself.
GRAHAM: To
be sure. Though you will have to admit
that such 'relapses', as you tactfully put it, aren't always conventional but
reflect a more liberated approach to sex which, as I see the problem, in some
measure redeems them. Of course, a
person who based his morality solely on naturalistic criteria, as all too many
persons still do, would accuse me of perversion. But, really, how can human beings evolve
towards spiritual transcendence without having perverted or, more correctly,
subverted their natural instincts along the way? Is not the overcoming of nature an integral
part of our evolution towards the supernatural - the negative and indirect
side, as it were, of our evolutionary strivings? You smile, but you know I am right, and that
is why, in spite of occasional misgivings, you are fundamentally a liberated
female, a quasi-Superman rather than a slave to nature, like a woman.
GRAHAM:
Such compliments as you pay me are but the reverse side of the compliments I
pay you when circumstances compel me to verify your claim to the status of a
liberated female, as they do from time to time.
FROM GRAVITY TO CURVED SPACE
BRIAN: If I
understand you correctly, the Universe began with explosions of gas that gave
rise to the proton-proton reactions of stars and only formed itself into
galaxies when some of those stars, evidently smaller and weaker than others,
cooled to the point of becoming partly material, and thus were attracted by the
larger subatomic stars on account of their atomic constitution.
SHANE:
Precisely! As soon as the smaller stars
began to harden into planets, the everywhichway divergence
of stars that had hitherto prevailed in the Universe was halted, because the
larger stars now found themselves competing for planets in a mutual attraction
that kept them pinned, as it were, to circumscribed cosmic bounds.
BRIAN: So
stars and planets weren't born simultaneously.
SHANE: No,
of course not! A planet presupposes a
certain atomic integrity and cannot arrive at such an
integrity without having first existed on the purely or predominantly
subatomic level of a star. The subatomic leads to the atomic, so planets would have evolved
somewhat later than stars, originally being small stars that were destined to
cool, at least in part, into matter.
BRIAN: I
agree when you say 'at least in part'. For the earth is itself a star in the process of cooling, one that
possesses a subatomic core which is encased within an atomic crust. It is divided, so to speak, between the
subatomic and the atomic.
SHANE: One
could alternatively describe it as being somewhere in-between a star and a
moon, since a moon is a dead star, or a star which has completely cooled. That, I think, would constitute the
definitive definition of a planet.
BRIAN: Yet
why is it that planets revolve around the sun?
What is it about these cooling stars that brought the everywhichway divergence of stars in general to a halt, and
thus created the basis of a galactic integrity?
SHANE:
Precisely the fact that they were and remain partly atomic, and so became
attracted to the nearest stars. For
protons attract electrons, and since there were plenty of electrons in the
atomic integrity of the earth's crust it followed that, in conjunction with
other planets, the earth would be attracted to the nearest 'anarchic'
star. What prevented the earth from
being sucked-in to the sun, as we may now call the star in question, was the
fact that it wasn't entirely atomic but contained a large subatomic core which
reacted against the sun's attractive force, and thereby established a tension
the nature of which was to contribute towards its revolution around the
sun. For whilst one
part of the planet was attracted to the sun, the other part reacted against it,
while simultaneously attracting the earth's atomic crust. This tension between attraction and
repellence is precisely what caused our planet, and by implication other nearby
planets, to revolve around the sun, and it keeps the earth intact. For it is quite probable that the subatomic
core would exert a stronger attractive influence on the crust, were it not
balanced-out by the competing attraction of the sun.
BRIAN: An equilibrium of mutually attractive and repellent
tensions! But does this also explain the
revolution of the moon around the earth?
SHANE:
Indeed it does, since the atomic relativity of the moon is attracted by the
subatomic absolutism of the earth's core while simultaneously being repelled by
the atomic relativity of its crust - the protons in each of these relativities
chiefly being responsible for the repelling.
Yet the moon is also attracted by the subatomic absolutism of the sun
and revolves around the earth more in consequence of the competition between
core and sun than in response to any repellent influence solely stemming from
the earth's crust.
BRIAN: In
other words, it is torn between two mutually exclusive attractions.
SHANE: Just
as the earth's crust is torn between the mutually exclusive attractions of its
own core and the sun, and the planet is thereby kept spinning on its axis
around the sun, which is unable to pull the crust into itself from without ...
for the simple reason that the earth's core is exerting a similar attraction on
it from within.
BRIAN: And
yet, what about the sun - what is there that keeps it revolving around the
central star of the Galaxy?
SHANE:
Certainly not the fact that the central star attracts the sun to itself, but,
rather, because, being large and powerful, it attracts the numerous planets
which revolve around smaller stars and would probably succeed in sucking them
into itself, were it not for the fact that these smaller stars, one to each solar
system, exert an attractive influence of their own on the planets as well.
BRIAN: So
just as a moon is kept in revolution around a planet because of the competing
attractions of core and sun, and a planet is likewise kept in revolution around
a sun, so a peripheral star is kept in rotation around the central star of the
Galaxy because of their mutually exclusive interest in planets and moons.
SHANE: That
must be approximately correct. And it
should mean that part of the reason why a planet revolves around a sun is that
the more distant central star of the Galaxy also exerts an attractive influence
on it, an influence which is counterweighted, however, by the small star at the
heart of any given solar system, as well, of course, as by its own subatomic
core.
BRIAN: So the central star in each galaxy and the small peripheral
stars are fundamentally the same - at least in constitution, if not in size and
strength.
SHANE: Yes,
for anything that is subatomic can only be such on approximately identical
terms, i.e. as implying some degree of proton-proton reaction. The central star, from which it appears the
smaller ones emerged, would be no less subatomic than the others. Only with planets does evolution attain to an
atomic integrity.
BRIAN: And it is this integrity, this matter, that a sun attracts
to itself.
SHANE: Yes,
certainly not the electrons by themselves!
For electrons cannot be divorced from matter at such an early stage of
evolution as planetary formations. Rock
does not burn, because the atomic integrity of such matter is too densely
proton-packed. It was once molten lava
that cooled and hardened into rock, from which state it cannot return to fire
again, having already burnt itself out.
But it can be attracted, in a kind of magnetic reciprocity, by the
subatomic absolute, which exerts a force on its mass.
BRIAN: Here
you are speaking of gravity.
SHANE:
True, and the gravitational force exerted by the subatomic absolute acts as
though that absolute would like to reclaim the mass, derived from its partial
cooling, back into itself out of a wilful desire to prevent further evolution.
BRIAN: But
why, if the sun attracts this mass to itself, does a stone return to earth when
thrown into the air instead of continuing in the sun's direction, from which an
attractive force is apparently all the time emanating?
SHANE:
Precisely because the earth's molten core also exerts an attractive force on
the stone which causes it to return to the surface, this force being closer to
the stone than the sun and therefore exerting more authority over it. And for that reason the earth's crust,
composed of rocks and mineral formations, is prevented from being sucked-in to
the sun; though, because an attractive force still emanates from it, the
planet, caught in a tug-of-war between core and sun, not to mention sun and
central star, is obliged to revolve around it.
BRIAN:
Granted that the sun acts as a kind of magnet on the earth's crust, what
happens as regards, say, wood and vegetables?
SHANE: They
are also attracted by the sun, if in a heliotropic
rather than a magnetic way, since no magnet has ever been made out of wood or
vegetable life! The sun doesn't attract
plants to the degree it attracts rock or crystal formations, though some
attraction does in fact occur, else they would be unable to grow. Indeed, were there not a simultaneous
attraction from the earth's core, they wouldn't grow anyway, since unable to
remain rooted. For a plant's growth
isn't just upwards into air; it is also downwards into soil, and we may believe
that the roots are encouraged to grow by the earth's core and the stalk, in
contrast, by the sun, so that a plant grows simultaneously downwards and
upwards, is the result of a tension of competing gravitational forces which, at
some point in any particular plant's growth, are obliged to call it quits, so
to speak, and leave the plant as testimony to a gravitational compromise
between the competing attractions. Even
a sunflower, which is taller than other flowers and thereby suggests a bias
towards the sun, has roots that go down deeply into the soil and thus testify
to the simultaneous competing influence of the earth's core. Even animals and men are subject to this
tension of gravitational forces between the two main subatomic protagonists in
the Solar System.
BRIAN: But
they don't possess roots that go down into the soil.
SHANE: Not
literally! But, then, legs are root
equivalents in autonomous life forms and lead, particularly in the case of Homo
sapiens, to an upright, stalk-like entity that we call the torso, which in
turn leads to what may be regarded as a blossom equivalent - namely the
head. Considered biologically, man is a
kind of walking plant, and, believe me, he wouldn't walk long on this planet's
surface were he not subject, like a plant, to the attractive force of the
earth's subatomic core! He would be more
like a spaceman, gliding about in space, and always at the risk, if he ventured
too far from the earth's gravitational field, of being sucked-in to the sun.
BRIAN: So
our stability is to some extent determined by the competing gravitational
forces of sun and core.
SHANE:
Yes. And that applies to every life form
on this planet, from a tiny plant to a huge elephant. It also determines, in some measure, our height
and weight.
BRIAN: You
mean a person's height is determined, in part, by the competing attractive
forces simultaneously at work on him from opposite directions?
SHANE: Only
from a species point of view, since individual variations are primarily determined
by hereditary factors. But as weight is
generally proportionate to height, so height is dependent on the particular
tension of competing subatomic forces that simultaneously exert themselves on the world.
Were there less attraction from below, in the earth's core, we would
probably be a good deal taller, as a species, than we generally are. In the case of pigmies, however, it will be
found, I think, that they are shorter in height than the average of humanity because
more subject to the attractive force of the earth's core than to that of the
sun, and largely on account of the fact that they live in jungle regions which,
while not totally shutting out the latter's attractive force, somewhat weaken
it by dint of the density of plant life to be found there. So they grow less tall than those of us
accustomed to regular exposure to the sun.
BRIAN: A
theory which should imply that the tallest men, by contrast, will live in
regions of the world most exposed to the sun, like the
SHANE:
Indeed, and I think you will find that Arabs are taller, on average, than those
of us who live in temperate regions.
BRIAN:
Getting back to the attractive force which the subatomic absolute exerts on
matter, we must distinguish, I take it, between this
matter and its electron content. In
other words, the attraction is primarily on matter rather than on the electrons
inside it.
SHANE:
Absolutely! And the more dense the
matter, the more tightly proton-packed it is, the stronger is the attraction of
the subatomic upon it, as in the case of rocks and mineral formations
generally.
BRIAN: So
there could be no question of free electrons, of transcendent spirit, being
attracted by, say, the sun, in the event of transcendence occurring on earth.
SHANE: None
whatsoever, because the distinction between the subatomic and the supra-atomic
is absolute, and no attraction can possibly occur between absolutes. It would be absurd to suppose that, in
escaping from the atomic constraint of new-brain matter at the culmination of
millennial evolution, transcendent spirit would straightaway be attracted by
the sun and eventually merge into it.
The sun would be the last thing, metaphorically speaking, that pure
spirit would be attracted by, since its sole predilection would be to converge
towards other transcendences, other globes of pure spirit, and expand into
larger wholes in consequence, a process that, repeated possibly millions of
times throughout the course of supra-atomic evolution, would eventually
culminate in a definitive globe of pure spirit - namely, the Omega Point, as
defined by Teilhard de Chardin
in terms of the spiritual culmination of evolution. Now just suppose, for the sake of argument,
that all transcendences, from whichever part of the Universe, were attracted to
the nearest stars instead of to one another - what do you suppose would happen?
BRIAN:
Provided enough large transcendences entered a star,
the proton-proton reactions of the subatomic would be confronted by
electron-electron attractions of the supra-atomic, which could lead to its
being elevated above pure soul into matter, becoming, in the process, akin to a
planet with some degree of atomic integrity.
SHANE: In
theory. But, in practice, I rather doubt
it! For stars only became planets
through cooling, and matter was thus created, on its most rudimentary level,
from a subatomic base, not through a sudden fusion of protons with free
electrons entering the subatomic from without!
No, pure spirit would never be attracted by the stars, not even
slightly. Rather, it would fulfil its
own destiny in loyalty to the divine principles of a convergence and expansion
of separate transcendences towards total unity.
BRIAN: Then
matter is only attracted by the subatomic so long as it is naturalistic and, as
it were, rooted in the Diabolic Alpha.
SHANE: Yes,
as soon as spirit begins to get the upper hand over soul, as it will do in man
at a relatively advanced stage of his evolution, then life aspires towards the
Divine Omega, towards transcendence, even if only relatively so at first, as in
Christianity, rather than with absolute intent.
Atomic, or dualistic, man, who is part mundane and part transcendental,
physically stemming from the Diabolic Alpha but psychically aspiring towards
the Divine Omega, is still to a certain extent attracted by the subatomic. But transcendental man, while possessing a
natural body, will exclusively turn towards the Divine Omega, that is to say,
towards creating the Supernatural, and thus cease to affirm a link with the
Creator. He will be set on course for
the post-Human Millennium and, hence, the practical implementation of an
exclusively omega-oriented aspiration through the supersession
of man by largely artificial, or post-human life forms, the second and last of
which, namely the Superbeings, will have no
connection with the Diabolic Alpha whatsoever!
BRIAN: Thus
evolution proceeds from pure soul to matter, and from matter to pure spirit,
not back, as some people seem to imagine, into pure soul.
SHANE:
Correct! There would be no logic or
sense to life if evolution were destined to return to the subatomic after it
had attained to the atomic, instead of progressing to the supra-atomic. There can be no greater distinction than that
between Hell and Heaven! We are set on
course for Heaven, if from a kind of purgatorial compromise in the atomic.
BRIAN: And this despite the diabolical workings of the physical
cosmos, in which the law of gravity holds sway and planets are accordingly
obliged to rotate around suns.
SHANE: To
be sure! A literal knowledge of how the
physical cosmos works is the prerogative of people like us, who are beyond the
confines of Western civilization, with its petty-bourgeois transcendentalism
demanding a subjective, quasi-mystical interpretation of how it works, as exemplified
by the Einsteinian concept of curved space. Such a civilization must
kow-tow to transcendental sensibilities, and thus uphold a
quasi-mystical interpretation at the expense of force and mass. It will claim that
BRIAN: But
won't proletarian civilization uphold a similar if not more radical
quasi-mystical interpretation of how the Cosmos works, in due course?
SHANE: Oh
yes, absolutely! But, in the meantime,
proletarian states will prefer the literal, objective 'truth' about the
physical universe, since that accords with their materialistic integrity beyond
the boundaries of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, which isn't, after all,
the ultimate civilization but only a stage on the evolutionary road to something
higher - namely, proletarian civilization.
Marxist states, as upholders of dialectical materialism, certainly won't
venture into the realm of petty-bourgeois transcendentalism, but will remain
partial to Newtonian explanations of the Cosmos. I, too, am partial to such explanations, as
this dialogue should indicate, but only on a relative basis! For whilst it is useful for a proletarian
thinker to get to the bottom of how things really work and why, it is even more
useful to know why a quasi-mystical interpretation of such workings should be
endorsed, if not now then certainly in the future. Petty-bourgeois transcendentalism may be good
but, believe me, proletarian transcendentalism will be a good deal better! That I can assure you! In the meantime, let us exploit our status as
'barbarous' outsiders in order to put our more comprehensive knowledge of the
literal workings of the physical cosmos down on record once and for all!
BRIAN: I
agree. But don't you think you
exaggerate the transcendental integrity of bourgeois/proletarian civilization,
which, after all, isn't absolute but decidedly relative? I mean, Einstein may be de rigueur
for the scientific avant-garde, but
SHANE: You
are right, and consequently a literal explanation of how the Cosmos works would
still find sympathetic ears in the West, since the pagan root remains intact in
a relative civilization, and that allows not only the relatively uncivilized
masses, but the more conservative-thinking people to regard the Cosmos from a
traditional force/mass point-of-view, if they so desire. Probably a majority of the aristocracy and
the grand bourgeoisie would be inclined to uphold a literal rather than a
quasi-mystical view of the Cosmos, since they don't live on the same plane,
generally speaking, as the petty bourgeoisie, particularly those who constitute
the scientific avant-garde. So while
curved space may be de rigueur for petty-bourgeois pace setters, force-and-mass
cannot be outlawed, since there will be those who, on class or religious
grounds, relate more to a literal explanation of how the Cosmos works than to a
quasi-mystical one largely conducted, one suspects, in the interests of
transcendental complacency. For this
reason, anyone who chooses to walk into a book shop and buy the works of
BRIAN: Ah,
how absolutely right you are!
FROM THE PERSONAL TO THE UNIVERSAL
MARK: There
are those who claim that Absolute Mind, meaning God in any ultimate sense, is
immanent as well as transcendent, is both in the world and beyond it. Aldous Huxley
upheld this claim, and he derived it from Buddhist and
Oriental scriptures. Would you agree with him?
GERALD: No,
not on an absolute basis. There is, to
be sure, a distinction between relative and absolute, that is to say, between
human spirit and pure spirit, or what we each possess, as awareness, in the superconscious mind, and what is claimed to exist beyond
the world in complete self-sufficiency, as the most aware mind of ...
transcendent spirit.
MARK: In
other words, God.
GERALD: No,
not necessarily! God, in any definitive
sense of literally applying to a supreme level of being, would be the ultimate
globe of transcendent spirit such as could only come about at the climax of
evolution. Transcendences could
conceivably exist in space at present, compliments of more evolved
civilizations than anything we have seen on earth, but they would probably be
at one or two evolutionary removes from the climax of evolution in total
spiritual unity, and therefore oughtn't to be mistaken for God.
MARK: So,
conceived as the ultimate globe of pure spirit at the climax to evolution, God
doesn't yet exist.
GERALD: No,
and won't do so for a considerable period of evolutionary time!
MARK: A
contention, apparently, which need not prevent a distinction between spirit and
pure spirit from existing, as regarding the immanent and the transcendent.
GERALD: Indeed,
there is no reason why planets more advanced than our own shouldn't have
already put pure spirit into space.
Wherever life had evolved to the level of a Superbeing
Millennium, pure spirit would sooner or later emerge. Now that spirit would be Absolute Mind,
because transcendent, and shouldn't be confounded with the immanent experience
of spirit, which ought really to be defined as relativistic absolute mind,
since the immanent absolutism is dependent on and connected with the new brain
and can only be somewhat less divine than the transcendent. One should accordingly distinguish between a
relative absolutism and an absolute absolutism.
MARK: How
is this absolutism relative?
GERALD:
Because awareness would be in the brain and connected with the body. The immanent experience is absolute on this
basis alone: that we are solely concerned with awareness, as the psychic
attribute of superconscious mind, rather than with
any compromise between awareness and emotions such as pertains to the conscious
mind, particularly in conjunction with thoughts. Consciousness is a mixture of subconscious
and superconscious, whereas the immanent experience
of absolute mind demands that we transcend the subconscious and so exist solely
for the superconscious, absorbed in painless
awareness. But such awareness is
relative, because dependent on the new brain.
It can only fall short in quality of the sublime awareness of
transcendent spirit, which is the perfected attribute of Absolute Mind. The distinction between the immanent and the
transcendent is one of degree, as between the personal and the universal. They can never be the same, contrary to what
superficial thinkers tend to imagine!
MARK: And
yet we can progress from the one to the other in the course of time?
GERALD:
Yes, in the course of evolutionary time, which will presuppose further progress
on the human level in terms of a transcendental civilization, the ultimate
civilization in the evolution of man, which should lead, in due course, to the
more evolved life forms of a post-Human Millennium, when first the entire brain
and then just the new brain will be artificially supported and sustained in
collectivized contexts, bringing life to its highest possible earthly pitch
prior to transcendence - the goal of millennial striving in the supra-atomic
Beyond ... of Absolute Mind.
MARK: And
yet, even with the attainment of immanent spirit to transcendent spirit,
further evolutionary progress will presumably be required, in space, to bring
all separate transcendences to ultimate unity in definitive divinity.
GERALD:
Yes, such separate transcendences as emerge from individual Superbeings
will converge towards those nearest to them in space, and thus gradually expand
into larger globes of pure spirit, evolving from what might be termed a
'planetary' level to a 'galactic' level and on, finally, to a 'universal'
level, the climax of supra-atomic evolution in the Omega Point, which will be
at the farthest possible evolutionary remove from the Alpha Points, as it were,
of the central or governing stars throughout the subatomic universe -
approximately one to each galaxy.
MARK: Could
these Alpha Points, as you call them, possibly correspond, by any chance, to
what Buddhists call the Ground of all Being, Christians the Father, Mohammedans
Allah, and Judaists Jehovah?
GERALD:
Indeed they could; though such terms as traditional religions uphold indicate
the singular rather than the plural, because religious evolution stems from a
galactic base in a kind of microcosmic isolation from the Universe in toto, the governing star of the galaxy in which we exist
being the literal source from which theological symbols like Jehovah, Allah, et
cetera, were extrapolated in monotheistic partiality. And this would have been so even if, as was
probably the case, men had no idea of the existence of a governing star, being
unable to see it, but simply posited some creative force behind nature,
including the sun and nearest stars - those visible to the naked eye or through
some rudimentary telescope. Of course,
the ancients may have spoken of a 'Creator of the Universe', but their
'universe' was a good deal smaller, so to speak, than the one we are becoming
familiar with today. They had no idea
that it was composed of millions of galaxies, not possessing a
knowledge of galaxies. Even up
until comparatively recent times men thought the earth
was at the centre of the Universe! No,
if we are to get anywhere near the mark, albeit in anachronistically
theological terms, we should ascribe the creation of the subatomic universe to
literally millions of Grounds, Fathers, Allahs, Jehovahs, or what have you, because pluralism is the
essence of the alpha. Even the idea of a
divine Creator is essentially erroneous or, at the very least, morally suspect
when regarded from an omega-oriented point of view, since evolution begins with
the subatomic and, as pure soul, that corresponds to a diabolic absolute ... in
contrast to the future climax of evolution in the supra-atomic, which, as pure
spirit, will correspond to a truly divine absolute. To speak of a divine Ground, like Aldous Huxley, is effectively to indulge in a contradiction
in terms. The term 'Ground' suggests a
root or base, and could only apply to the diabolic absolute which, as pure
soul, has nothing to do with pure spirit.
MARK:
Presumably the term 'Clear Light of the Void' would be more suitable to the
latter, since effectively corresponding, in Christian parlance, to the Holy
Spirit?
GERALD: Indeed, it may well be that the distinction between the
Ground and the Clear Light ..., as between the Father and the Holy Spirit, is
equivalent to alpha and omega, with some avatar, or anthropomorphic man-god,
coming in-between as the mid-point of religious evolution. But such terms as the Clear Light ... and the
Holy Spirit, while relevant to their respective faiths, would be quite
irrelevant to Transcendentalism, which, as I conceive it, will be the ultimate
religion requiring a convergence to omega, as it were, on the level of a fresh
terminology, so that, not for the least of reasons, no traditional religion may
be regarded as surviving at the expense of another. Transcendentalism is not Buddhism or Hinduism
or Shintoism or any other traditional faith taking
over from each of the others but ... a completely new, all-embracing religious
development which appertains to the world proletariat. It signifies a complete break with the alpha
roots of the Universe in the stars and, in addition to regular meditation in
specially-designed meditation centres, embraces knowledge of evolutionary
perspective ... as applying, in the main, to the Superbeing
Millennium and the nature and direction of transcendence. No Transcendentalist would ever make the
mistake of confounding alpha with omega, or vice versa, and I very much doubt
whether, given the right education, all that many Transcendentalists would
consider God both immanent and transcendent when, in any ultimate sense, God
doesn't yet exist, being the climax of evolution. Neither would they regard their absolute mind
as being identical to the Absolute
Mind, failing to distinguish between the relative and the absolute, the mundane
and the transcendent. A man engaged in
transcendental meditation won't mistake his spirit for pure spirit. He will discover, sooner or later, that
subconscious emotions are never entirely eclipsed by relative awareness and
that even the superconscious is prone to intrusive
emotions and thoughts from time to time!
He will know that there is a significant evolutionary difference between
his absolute mind and the absolutism of a Spiritual Globe converging towards
other such globes in the post-atomic Beyond.
But he will know, too, that such a difference is precisely what
evolutionary progress on earth is determined to overcome. Above all, he will know that man is but a
stage on the way to the post-human.
PETTY-BOURGEOIS ART
LIAM: A
relative civilization will always have two sides to it, viz. a material and a
spiritual, and this no less so on the petty-bourgeois levels of, in the main,
twentieth-century art than on the preceding bourgeois stage of relative
civilization.
ALAN: You
say 'levels', which should be distinguished, I take
it, from sides?
LIAM: Yes,
by 'levels' I refer to earlier and later phases, either of which will have
materialist and spiritual sides which, to further complicate things, constitute
a lower and a higher approach to art - materialist art always being lower, in
any morally objective scale of values, than its spiritual or, to speak in
grammatically parallel terms, spiritualist counterpart.
ALAN: And
how would you define those levels?
LIAM: In
regard to petty-bourgeois civilization (which is the bourgeois part, as it
were, of what, these days, one would call bourgeois/proletarian civilization), either
as a stemming from the bourgeoisie on the earlier level or as an aspiration
towards the proletariat on the later level.
The former will be more representational than abstract, the latter more
abstract than representational. Indeed,
it may even be entirely abstract.
ALAN: And yet be materialist or spiritualist, depending on the
type of art?
LIAM: Yes,
on whether, for example, the art in question is concerned with distorting the
natural or, in the case of the spiritual approach, transcending it in a kind of
painterly supernaturalism.
ALAN: Can
you give me an example of each type of art, on whatever level?
LIAM: Most
certainly! But first I would like to
point out that petty-bourgeois civilization is divisible into what may be
termed a genuine and a pseudo camp, that is to say, a camp of legitimately and
historically relevant petty-bourgeois nations on the one hand, and a camp of
traditionally bourgeois nations on the other hand that, while to some extent
changing with the times and embracing an authentic petty-bourgeois element,
remain closer to their bourgeois roots, and this in spite of exposure to
petty-bourgeois influences from without, i.e. from the more genuinely
petty-bourgeois nations.
ALAN: I
presume you are alluding, within the traditional framework of civilized
painterly art, to nations like
LIAM: Yes,
I am distinguishing between such quintessentially twentieth-century nations as
Germany, Italy, Japan, and the USA in regard to the genuinely petty-bourgeois
camp, and nations like Britain, France, Belgium, and Holland in regard to what
may be called the pseudo-petty-bourgeois camp, which is largely composed of
nations that came to world prominence in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries
but declined, like their respective Empires, in the twentieth century.
ALAN: I
see. And would there be a kind of
materialist/spiritualist division between each of these camps?
LIAM: No,
each camp is itself divisible in that way.
For example, in the traditionally bourgeois camp,
ALAN: Would
one be correct in contending that there exists, as by natural right, a friction
between the materialistic nations and their, so to speak, spiritualistic
counterparts?
LIAM:
Indeed, such a friction, occasionally degenerating into open hostilities, has
long existed between nations with an ideologically antithetical constitution on
the basis of a sort of feminine/masculine distinction which is traceable, it seems to me, to the cosmic tension between
stars and planets at the roots of evolution.
Hence the traditional rivalry between Great Britain and France in the
bourgeois camp, and the more recent rivalry, which came to a head in World War
Two, between Japan and the USA in the petty-bourgeois camp, not to mention
between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy - Germany, though to some extent
spiritualized by Hitler, fundamentally aligned with the materialist side of
things, a fact which had never escaped Italian attention! However, not all friction between
materialists and spiritualists leads to war.
It is more likely to lead to competition in business or sport or
technology or art.
ALAN: You
began by mentioning art.
LIAM: Well,
it is my firm contention that the materialistic nations tend, as a rule, to produce
a materialist art, spiritualistic nations being more given, by contrast, to the
production of a spiritualist art. But
this is relative, not absolute, since in a relativistic civilization, on
whichever class level, both types of art will be produced in any given
country. It is just that a nation will
be predominantly dedicated to the production of one or other of the two types,
according to its ideological integrity, which, so I maintain, is traceable to
ethnic roots.
ALAN: So we
may expect France and the USA, for example, to be predominantly concerned with
producing a spiritualist art, Britain and, say, Germany more given, by
contrast, to the production of a materialist art.
LIAM: Yes,
but one must distinguish between the pseudo-petty-bourgeois nations and the
genuinely petty-bourgeois ones, since, as a rule, the exact type of
spiritualist or materialist art that each nation produces depends on which camp
it is in, a distinction having arisen, in the course of time, between what we
may term mainstream petty-bourgeois art, on whichever level and irrespective of
which side, and subsidiary petty-bourgeois art - the former appertaining to the
genuinely petty-bourgeois nations and the latter to those nations which retain
some allegiance to their bourgeois traditions.
ALAN: Can
we take each art one at a time, starting with the mainstream?
LIAM: Of
course! And on the spiritualist side, as
mainly pertaining to the USA, we may note a progression from Impressionism on
the earlier level to Abstract Impressionism or, as it is better known,
Post-Painterly Abstraction on the later level; a progression, in other words,
from an Impressionism stemming from the natural in semi-representational form
to an Impressionism aspiring towards the supernatural from an abstract base - a
distinction between, for example, Whistler and Rothko. The essence of Impressionism, on whichever
level, is to transcend the natural, to create an impression that, negating
optical focus on the earlier level and transcending it on the later one, relates
to awareness and thus to the visionary.
The earlier Impressionism, stemming from the bourgeois stage of
relativistic civilization, will be apparent, as reflecting an external
impression; the later Impressionism, aspiring towards a proletarian absolutism,
will be essential, as reflecting an internal impression.
ALAN: You
mention the USA, and yet most of the earlier kind of Impressionism, the
concrete kind, so to speak, was created in spiritualistic France, apparently
beneath the orbit of mainstream petty-bourgeois civilization.
LIAM: That
is true, though it was created by petty-bourgeois artists who, like Monet and Pissarro, existed within the confines of an essentially
bourgeois civilization. Hence the opposition among traditional and naturalist painters
which Impressionism initially aroused in
ALAN: An
art which presumably had a mainstream materialist counterpart in ...?
LIAM:
Expressionism, as pioneered by the Dutchman Van Gogh,
and its offspring Abstract Expressionism, the progression from the one to the
other largely taking place in
ALAN: In
what way is Expressionism materialist?
LIAM: By
distorting the natural world rather than transcending it on the earlier level,
in accordance with subjective expression of the artist's emotions vis-ŕ-vis his
external environment, and by taking the same distorting process to a point
where it turns in upon itself, so to speak, and expresses distorted emotions
independently of external stimuli on the later level. Expressionism is the subconscious expression
of the external natural world, Abstract Expressionism the subconscious
expression of itself - the former being the converse of Impressionism, which is
the impression of the external natural world on the superconscious,
the latter being the converse of Abstract Impressionism, which is the superconscious impression of itself. Just as Van Gogh and Monet are largely
painting the external environment from different minds - the emotional mind and
the awareness mind respectively, the one extrovert and the other introvert, so
Pollock and Rothko are delineating, in their separate abstract approaches to
the internal environment of the psyche, different minds - the distorted
subconscious and the transcendent superconscious
respectively. Although they are both
late petty-bourgeois artists, the one is romantic, the other classic.
ALAN: Thus
Abstract Expressionism is romantic petty-bourgeois art, Abstract Impressionism
its classical counterpart.
LIAM:
Precisely! Though one
shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that romanticism is necessarily
materialist and classicism, by contrast, always spiritual - as I hope to
demonstrate shortly. To be sure,
there is certainly a romantic approach to the spiritual life or art....
However, now that we have discussed mainstream petty-bourgeois art, we can
proceed to the subsidiary variety, which will mainly pertain to the
traditionally more bourgeois nations like
ALAN: A
distinction, no doubt, between classical order and romantic disorder, the
strictly governed and the anarchic - as between Braque and Nolde
on the earlier level, and Mondrian and Pollock on the
later one.
LIAM:
Precisely! A distinction which is
reversed on the spiritual side of this subsidiary petty-bourgeois art, where we
find Pre-Raphaelitism and Symbolism on the earlier level, but Metaphysical
Painting and Surrealism on the later one, both levels romantic to the extent
that they rely heavily on appearance, which is taken from concrete representational
symbolism to abstract representational symbolism with the development from the
one to the other, particularly from Symbolism to Surrealism, as from Redon to Dali. The
use of appearance necessarily limits the transcendental potential of each
level, since Symbolism is the result, in many ways unfortunate, of applying a
romantic technique to a spiritual art, or what is intended to be so, and such a
contradictory use of appearances toward essential ends simply mirrors the
limitations of a bourgeois or pseudo-petty-bourgeois approach to this art, just
as the contradictory application of a classical technique to a materialist art,
rigid and abstract ... such as one finds in Cubism, paradoxically enhances its
materialistic integrity. And this is the
main reason why such art as has been produced by the pseudo-petty-bourgeois
nations like Britain and France is subsidiary to mainstream petty-bourgeois
art, since the latter, whether on its material or spiritual sides, employs the
best possible technique for the art in question. In the case of
(materialistic) Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism - a subjective
romantic technique. In the case of (spiritualistic) Impressionism and Abstract
Impressionism - an objective classical technique. Thus the approach to materialist art is
negative, the approach to spiritualist art positive, appropriately so in each
case, since the contraction of materialism and the expansion of spirituality is
particularly relevant to a petty-bourgeois age and civilization. Where, however, the traditionally bourgeois
nations are concerned, we find a positive, or classical, approach to
materialist art and, by contrast, a negative, or romantic, approach to its
spiritualist counterpart, approaches which mirror a relativistic duality favouring
the materialistic, in accordance with bourgeois criteria. Only with genuine petty-bourgeois art does
dualism lean towards the absolute, as technique and subject matter interrelate
on a homogenous plane - one necessarily favouring the spiritual.
RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION
GAVIN:
Christianity, as taught by Christ, was a religion of love, the essence of
Christianity being love, and especially the impersonal love of men for one
another.
CONOR:
While not overlooking the personal love of men for women, or of a man for a
particular woman, sanctified by marriage ... in accordance with the
relativistic principles of Christian dualism.
GAVIN: So
Christianity was centred in the heart, that seat of the emotions.
CONOR: That
is correct.
GAVIN:
Where, then, would Transcendentalism be centred?
CONOR: In the head or, more specifically, the superconscious
part of the psyche, as applying to awareness.
Transcendentalism would not be a religion of the soul, but the spirit.
GAVIN: So
love would presumably be ruled out?
CONOR: Love
would be irrelevant because connected with the emotional part of the soul. Now soul, on whatever level, wouldn't be
something for which transcendental man had any great respect.
GAVIN: What
other levels does it have?
CONOR: The levels of sensation beneath emotion and of feeling above
it, the one appertaining to the flesh and the other to the subconscious
mind. Generally speaking, the evolution
of relativistic religion has been from the sensational to the feeling via the
emotional.
GAVIN: In other words, from pleasure to happiness via love.
CONOR: Yes,
as sanctioned by the institutions of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and neo-Orientalism respectively, the class integrity of each phase
of this evolution approximating to the grand bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie, and
the petty bourgeoisie.
GAVIN: So
it was only with the rise of Protestantism, corresponding to a bourgeois phase
of relativistic evolution, that Christianity, as the religion of love, came
properly into its own. Prior to then,
Christianity, in the guise of Roman Catholicism, had put more stress on the
sensational, as implying pleasure.
CONOR: Yes,
possessing a kind of pagan/Christian integrity appropriate to the extreme
relativity of the aristocracy and grand bourgeoisie. Roman Catholicism was and, to a degree, still
is centred in sensation, the institution of the Confessional requiring that the
penitent confess his sins, i.e. sensual indulgences; it being taken for granted
that he will always have sins to confess.
For as sensation is of the essence of Catholicism, so the Church must
ensure that the penitent always has something to confess and therefore will
expect a confession from him, thereby to some extent pressurizing him into
further sin in a vicious, non-evolutionary circle of penitence and
absolution. Paradoxically, the Catholic
Church exists as much to maintain sin, i.e. crude sensation, as to absolve
it. Without the Confessional, the Church
would have no way of keeping a tag, so to speak, on people to ensure that they
were sinning. The Catholic ideal of
refined sensual indulgence, reflected more positively in the institution of the
Mass, with its obligatory wafer of bread, has to be protected if the
ideological integrity of Catholicism, as a pagan-based extreme relativity,
isn't to be diluted or undermined.
Speaking personally, I have no use for a religion that upholds
sensation. The bourgeois ideal of love,
centred in the heart, certainly reflects a superior development in the
evolution of relativistic religion, albeit one that is still sensual, and hence
soulful.
GAVIN: And
yet, the bourgeois ideal of love was destined to be superseded, on a class
basis, by the ideal of happiness, as applying to the petty bourgeoisie, an
ideal which is as much post-Christian as the Catholic one was pre-Christian,
using the term 'Christian' in a moderately relative sense.
CONOR: Yes,
that is so! Christ didn't teach men to
meditate, only to love one another, and so the meditating, yoga-practising neo-Orientalist is experiencing a more refined soulfulness than
Christ would have envisaged - namely, the soulfulness of feeling at its most
positive, either as happiness or joy, and usually dependent on some special
breathing technique to increase the oxygen/carbon content of the blood and
thereby facilitate enhanced awareness and refined feeling. This petty-bourgeois meditation, centred in
happiness, is at the opposite pole from the pleasure-indulging Catholic - an
extreme relativity favouring the transcendent (awareness), but rooted in
positive feeling, the most sublimated soulfulness.
GAVIN: Thus
from the concrete sensational soulfulness of the Catholic to the abstract
feeling soulfulness of the neo-Orientalist via the
compromise emotional soulfulness of the Protestant - the evolution of
relativistic religion.
CONOR:
Indeed, though of course before the relative there was the absolute, and after
the relative has passed, there will be another absolute, antithetical in
character to the first one.
GAVIN: You
mean a transcendental as opposed to a pagan absolute?
CONOR: I
do, and which, in class terms, we might distinguish as aristocratic and
proletarian, the former implying stoicism, or an absolute endurance of pain,
the latter, beyond the realm of soul, implying awareness, but an absolute
awareness elevated above any intrusion of positive feeling.
GAVIN:
Therefore not dependent on special breathing techniques or involving yoga posturings, but demanding, instead, the most complete
negation of the body in a spiritual positivity solely
concerned with itself, that is to say, with the cultivation of awareness.
CONOR:
Absolutely! An
entirely post-atomic religion, in which the spirit is free to expand upon
itself, conscious of nothing foreign.
GAVIN: And this would be the religion of civilized proletarian man,
of social man become transcendental man.
CONOR: The ultimate religion in the evolution of man from
aristocratic beginnings to proletarian endings, as pertaining to an absolutist
civilization, and therefore not co-existing with any other religion.
GAVIN: Does
petty-bourgeois meditation, or yoga, co-exist with
other contemporary religions, then?
CONOR:
Indeed it does, and as a predominantly classical religion co-existing with the
romantic appearance-centred religion, if I may so call it, of LSD tripping,
both of which religions exist on the highest level of petty-bourgeois
civilization - the later phase of it, which is that of petty-bourgeois
relativity leaning towards a proletarian absolutism.
GAVIN: Then
what would be the earlier phase, on whichever side?
CONOR: Some
kind of Friends or Unitarian neo-Protestantism on the spiritual, essential, and
therefore predominantly classical side, which would co-exist with
neo-Catholicism on the materialist, apparent, and therefore predominantly
romantic side - neo-Catholicism being distinct from Roman Catholicism,
particularly in its historical mould, in terms of the greater emphasis placed
on appearances, including ceremony, as opposed to refined sensual indulgence, though
some of this will doubtless still accrue to it.
GAVIN: So,
like art, religion evolves from an earlier to a later phase of petty-bourgeois
development, and does so, in accordance with the dualistic integrity of a
relativistic civilization, on two sides - namely, a materialist/romantic, and a
spiritualist/classic.
CONOR:
Precisely! And I venture to suggest that
the spiritualist/classic side will signify a higher level of religion than the
materialist/romantic side, just as spiritualistic art is inherently superior to
its materialistic counterpart in any given phase of evolution. Thus if I were a petty bourgeois of the
earlier and more relativistic type, I would prefer to be a neo-Protestant than
a neo-Catholic. By a similar token, I
would prefer to be a meditator than an LSD-tripper,
if I were a petty bourgeois of the later and more absolutist type. And this in accordance with my
spiritually-biased temperament, the sort of temperament that, in sexual
matters, keeps me away from wife-violating and homosexual activities.
GAVIN: And one, no doubt, which makes you a Transcendentalist
rather than a Socialist.
CONOR: Yes,
but that is on an absolute ideological level, which has nothing to do with
petty-bourgeois civilization.
GAVIN: Then
there is a relative distinction between them?
CONOR: To
be sure, and it will persist until Socialists are converted to
Transcendentalism sometime in the future, and the basis is accordingly laid for
a proletarian civilization, a civilization upholding transcendental meditation.
GAVIN: This
presumably being the absolute meditation, as distinct from the petty-bourgeois
extreme relativity of happiness/yoga meditation.
CONOR: Yes,
and it would not co-exist with LSD tripping.
GAVIN: Then
there will be no recourse to synthetic hallucinogens in the future?
CONOR: Only
in the first phase of the post-Human Millennium, that of the Superman, which,
following an epoch of classical absolutism, will constitute a kind of romantic
interlude preceding the higher classicism, so to speak, of the hypermeditating new-brain collectivizations
in its second, or Superbeing, phase. This romantic interlude, between the ultimate
human classicism of the transcendental civilization and the ultimate post-human
classicism of the Superbeings, will apply to the
absolutely superhuman stage of evolution, in which human brains become
artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, a post-human
epoch during which time LSD tripping will be the religious norm, it being
distinguished from petty-bourgeois tripping by dint of the evolutionary gulf
between a flesh-bound human being and an artificially supported/sustained
brain, the one relative, the other largely absolute, having LSD, or some such
synthetic hallucinogen, introduced into it on a much more consistent,
protracted, and regular basis than could be tolerated by a human being, and
this in accordance with the spiritual criteria of the Superman Millennium.
GAVIN: And yet this romantic phase will be superseded by a period
of intensified transcendental meditation, as Supermen are transformed, by
qualified technicians, into Superbeings, following
the surgical removal of the old brain and the ensuing re-collectivization of
new brains into superior entities.
CONOR:
Absolutely! And such hypermeditation,
as I prefer to call it, will put Superbeings on
course for transcendence, that is to say, for the attainment of pure spirit to
the heavenly Beyond, as evolution draws towards a climax.
GAVIN: In other words, the attainment of Absolute Mind to Heaven,
if I may be permitted a Christian anachronism.
CONOR:
Which would be a supra-atomic stage of evolution and, once all separate
transcendences had converged towards one another and expanded into larger
wholes, the ultimate stage ... of the Omega Point - the culmination of
evolution in spiritual Oneness.
GAVIN: So
it is towards this spiritual Oneness that all human progress tends.
CONOR: All
virtuous human progress. Certainly not
on absolute terms while there is any soulful identification in religion and,
consequently, a stemming from the alpha roots of evolution in pure soul, as
there still is in petty-bourgeois civilization ... where the most positive
feeling becomes the religious ideal.
Such philosophers as Bertrand Russell in The
Conquest of Happiness and John Cowper Powys in The Art of Happiness
may be relevant to a petty-bourgeois stage of religious evolution, but not to
anything higher! The proletarian stage
of the future will require a philosophy of awareness, which, cultivated on
absolutist terms, should bring human evolution to its religious climax. We must leave what lies beyond man to the
post-human life forms of the Superman/Superbeing
Millennium.
AN ULTIMATE UNIVERSALITY
FRANK: As a self-taught philosopher, you are very much the type of
the 'universal man' - perhaps his ultimate manifestation, insofar as you weave
a variety of disciplines together and cause them to interrelate and overlap.
COLIN: I
agree that my philosophical interests are wide-ranging rather than confined to
any one discipline, like a logical positivist.
I prefer to integrate education eclectically, since the development of
one discipline is tied-up with that of another and one cannot hope to further
an integrated society unless each discipline is harmonized, as closely as
possible, with the others in an all-embracing unity of purpose. They must be co-ordinated with one another on
a uniform ideological plane. It is no
good trying to separate politics from religion or science from art or sex from
society. They have to be harmonized on
the same class-evolutionary plane, their respective spheres of influence
respected while still being developed to an identical evolutionary stage. This is why my work has remained universal,
scorning narrow specialization in the interests of a more comprehensive
evolutionary perspective concerned with the future development of proletarian
civilization, and accordingly determined to bring all the major disciplines
within the scope of a uniform assessment and standardization, which, needless
to say, should be of crucial importance from a moral standpoint.
FRANK: Thus
the type of the 'universal man' essentially pertains to the foundation of a new
civilization; he is the root organizer and comprehensive criterion from whom specializations
will eventually emerge, with the development of this civilization?
COLIN: Yes,
as the next civilization will be the last in the history of human evolution,
you are correct, I think, in contending that I am the ultimate manifestation of
the 'universal man'.
FRANK: An
essay on 'universal men' written by the art historian Kenneth Clark suggested
that the age of such men had passed, in consequence of which there wasn't
likely to be another 'universal man' in the future.
COLIN:
Considering that British art historians, together with their counterparts in
other Western nations, are unwilling to concede to the possibility of a future
civilization, following their own rather bourgeois one, I cannot be surprised
that
FRANK: I
agree, and when he did get round to a positive involvement in both the
discussion and elucidation of modern art, it was with a materialist bias that
left the superconscious out of account and
accordingly induced him to describe such art in terms of the subconscious,
which, from an objective viewpoint, totally fails to do proper justice to, if
not the greater part, then at any rate the most spiritually important part of
it.
COLIN: A
typically bourgeois limitation, and not least of all where the British are
concerned! For an acknowledgement of the
superconscious could, after all, suggest the
possibility of subsequent evolutionary progress, and not only in the context of
art, to the detriment, needless to say, of monarchic determinism! So while Kenneth Clark may have been prepared
to cite universal men like da Vinci and Jefferson, as
pertaining to the relativistic developments of the Italian grand-bourgeois and
American bourgeois renaissances within the overall context of Western civilization,
he couldn't be expected to know anything about the ultimate 'universal man',
whose work, breaking with bourgeois tradition, necessarily pertains to the
future development of an absolutist civilization of truly universal scope and
significance.
FRANK: And who would be less a philosopher than a philosophical
theosophist, am I correct in saying?
COLIN:
Very, bearing in mind that the life-span of philosophers does not extend beyond
the confines of bourgeois/proletarian civilization, since they stem from the
pagan root of things and are only permissible so long as that root remains
intact, which it will do even into a petty-bourgeois phase of the civilization
in question, wherein the most extreme relativity of transcendental bias is to
be found. The foundations of an absolute
civilization, on the other hand, cannot be rooted in a philosopher, least of
all an academic one, but only in a philosophical theosophist, whose creativity
is more literary than a philosopher's, employing the use of certain genres that,
taken in conjunction with traditional philosophical ones, elevate his work
above traditional categorization in deference to transcendental criteria.
FRANK: So,
as a philosophical theosophist, you are nevertheless equivalent to a
philosopher.
COLIN: More
like his successor actually, though I am unlikely to have any successors
myself, since 'universal men' aren't entitled to eternal life but appertain, as
a rule, to the inception of a given civilization, and, as already remarked, the
transcendental one will be the last!
FRANK: So,
after you, one must expect specialists to emerge who will tackle each
particular discipline in the context of the whole.
COLIN: Yes,
religion and art, not to mention science and politics, will continue to require
specialist attention to further their advancement, though such attention won't
be carried out in defiance or ignorance of the justification for other
disciplines, but ... will be conducted within the all-embracing context of a
wider perspective, harmonized to ends outside itself and therefore precluding
the danger of any given discipline degenerating into some 'ism', be it
scientism, politicism, spiritualism, or
aestheticism. Thus the integrating
influence of the ultimate 'universal man' will never be very far away.
FRANK:
Would you therefore describe the 'universal man' as inherently superior to the
specialist?
COLIN: In a certain sense, I would.
That is to say, with regard to specialists of a preceding civilization,
whose work he has personally transcended in his commitment to a future
one. He can afford to 'look down' upon
the outmoded theological beliefs of an earlier civilization's priests, or upon
the obsolescent art of that same civilization's artists, and so on.
FRANK: What
about the specialists who succeed him?
COLIN:
Well, that is another matter and, at the risk of succumbing to my old vice of
offensive clarity, I shall concede the right of creative superiority to the
spiritual specialists who succeed him, such as future artists and
priest-equivalents, whilst according a less flattering status to their
materialist counterparts in science and politics. For, to my mind, the absolute man is
inherently superior to the relative one, provided, however, that he pertains to
a later spiritual absolutism! The later
materialist absolutism, on the other hand, of the scientist I regard as less
entitled to such a claim - indeed, as not entitled to it at all - since his
materialistic preoccupations, whilst equalling or surpassing those of the
'universal man', cannot be expected to match or surpass the latter's spiritual
preoccupations, which constitute the most important aspect of his work. Certainly I can vouch for that fact as
regards my own universal tendencies!
FRANK: You
must have a low regard for scientists generally.
COLIN:
Well, I don't consider them superior to the foremost artists of any given age,
if that's what you mean. It is a
distinction between the discoverer and the creator, the negative and the
positive, the reactive and the active. A
similar distinction holds true between politicians and priests, though we
should define it rather more in terms of doing and being than of, say,
discovering and creating.
FRANK: In other words, a distinction between the active and the
passive, the coercive and the instructive.
COLIN: Yes,
that must be approximately so! Now when
we compare the reactive scientist with the active politician or the creative
artist with the instructive priest, it is only logical to regard the latter as
superior, in each case, to the former, their positivity
entitling them to a hierarchic distinction over the negativity of the scientist
and politician.
FRANK: What
happens when we compare the artist with the priest?
COLIN: The
instructive being of the latter takes precedence over the creative doing of the
former. There is no-one higher than the
spiritual leader! And wherever
civilization prevails, his superiority will be acknowledged and taken for
granted. Likewise, the artist's status
will be accorded due recognition.
FRANK:
Interesting how, in another of the essays published in Moments of
Vision, Kenneth Clark should have contended that modern art signified a
decline in inspiration and quality over traditional art, and that one of the
main reasons for this was the fact, as he saw it, of the twentieth century
being a scientific rather than a religious age, in which scientific and
technological endeavour took precedence over art, their pursuit being worthy of
greater prestige in consequence.
COLIN: All
of which only goes to confirm what you said about his materialist bias, and
further underlines how out-of-touch he must have been with petty-bourgeois
religious developments, including yoga and hallucinogenic contemplation, to see
in the age such a scientific hegemony.
Besides, the contention that modern art signifies a decline in creative
inspiration over what preceded it in earlier centuries simply reflects the
psychological limitations of its author, since, lacking knowledge of the superconscious, he entirely fails to perceive, in the
by-and-large post-egocentric nature of such art, an advancement towards greater
simplicity. His preference for more
complex works doubtless accords with a representational bias which demands not
abstraction but the grandiose spectacle of what Spengler
would have called 'great art'.
Fortunately, we are unlikely to witness a recrudescence of such
egocentric art in the future, contrary to
FRANK: Such
as light art and abstract holography?
COLIN: Yes,
particularly the latter, which should become the principal visual art form of
the transcendental civilization, bringing such art to a climax in the
symbolization, through apparent means, of maximum essence. This will be at the furthest possible remove
from the inception of civilized visual art in the attempts, doomed to failure,
of pagan man to emulate the beauty of nature through sculptural images, the
most materialistic of beginnings, compared to which even representational
paintings signify a marked spiritual advancement!
FRANK:
Though presumably not one for which the ultimate 'universal man' is likely to
have much philosophical respect, given his commitment to transcendental values.
COLIN: No,
since he has better things to do than to dote on the achievements, aesthetic or
otherwise, of relativistic civilization.
In pointing forward, he turns his back on the past. And that, believe it or not, is precisely what
the final human civilization will do - at the expense not only of art historians
but of historians in general! For relativistic history, my friend, will have no place in the
coming transcendental age. The
only history worthy of academic sanction will be the absolutist history of
proletarian man. And that begins - does
it not? - where bourgeois history leaves off.
PART TWO:
ESSAYS
FUTURE RELIGIOUS PROGRESS
As life
evolves, so it becomes more interiorized, and people therefore spend a greater
amount of time indoors than outdoors.
Just as the Christians spent a greater amount of time indoors, as a
rule, than the pagans of pre-atomic times, so in the coming post-atomic age
will Transcendentalists spend even more time indoors than their Christian
predecessors - perhaps the greater part of their lives. Indeed, Transcendentalists will spend so much
time indoors ... as to be the complete antithesis of pagans, who doubtless
spent most of their time outdoors, living in closer proximity to nature and
thus enslavement to the natural-world-order.
This was because they stemmed from the alpha roots of life in the stars
and consequently reflected a preference for appearance over essence, the
exterior over the interior. We can't
properly understand why the ancient Greeks, to name but one pagan people, built
temples on a columnar basis if we do not appreciate the need felt by such
peoples to exteriorize their buildings, and thus remain in contact with nature
even when they entered them. A classical
temple remained open to nature even when, as was not always the case, it
possessed a roof. The Greeks would never
have dreamt of completely shutting themselves off from the outside world in
sealed buildings, and so they built openly, with the use of columns. There is no deeper underlying reason behind
their architectural styles than that!
The Christians, however, being dualists,
had more respect for transcendentalism than their pagan forebears. In fact, they were prepared to spend as much
time indoors as outdoors, and sometimes even more. Their religious buildings, while partly
imitating Graeco-Roman styles, albeit superficially
and primarily for decorative purposes, shut people off from nature behind
walls, though never entirely so! For in
every church there were windows, and in some churches, particularly Gothic,
there were more windows than walls. Yet,
even then, these windows weren't plain and ultra-transparent, but either
frosted or stained, and stained, often enough, in a most colourful and
religiously educative manner - the tradition of stained glass lasting into the
industrial age, though on a largely revivalist basis.
With the ongoing development of
Protestantism in certain countries from the seventeenth century, however, walls
tended to preponderate over windows, the latter being frosted and mainly
utilitarian. People became even more
shut off from nature in these buildings, though, thanks to their windows, not
exclusively so! There was a plentiful
supply of natural light, duly supplemented, in the course of time, by different
forms of artificial light. Coming out of
or going into a church, one might have encountered columns either embedded in
the walls and/or forming a portico. This
may have been reassuring for some people, particularly those who admired the
Greek ideal. Nevertheless inside the building, walls and windows preponderated,
with perhaps a few decorative columns for aesthetic purposes. That was the essence of late-Christian
architecture.
But we haven't reached the end of human
evolution, least of all in religious terms.
For an age is coming when meditation centres will have to be built, and
such centres will correspond to a transcendental civilization, a global
civilization whose citizens will be even more shut off from nature in their
buildings than the Christians were - so shut off, in fact, as not even to have
windows in them. Then what? Not thick walls suggestive of materialism
but, on the contrary, relatively thin, synthetic walls all the way around, with
artificial light to illuminate the interiors when necessary ... Which shouldn't
be when people are meditating and thereby striving to transcend
appearances! Electric or neon light
should replace natural light, where such transcendental buildings are
concerned. There will doubtless be need
of air-conditioning, perhaps even of sophisticated filter systems, but not of
windows. People will enter a building in
which the lights have been dimmed and get dimmer as the meditation session
proceeds. They will understand that
essence is what counts in a meditation centre, not appearance! The Christian churches were, as a rule, less
bright inside than the Greek temples, open or partly open to the sky, would
have been - indeed, many of them might fittingly be described as dim or even
dingy. A bright meditation centre,
however, would be a contradiction in terms!
So Transcendentalists will be completely
shut off from nature in their religious buildings, and thus exist in a context
essentially closer to the post-human phases of evolution in the ensuing
Superman/Superbeing Millennium. Evolution will have progressed from
appearance to essence, from exterior architecture to interior
architecture. This will signify a
qualitative improvement - the inner manifestations of evolutionary progress.
But there will also be need of
manifestations which, being outer, may be defined as quantitative, in which the
diversity and separateness of things at the roots of evolution are gradually
transcended - the direction of evolution being from the innumerable stars to
the ultimate globe of transcendent spirit via planetary life. The lower the stage of human evolution, the
more prevalent is this diversity and separateness. Why, one may wonder, has the world given
birth to so many distinct languages?
Precisely because lingual diversity is a cultural manifestation of
diabolic influence, the great variety of things or distinctions on the
pre-atomic and even atomic levels of evolution.
Before men evolved to national distinctions, they were subject to the
far more numerous tribal distinctions, and of course each tribe evolved a
distinct language of its own. Literally
thousands of conflicting tongues babbling away in pre-atomic times, a source of
deep-rooted hostility and distrust - interminable intertribal strife! Such was the case even when certain tribes
joined together to form nations, or when the victory of one tribe over another
paved the way for the nation states of today, and the number of languages was
reduced in proportion to the number of vanquished or incorporated tribes - the
tongue of the stronger tribe becoming the national language of the new
nation. And yet, even then, still too
many languages, circumstances still reflecting the diversity and separateness
of things ... as stemming from the alpha roots of evolution in the stars. Is not the contemporary world torn between
literally hundreds of tongues, even though the vast majority of people speak
one or another of the half-dozen foremost languages in the world, including
English, French, and Spanish? Some
people even speak two or more such languages, since capable of transcending
national barriers and culturally embracing wider sectors of humanity. But most people are still imprisoned in the
language of their particular nation, a language among languages - no more and
no less!
Clearly, there is more scope for
quantitative improvement here, for a further contraction of diversity and
separateness. Such an improvement must
surely come when the world transcends national distinctions and becomes not
simply an international community, but a supra-national community in the
ultimate human civilization of the transcendental future. What will be required is a convergence
towards the Omega Absolute, or the goal of evolutionary development, on the
level of language, the adoption, in due course, of a supra-national language to
supersede the various national tongues which currently exist and will doubtless
continue to do so until the world is brought under a central administration in
the coming post-atomic age. For there
can be no question of one national tongue, like English or Russian, being
adopted at the expense of all the others.
That would not signify a lingual convergence to the Omega Absolute, but,
rather, an imperialistic extension of one national tongue into the future. Yet all national tongues are equally
irrelevant to a transcendental civilization, which must be supra-national.
Likewise, all national or regional
so-called world religions would be equally irrelevant to the formation of the
next civilization. There could be no
question of Buddhism or Hinduism being adopted by peoples who had traditionally
upheld Christianity or Islam or whatever.
Transcendentalism will mark a new beginning in religious evolution, and
it will do so as a world religion in the truest sense, not as one of seven or
eight contending religions, the co-existence of which simply reflects the
divisive and separative nature of things stemming
from the alpha roots of evolution. All
existing so-called world religions should be superseded by the True World
Religion of transcendental man, in which quiescent meditation will enable its
practitioners to approximate more closely to the ultimate tranquillity, peace,
and blessed being of the Divine Omega, conceiving of the latter as the goal of
evolution in transcendent spirit. But
there will be no oriental fanaticism about this type of meditation, no striving
to attain to transcendence through meditation techniques alone, and for
literally hours at a stretch every day of the week! Unlike a Buddhist, transcendental man will
know that his civilization is but a stage on the road to the post-Human
Millennium, when brains become artificially supported and sustained in communal
contexts, and a new life form, post-human and largely supernatural, continues
the evolutionary journey from approximately where man left off. Knowing that technology will have an
important role to play in furthering spiritual progress, he won't be subject to
the delusions of the traditional oriental fanatic concerning his prospects of
salvation through natural meditating methods alone! He will be able to meditate rationally,
calmly, periodically, uncluttered by superstition. And when the technicians have perfected the
means of supporting and sustaining brains artificially, he will be superseded
by the Superman of the first phase of the post-Human Millennium, in which not
transcendental meditation but hallucinogenic contemplation will prevail, in
accordance with the need to open-up the superconscious
and have the psyche pass through an intermediate period of internal visionary
experience en route, as it were, to higher things.
One of these higher things will of course
be the hypermeditation of collectivized new-brains
artificially supported and sustained in the second phase of the post-Human
Millennium, the truly classless society of the Superbeings,
which will exist, in evolutionary terms, as antithetical equivalents to
trees. In this ultimate phase of
millennial evolution, the interaction of new brains on any given
support/sustain system will lead, after a certain period of time, to spirit
being cultivated to a point where it becomes transcendent, when electrons
detach themselves from atomic constraint and soar heavenwards in supra-atomic
freedom. Now whilst electrons climb free
of new-brain matter and merge with and converge towards other such
transcendences in the void, the protons left behind will probably react against
one another in subatomic cursedness, thereby destroying whatever remains to be
destroyed. Spirit, however, will have
attained to its goal in supra-atomic blessedness, a goal which first became
apparent to Christians in the age of atomic balance, but which was sought after
more keenly as time went by and life became increasingly post-atomic in
constitution. With the final overcoming
of matter, ultimately reduced to its new-brain guise, salvation will be
definitively attained. All that remains
to be done then ... is that the individual transcendences from whichever Superbeing in whichever part of the Universe should merge into one ultimate transcendence for evolution to run its
course and achieve completion in a beingfulness that
will last for ever.
Not so the remaining stars, however, which
will gradually fade, collapse, and disappear, leaving the Universe to the
perfection of the divine presence alone.
This divine presence - God in any ultimate sense - will be the most
interiorized existence possible, the ultimate experiential interiorization
of a supreme level of being, towards which all progress in earthly interiorization tends, including that still to be made in
the future transcendental civilization.
THE EVOLUTION OF ART
I believe
it was Winklemann who once wrote that the moderns had
failed to attain to the perfect aesthetic beauty of the ancients; that the
Christian civilization of the West had not equalled, let alone surpassed, the
ideal beauty achieved by the ancient Greeks in their, for the most part,
sculptural traditions. Now if I am not
mistaken, it was with a critical and not altogether sympathetic eye that the
great German aesthetician looked upon this fact. And looked upon it even with regard to the
Renaissance, when, as we all know, ancient values were resurrected and geniuses
of the stature of da Vinci and Michelangelo
endeavoured to equal, if not surpass, what was regarded as an art superior in
beauty to the Christian.
I shall not attempt to disagree with Winklemann's assertion concerning the aesthetic
pre-eminence of Greek sculpture. But I
do see reason to question the contention that because Christian sculpture, even
in its neo-pagan guise, was less beautiful than the finest works of ancient
No, contrary to Herr Winklemann's
assumption, the Christians did not fail to emulate or surpass the ancient
Greeks. On the contrary, they
concentrated, if not exclusively then at any rate partly, on a creative
dimension and objective, namely truth, for which the Greeks not only had little
respect ... but no real understanding, and precisely because it would have been
alien to their level of civilization, a level that required unbroken fidelity
to pagan criteria. Morally considered,
the Christians were somewhat superior to the ancient Greeks; for the sculpture
half-beautiful and half-truthful can only arise at a later juncture in
evolutionary time than the sculpture exclusively or predominantly concerned
with beauty - evolution being a struggle from appearance to essence, which is
to say, from the absolute beauty of the stars to the absolute truth of
transcendent spirit. Even with the
Renaissance - a half-hearted attempt to rival the ancient Greeks - the leading
sculptors, not excepting Michelangelo and da Vinci,
managed to avoid producing works as beautiful as their pagan prototypes, and
this largely in spite of themselves and because they, no less than everyone
else, were inheritors of a thousand or so years of Christian civilization, in
which truth had come to supplant beauty in the scale of moral worth. Admittedly, they were Italians, and thus
arguably part-descendants of the ancient Romans. So one could to some extent speak of a
recrudescence of pagan civilization in defiance of Christian values and the
(compared with certain other European countries) relatively thin veneer of
Christianity that had been imposed on a traditionally pagan people from
without. Certainly, the fact that the
Renaissance broke out primarily in Italy and in rebellion against the Gothic
ideal (to truth) of Northern Europe, suggests that a vein of paganism remained
firmly embedded in the Italian psyche and only required the relaxation of
cultural pressure ... for it to bubble-up, like molten lava, and gush forth in
the neo-pagan effusions of the Renaissance - a movement mistakenly identified,
in my opinion, with one of the greatest periods in the history of Western
civilization!
Yet, much as they sought to rival the
ancients, the leading sculptors of the Renaissance were no ancient Greeks or
Romans but modern Italians, the inheritors of Christian values. Their sculptures, detached from Christian
iconography and free-standing, were very often beautiful, but by no means as
beautiful, fortunately, as the works upon which they had been partly modelled. The human soul had made some progress in the
meantime, and neither da Vinci nor Michelangelo were
content to carve sculptures the faces of which resembled soulless masks! After all, the closer one approximates to
Absolute Beauty with the use of the human form - a form which, by definition,
will preclude all but a relative approximation to it - the greater the emphasis
one must place on appearance alone, and the more lifeless the facial features
of the sculpture in question will become, since expression is a concession to
soul and thus to essence, albeit, in its emotional manifestation, to the lower
essence of the subconscious rather than, as with spirit, to the higher essence
of the superconscious. Such higher essence would, however, be beyond
appearance altogether, and so could never be defined in terms of the Greek
ideal of mask-like vacuity, which, by contrast, is necessarily beneath essence
conceived as soul. It could be defined,
as I hope to demonstrate presently, in terms of biomorphic or abstract
sculpture, such as one encounters in the twentieth
century. But the men of the Renaissance
had no desire to completely forsake the soul, which is why their works, though
morally inferior to much Gothic and subsequent Baroque sculpture, remained
morally superior to the pagan masterpieces they sought to emulate and, if
possible, excel. Unadulterated
appearance appertains to the Diabolic Alpha!
In tracing the history of art's
development, we find that the ancients preferred sculpture to anything else -
indeed, were predominantly and for long periods almost solely concerned with
sculpture. Why was this? I think the answer must be: because
sculpture, besides being the most materialistic mode of artistic endeavour and
therefore the one most suited to a pagan age, is the art form that permits the
closest possible approximation to nature and, by implication, to Absolute
Beauty, irrespective of the limitations inherent in the (anthropomorphic)
medium itself. A civilization the ideal
of which is 'the Beautiful' will find, in sculpture, its appropriate medium of
expression, and the ancients took this medium to unprecedented and, as we now
know, unsurpassed levels of aesthetic perfection - a truly diabolical
perfection of pagan classicism.
Painting, on the other hand, is less
well-suited to the emulation of nature because it is inherently two-dimensional
and partly transcendental, which is to say, detached from the material,
utilitarian world in a creative realm unique to itself. Of course, painting in the sense that we
generally understand the term, i.e. oils on canvas, did not arise and could not
have arisen in the pre-atomic age of the ancient Greeks, for the simple reason
that the degree of spiritual evolution necessary to the adoption of such a
partly transcendental medium didn't exist in pagan times. Even the Romans, late pagans though they
were, never took painting beyond the wall, where it existed in conjunction with
utilitarian ends and reflected a largely materialistic bias. The mural and the mosaic, which the Romans took
to a very high level indeed, are the precursors of painting as we generally
understand it and, to a significant extent, the successors to sculpture and
amphora painting, both of which particularly appealed to the Greeks. For the evolution of art is from the
materialistic to the spiritualistic, from the mundane to the transcendent, and
although the co-existence of sculpture and painting over a given period of time
- never more consistently so than in a Christian, or atomic, age - may lead one
to infer equal though separate status to each medium of expression,
nevertheless the sculptural must eventually be transcended by an art form
stemming from painting and, to a greater extent, light art, which yet
transcends both painting and light art
at the same time.
Such an art form will, I believe, be holography,
and it should become the principal and, ultimately, sole mode of artistic
expression in the future transcendental, or post-atomic, civilization. For what light art was to painting and
painting to murals, namely a step away from the mundane in the direction of
greater transcendentalism, holography must one day become to light art, as
connections with the mundane are entirely severed in a wholly transcendental
art form or, at any rate, in one which gives the impression of being wholly
transcendental, such as should bring the evolution of art to completion in
maximum spiritualization.
Thus what began in three-dimensional
sculpture as the closest possible approximation, using representational means,
to Absolute Beauty, will culminate in three-dimensional holography ... as the
closest possible intimation, using abstract means, of Absolute Truth. The development of vase painting at a later
stage than sculpture, of murals at a later stage than vase painting, of canvas
painting at a later stage than murals, of light art at a later stage than
canvas painting, signify but intermediate realms of creative evolution between
the two extremes - that of pagan sculpture on the one hand, and of
transcendental holography on the other.
What, then, of modern sculpture, considered
in its biomorphic or largely abstract guises?
Surely there exists an antithesis of sorts between, say, a Phidias and a Henry Moore, between a Greek youth or warrior
and a nondescript biomorphic shape? Yes,
of course there does! And such an
antithesis appertains solely to sculpture, that is to say, to extremes of
sculptural development rather than to extremes of artistic development per se. At its best, modern sculpture intimates of
truth - a thing, incidentally, which Moore doesn't always do; for, like Barbara
Hepworth, he also inclines to a form of extreme
naturalism, and thus approximates to varying degrees of natural beauty, not, of
course, to anything like the same extent as the ancient Greeks (which is just
as well), but certainly to an extent which makes one conscious of a particular
work being partly beautiful rather than simply profound or true (though some
intimation of truth there will probably be, if for no other reason than that
the overall semi-abstract or non-representational shape of the work will
suggest transcendental implications).
For what transcends nature, by going beyond it, necessarily intimates of
truth. The disadvantage with sculpture
doing so is that it can never transcend its own materiality and is thus
limited, to the degree that it is material, as a medium for
intimating of spiritual truth.
Admittedly, there have been experiments with extremely lightweight
sculpture, not least of all by Naum Gabo, and such experiments undoubtedly mark a progression
in the evolution of sculpture from its crudely material beginnings. But no matter how lightweight sculpture
becomes, it cannot transcend its basic materiality or cease to have a tactile
appeal, the sort of appeal which sculpture must retain if it is to do proper
justice to itself as sculpture.
By contrast, light art, although often
mistaken for or identified with sculpture, has no tactile appeal but stems from
painting in the overall evolution of art, being a better intimation of truth to
the extent that it is even more detached from materiality, i.e. canvas, oils,
walls, frames, etc., and consequently suggestive of spirit by dint of the
impalpability of electric or neon light.
Of course, the use of artificial light to intimate of truth is
inherently unsatisfactory, because transcendent spirit would not, when it
eventually emerged from matter, i.e. collectivized new brains, be glaringly
bright and therefore aligned with appearance.
On the contrary, it would be an entirely essential emanation. Artificial light differs from natural light
as an electric fire from an open fire - in degree rather than kind. This is especially true of electric light,
though the electron bombardment of phosphor (which is the metaphysical
principle underlining fluorescent lighting) bespeaks a considerable
evolutionary progression in the development of artificial light and is, by
definition, better suited to intimate of pure spirit. Yet, even then, art must necessarily fall
short of that which it is intended to be an intimation; for the use of apparent
means, no matter how refined upon, can never be anything more than a loose
guide to essential ends. If, judged
objectively, art is inevitably a failure, it is
nevertheless a necessary failure, inextricably linked to man's destiny. And this is no less so at the pagan end of
the spectrum of human evolution, where approximations to Absolute Beauty were
never less than crude.
Returning to sculpture, it should be
possible for us to clearly distinguish between extreme petty-bourgeois
sculpture, whether lightweight or biomorphic, and light art, which stems not
from sculpture (as a higher manifestation of sculptural development) but from
painting and, needless to say, a particular kind of painting - namely, that
which one would associate, in its abstraction, with the most extreme form of
petty-bourgeois transcendentalism. Now
whereas even the most radically biomorphic or lightweight modern sculpture
stems from the fundamentally pagan tradition of sculptural development, and
thus signifies the tail-end, as it were, of this art form's evolution, light
art marks a fresh creative development in the overall evolution of art and may
be defined as a post-atomic medium of expression, a medium forming an
antithetical equivalent with the vase painting of the pre-atomic Greeks, and
being but one evolutionary stage from the ultimate transcendental art ... in
the abstract holography of the future post-atomic civilization.
Thus sculpture cannot actually extend
beyond a bourgeois/proletarian phase of evolutionary development, for its
materiality would be incompatible with an exclusively transcendental age, an
age free of the pagan root and of any art form, including painting, which
stemmed from that root in fidelity to natural beauty. Even art that was purposely ugly, as much
modern art in the West certainly appears to be when judged by traditional
standards, would be irrelevant to a civilization solely concerned with
truth. For while such art may be
relevant to and even, by a curious paradox, meritorious in a bourgeois/proletarian
(transitional) age or society, it would be quite unnecessary in a society that
had ceased to concern itself with aesthetics or their anti-beauty negation,
having gravitated to higher concerns in loyalty to transcendental criteria. Whether it would be acceptable, from the
historical standpoint, in a post-atomic age ... must remain open to
debate. But it certainly wouldn't be
created in such an age. For, as I hope
to have demonstrated, creative endeavour would have progressed to a positive
and altogether superior level - one diametrically antithetical to that of the
ancient Greeks.
As for the culmination of the sculptural
tradition in the two main types of petty-bourgeois sculpture we have witnessed
this century, it is doubtful that Winklemann, if he
could return from the grave to witness certain typical examples of it, would
appreciably modify his opinion concerning the failure of Western art to attain
to the high level of beauty achieved by the ancients. Confronted by a Giacometti,
which, to my mind, aptly signifies the negative or anti-beauty side of this
culmination, he would probably be appalled by the extreme slenderness and knobbliness of the figure, the facial expression of which
was far too redolent of soul to satisfy even a crude approximation to human,
let alone absolute, beauty. Confronted,
on the other hand, by an Arp, which, as biomorphic
sculpture, seems to aptly signify its positive or pro-truth side, he would be
at a loss to establish any formal connections between such sculpture and
nature, and would have to confess that Arp, no less
than Giacometti, was an abysmal failure by ancient
Greek standards, as well as a further example of the lamentable decline in
aesthetic merit which Western sculpture appeared to signify. Ah, poor Winklemann! He could never have understood the
truth. He died facing Hell. His spirit, fortunately, cannot be
resurrected!
HUMAN EXTREMES
It is not
so often, these days, that one hears or reads of sadomasochism in sexual
relations, which is perhaps just as well!
For the infliction of pain on another, even when the other is a willing
accomplice to its infliction, isn't really the most honourable of pursuits and
scarcely tallies with a developing transcendental age or, at any rate, with an
age becoming increasingly transcendent in certain contexts, not the least of
which being sex. Sadism, one feels, is
somehow too cruel and barbaric for sensibilities worthy of the name civilized,
even when the civilization they may pertain to isn't the ultimate one but -
certainly so far as the greater part of the West is concerned - something
closer to being penultimate. Sadists and
masochists, we like to believe, are exceptions to the sexual rule, and probably
their behaviour, in the main, is not as brutal or submissive as it could be or,
indeed, once was for similarly-disposed people in the infancy, as it were, of
man's sexual evolution.
Ah, there we have the crux of the
matter! I have fathered a contention
which suggests that, at one time, relations between the sexes were a lot
rougher than at present, and so much so as to imply that sadomasochism, or its
historical equivalent, was once the rule rather than the exception! Frankly, I believe such a contention to be
reasonable, and am prepared to argue in its defence. For men were more disposed to inflicting pain
on others, regardless of sex, in pagan and early-Christian times than they are
these days, at least in the more civilized parts of the world, and we needn't
doubt that, as a corollary of this, women were correspondingly more disposed to
the endurance of pain during such times than (would be) their latter-day
descendants. The closer human society
stands to the diabolic roots of life in the stars, the more likely it is that
pain will predominate, and not merely as something to be endured but ...
actively engaged in as a test of one's strength or courage or capacity of
endurance (stoicism). Before sex became
a pleasure it was predominantly a pain, and we may conjecture that its
practitioners acted more savagely and unsympathetically towards one another
than most latter-day couples would be prepared to countenance!
But not everyone behaves gently in
love-making. There are those who prefer
to look upon sex from either a sadistic or a masochistic angle, depending, as a
rule, on their gender. The infliction
and endurance of pain is, for them, the governing principle of sexual
behaviour, without which sex would become far less exciting. What can one say of such people - that they
are barbarous or backward? An approach
to sex that consciously endorses pain as the governing principle is arguably
less than civilized, in the modern sense of that term. Certainly most men do not behave brutally
towards their partners during sex but, for the most part, gently and
sympathetically. Sex, like so much else,
has become civilized in the course of time.
Its sadomasochistic origins have been refined upon to the point where
pain is eclipsed by pleasure, which has become the principal incentive for
sexual intercourse. Admittedly, there
are exceptions. But even those who
consciously pursue sadomasochistic relationships do so on
a comparatively restrained basis, never or rarely sinking to the level of
savagery of our distant ancestors.
Nevertheless, their activities and attitudes are such as to suggest
that, where sex is concerned, they are simply laggards - neo-pagan types who
display less subtlety and restraint than the majority of their contemporaries;
pain-wallowing anachronisms whose approach to sex, in an age of sexual
pleasure, is barbarous rather than civilized.
Most people do not admire sadomasochism in others!
This essay isn't specifically intended to
be about sexual behaviour but also about other things, including pain and
pleasure generally. We may note that, as
human evolution progresses, there develops a tendency among men to minimize
pain and maximize pleasure - at any rate, to the extent that it can be
maximized. For while pleasure is
preferable to pain, it is by no means entirely separable from pain, but also
pertains to the flesh as a positive response to positive stimuli; though,
unlike pain, it is strictly limited as to its intensive potential. By which I mean that, whereas pain can
descend to the absolute level of maximum suffering, pleasure is strictly
finite, dependent on and limited by the physical constitution of the flesh
which, being proton-dominated, leaves comparatively little scope for electron
attraction in response to positive stimuli from without. Because protons predominate over electrons in
the crude atomicity of the flesh, the strongest sensation we can feel will
always be the negative one, as evoked by a negative external stimulus, like the
application of force to the skin. Our
capacity for pleasure can never become the ultimate goal of human striving but
only, at best, a temporal, intermediate goal ... to be transcended for
something higher when or as often as opportunity permits. We may endeavour to curtail pain or the
causes of pain as much as possible, but we can't thereby expand pleasure
indefinitely, until, for instance, it attained to an intensity the equal of
anything humanity had ever experienced of pain in the past. There can never be a pleasurable sensation
the equal, in intensity, of a hand or body consumed by fire! The atomic constitution of the flesh will
always preclude such a possibility and thereby render the pursuit of increased
pleasure futile. The wiser, more
advanced members of the human race have long subordinated pleasure to the
pursuit of higher ends, such as happiness and awareness, which stem from
positive stimuli impinging upon areas of the body or brain with a greater ratio
of electrons to protons and/or neutrons than the flesh. Unfortunately even in the heart, that seat of
the emotions, the ratio of protons to electrons is too favourably disposed
towards the former to enable the positive emotion of love to outweigh, in
intensity, the negative emotion of hate, which has hitherto been the ruling
emotion of the heart, with love, or the actual condition of 'being in love', a
periodic exception to the general rule!
This isn't to say, however, that hate has existed at the expense of love
on a permanent basis; for, like the flesh, the heart requires a stimulus one
way or another in order to respond in an emotional way. But, certainly, a heart which is not 'in
love', as we say, will be more disposed, in its neutrality, to the negative
emotion of hate than would otherwise be the case. Doubtless one of the great charms of 'being
in love' for most people is that, whilst it lasts, the ruling emotion of hatred
is quelled, if not ousted, and one becomes more disposed to look at life
positively, in response to the rebellious 'electron uprising', as it were, of
the heart against its customary proton master.
We acquire, through love, a reprieve from hate or, alternatively, a neutrality favouring hate or some weaker negative emotion.
But even love is temporal and therefore
inadequate as a goal of evolutionary striving or ideal to be pursued for its
own sake. We can never entirely escape
from hate. For, alas, the heart, too, is
atomic and accordingly biased towards its proton master! Love may be a pleasant reprieve from negative
emotions, but it doesn't last for ever - certainly no more than a few
years. And as we get older our capacity
for 'falling in love' is reduced, partly because we become more
intellectualized and less disposed to appearances, partly because the heart
contracts and beats less vigorously than before. Falling in love would for many adults constitute
a kind of indignity in the face of their intellectual and/or spiritual
preoccupations and pretensions. Not
surprisingly, certain higher men, like surgeons, refuse to acknowledge that the
heart could possibly be anything more than a pump. We may be sure that youths, particularly
female, would be highly sceptical if not downright critical of such an
attitude! A young woman in love would
have little doubt that the heart was more than just a natural pump - namely the
seat of the emotions!
Yet relatively few people have no other
desire than to live for their emotions, particularly among the older
generation. A person, who may have
predominantly lived for pleasure at one stage of his life, may subsequently
live for positive emotions. It is even
possible that such a person may come, in the fullness of time, to live for his
feelings, placing due importance on happiness, the most positive feeling. He may gravitate, as it were, from the heart
to the head or, more specifically, to that part of the head in which the old
brain is located and from the psychic aspect of which, in the subconscious,
feelings of a more elevated and, on the whole, generalized nature may emerge,
in response to a variety of external stimuli.
Not that all such feelings are positive; for the subconscious is no less
disposed to negative feelings in response to negative stimuli than the heart or
the flesh. But these feelings won't be
quite as strong as those connected with areas of the body in which protons
greatly predominate over electrons.
Sadness is a strong feeling, but it isn't as strong, or bad, as the
emotion of hate, and nowhere near as difficult to endure as the sensation of
physical pain in response to some brutal external stimulus aimed at the
flesh. Most people would rather be sad
than burning to death, and we may surmise that a majority of people would
likewise prefer transient sadness to lasting hatred.
The negative feelings of the subconscious
are therefore less disagreeable, as a rule, than the negative emotions and sensations
of the lower regions of soul, as evoked by and dependent on the body. One suffers less from the old brain than from
the heart or the flesh. But, conversely,
the positive feelings associated with the psychic aspect of the old brain are
likely to be more rewarding than those associated with the parallel aspect of
more deeply proton-dominated organs. We
cannot blame a man for preferring happiness to either love or pleasure, because
such a feeling is more refined, in that it connotes with a greater degree of
electron freedom than would be possible in lower regions of the body, and has,
in consequence, a more diffuse, impersonal, universal quality. Both love and pleasure are dependent on other
people, but happiness can transcend others in response to quite disparate
external stimuli. Intellectual activity
can bring a person happiness for the duration of his
work, or whatever. Like pleasure,
happiness can be switched on and off, can come and go with changing
circumstances. One can be happy for apparently
no reason at all; though, in point of fact, there will usually be some reason, if
one bothers to analyse the situation carefully enough.
Although superior to love and pleasure,
happiness cannot, however, be turned into the goal of evolutionary striving. For there is no absolute happiness! It cannot be cultivated to the exclusion of
other feelings, least of all sadness, which is always lurking in the
background, ready to pounce, in response to appropriately negative stimuli, and
devour one's peace of mind. The man who
strives to cultivate happiness is certainly on a superior level than the lover
or the hedonist, but he is still some way short of salvation, and can no more
expect to escape from sadness on a permanent basis than the lover ... from
intermittent hatred or the hedonist ... from intermittent pain. If pain is the lowest and most intense
feeling the soul can experience, then happiness is its highest and most
refined. Yet such an antithesis cannot
transcend the soul, for it exists within the soul's confinement and will relate
to the temporal world, of which the soul is but a psychic manifestation. One cannot be happy all the time, since each
part of the soul demands some expression, and not only on a positive
basis! The old brain, even with a
greater overall electron content than the heart or the flesh, is still a part
of the body and one, moreover, in which protons predominate over electrons, so
that sadness, when it arises, will remain the stronger feeling, irrespective of
whether it is less strong, or disagreeable, than the negative feelings of the
heart (hate) and the flesh (pain) respectively.
Precisely because the material constitution of the body is
largely composed of protons and electrons, as in any natural matter, it is
impossible to cultivate one feeling at the lasting expense of another. Positive stimuli impinging upon the flesh or
senses will evoke positive feelings, but negative stimuli will evoke the
converse of these and, given the proton-dominated constitution of flesh, heart,
and old brain (roughly corresponding to the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost), these negative feelings will be stronger, as a rule, than their
positive counterparts. We can minimize,
by degrees, the negative stimuli impinging upon the body, but we can't entirely
escape from such stimuli or transcend negative feelings altogether. Even the man who consciously cultivates
awareness for long periods at a time cannot avoid sleeping or eating or hearing
or seeing or walking.
But if happiness is temporal and therefore
inadequate as the goal of evolutionary striving, then the cultivation of
awareness in the superconscious, or psychic aspect of
the new brain, is quite a different proposition! The man who lives predominantly for and in
his spirit doesn't care too much for happiness or love or pleasure or any other
positive feeling associated with the soul, because his attention will be
focused on the eternal, on what is potentially absolute and therefore
cultivatable as an end-in-itself. With
the spirit there is no converse side, no negative feelings, because, pertaining
to the realm of awareness, it is above feelings. Admittedly, the new brain, like the old one,
is atomic in constitution and consequently composed of protons and
electrons. But electrons predominate
over protons here and thus set the new brain apart from the old one as a brain
predominantly given to awareness; though there will, of course, be overlappings with feelings in view of the (partly) proton
content of brain matter, so that some soul may cling to the new brain and
behave in an appropriately sensual way, extending the governing principle of
the old brain into the new one on a largely tangential basis. Nevertheless, awareness remains the leading
characteristic of new-brain activity, and it will preponderate to a greater or
lesser extent depending on the psychic development of the individual, that is
to say, on the degree to which the superconscious
preponderates over the subconscious - if at all. Intelligence, which is broadly synonymous with
awareness, varies considerably from person to person, though all people live in
their superconscious at least some of the time,
either directly, through meditation, or indirectly, as when the will is applied
to the subconscious and thought is evoked in response to a variety of external
stimuli. All of us 'feed our minds',
even if only to the extent of reading a newspaper or watching some television
serial. To 'feed one's mind' is not only
to ingest, through one or other of the senses, information which is then
digested and either made immediate use of or consigned to memory for possible
future use; it is primarily a process whereby awareness is sharpened, whereby
we, as spirit, grow increasingly conscious about various aspects of whatever we
are ingesting, from a symphony to a television programme, from a novel to a
painting, and become, during this process of enriched assimilation, more alive
to ourselves than at other times!
Being dependent on external stimuli for the
cultivation of greater awareness does, however, have its drawbacks, not least
of all because awareness is an internal quality and can only be cultivated to a
relatively limited extent through the use or assistance of external stimuli, no
matter how intellectually stimulating such stimuli may happen to be! If we wish to cultivate awareness to a higher
extent - which we won't do, as a rule, before it has been cultivated to a quite
high pitch through external means - then we can do no better than to turn away
from appearances and focus our attention upon the self, awareness thereby
becoming aware of itself in a kind of spiritual narcissism, which is the
opposite of any sensual narcissism. We
turn inwards to develop our awareness of self to the highest degree humanly
possible, and become, in the process, quasi-divine, living only for and in the
spirit, above and beyond the ambiguous realms of feelings and thoughts and
dreams. This is the meditative state
and, although it isn't unknown to people in the West, relatively few are those
who regularly experience it for any length of time in this day and age!
Unlike pleasure, love, and happiness,
maximum awareness can become the goal of human striving, indeed the goal
of evolution itself, though we can none of us expect to attain to that goal
before certain intermediate stages, transcending the human, have been
introduced - a thing, alas, which won't happen for some time to come! The 'being-for-self' awareness of the meditator is certainly a viable state, and one which more
people are bound to experience as time goes by.
But it isn't the ultimate state, nor can we expect it to take us
directly to that state in spiritual transcendence. The best we can do, while still human beings,
is to live for awareness, particularly the direct, essential awareness of
meditation. We cannot experience the
post-human tripping state of Supermen, at any rate not on an official and
universal basis, nor can we experience the subsequent hypermeditative
state of Superbeings, the state immediately preceding
transcendence. But we can
cultivate awareness to a greater extent than hitherto, and thus modify both the
psychological and physiological constitutions of our brains. For, unlike bodily matter, brain matter,
particularly when of the new brain, can be significantly modified in the course
of time ... as intellectual activity rearranges and refines upon its basic
atomic constitution, transforming the predominant electron content of the new
brain from a marginally to a substantially predominating content in the course
of our psychic evolution. Unlike the
body, which grows naturally and independently of conscious volition, the superconscious mind requires to be artificially cultivated
as a result of conscious effort on our part.
We cannot change our bodies, at least not beyond making them physically
stronger or weaker, but we can certainly change our minds, and thus alter the
physiological constitution of the new brain in the process! This is, after all, merely the beginnings of
a tendency which, at the climax of millennial evolution, will result in mind
becoming completely independent of new-brain matter, as electrons break away
from proton and/or neutron constraint and soar heavenwards towards their
spiritual destination in the supra-atomic Beyond.
All this takes us a long way from
sadomasochism, which is where I began this essay, but not for nothing and not without a certain arcane logic! For the sadist and the meditator
exist at opposite poles of human behaviour - the one stemming from the Diabolic
Alpha in an attitude to sex which emphasizes its reactive proton origins; the
other aspiring towards the Divine Omega in a context which stresses electron
attractions as applying both to his own and to other people's higher self. In this day and age, each extreme is rather the
exception to the rule. But whereas the
sadomasochistic exception is largely a consequence of man having, in the main,
outgrown such diabolical behaviour, the meditative exception reflects the
converse consequence ... of man not yet having become spiritual enough to
directly aspire towards the Divine Omega on both a regular and a widespread
basis. We needn't lament the
sadomasochistic exception, but we should, if spiritually progressive, look
towards a future in which meditation will become the rule!
POST-ATOMIC PROGRESS
In this
age, and as time goes by, everything becomes more biased towards the electron,
regardless of its origins or basic constitution. Sex is no longer the predominantly
proton-biased sadomasochistic reaction of one body to another it formerly was,
in the early days - extending up to comparatively recent times - of human
evolution. People are generally more
disposed, when indulging in sex, to join together on an electron basis of
mutual attraction, which necessarily stresses gentleness and sympathy. Whereas the female was a proton equivalent in
the disreputable days of sadomasochistic sex, the modern female increasingly
behaves, in her liberated capacity, like a quasi-electron equivalent in the
attractive sexual relationships of free sex.
Like electrons, electron equivalents behave positively, that is to say,
passively, gently, tenderly, and so on.
The quasi-electron equivalent (of the liberated female) and the
free-electron equivalent (of the unmarried male) behave lovingly towards each
other and thus participate in a sexuality which could be defined as positively
unisexual. This contrasts with the
negative unisexual activity of proton equivalents and pseudo-proton and/or
bound-electron equivalents of earlier, more barbarous times. But before evolution reached the stage of
encouraging positive relationships, it did, of course, have to pass through an
intermediate stage of heterosexual relationships, as manifested in the
ambiguous coupling of proton and/or neutron equivalents, i.e. women, with
bound-electron equivalents, i.e. men, which was institutionalized in the atomic
tradition of marriage. This stage of
sexual evolution represented and reflected a compromise, we may surmise,
between negative and positive approaches to sex, proton-proton reactions and
electron-electron attractions - in other words, between the rough and the
smooth, the aggressive and the gentle. An atomic dualism, as opposed to either a pre- or a post-dualistic
absolutism.
The age, as I said, is becoming increasingly
electron-orientated, and therefore more disposed towards the
post-dualistic. Unisexuality,
both figuratively and literally, is on the increase, and we may suppose that it
won't cease to be so for some time to come - certainly not until it has attained
to a maximum development either before or with the termination of human
evolution. To expect a return to
traditional sexual criteria in the future would be equivalent to expecting
evolution to reverse itself and uphold atomic dualism again. That is something it is most unlikely to do,
though there may be periodic, if temporary, reactions and backslidings,
according to fluctuations in fortune or circumstance, in the foreseeable
future. Sooner or later, however, all
traditional values will be officially discredited, so no-one would think, for
example, of getting married. We can, I
believe, be confident that marriage will die a painless death with the
termination of atomic values generally.
For it affirms a union between man and woman, between a bound-electron
equivalent and a proton and/or neutron equivalent. With the overcoming of protons and the
transformation of men into Supermen, there can be no question of its being
valid or justified. A quasi-electron
equivalent and a free-electron equivalent do not, if and when they come together, form an atomic integrity. They are entirely post-atomic.
But if, in post-atomic sexuality, one body
attracts another on the most positive physical terms, terms which lay emphasis
on pleasure alone, in post-atomic religion the attraction of minds to one
another will be no less - indeed, probably even more - positive and
electron-centred. For such an attraction
is based on the superconscious, the upper part of
what atomic dualists are especially fond of calling the conscious mind, and it
manifests in awareness - the psychic quality of spirit. Awareness is the positive attribute of
electrons when they exist in a context considerably outnumbering protons in any
atomic constitution, and the more considerably they outnumber protons, the
greater is the degree of awareness to be found there. Where, however, protons outnumber or dominate
electrons, as in the body generally, the atomic integrity will be biased
towards feelings, and electrons accordingly be obliged to exert themselves
against their own deepest grain, as it were, by responding to positive stimuli
from without in an appropriately sensual context. The bound electron becomes a perpetrator of
positive feelings. By contrast, the free
electron becomes, in the electron-biased context, a perpetrator of awareness
which, as a spiritual quality, transcends feelings altogether.
Thus awareness isn't simply a refined or
very positive feeling, but a state-of-mind appertaining to an entirely
different and superior realm of consciousness - namely that of the superconscious. It
is through and in this superconscious that awareness
is cultivated in the form of a greater awareness of self, which is identical,
in its spiritual essence, to all other selves.
The person experiencing such awareness cares nothing for the physical
presence of human beings or material things in the external environment. The attraction of selves is wholly spiritual
and takes place in utmost loyalty to one's own self, through complete
self-centredness, without regard for the physical presence of lesser, or
personal, selves. This is not God in any
ultimate sense, but it can certainly be a stage on the road to divinity, an earthly
manifestation of transcendent togetherness.
It signifies a far superior development to the egocentric togetherness
of the praying congregation, whose wills are directed, through the act of
prayer, down towards the subconscious, from which the requisite thoughts
appropriate to the occasion are evoked and transmuted into spoken words. The meditator, by
contrast, turns away from the subconscious in a superconscious
that is free to exist for itself on its own spiritual terms, that is to say, in
the direct cultivation of awareness as a means to a higher end - namely the
attainment, one way or another, of spiritual transcendence. It is the difference between a bound-electron
equivalent and a free-electron equivalent, between the atomic (egocentric) and the
post-atomic (superconscious).
No-one would ever think of praying in the
post-atomic age, for prayer would be far too egocentric. Besides, fictions derived from cosmic facts
are of no importance to a psyche biased towards truth, which is to say, awareness. Certain illusions derived from the truth and
pertaining to the Cosmos will, of course, remain acceptable, in the interests
of Transcendentalism. But no fictions
derived from cosmic facts would remain so, and for the simple reason that the
psyche will be too superconscious to have much respect
for subconscious contents, which, in any case, would have receded into the
psychic distance of discarded archetypes.
Thus while the illusion of, say, curved space will prevail in the
interests, effectively, of transcendental complacency, the fictions of the
Creator and of Satan, respectively if unconsciously derived from the central
star of the Galaxy and the sun, will cease to play any part whatsoever in our
religious integrity, having been consigned, along with the fictional/illusory
Christ, to the remote regions of our psychic past - much the way that certain
outmoded political and social institutions were formerly consigned, by
socialist revolutionaries, to the rubbish heap of history.
TWO APPROACHES TO SALVATION
We are
entering an age and, to a limited extent as yet, already live in an age when,
to put it bluntly, politics is no longer a matter for politicians, but
effectively for priest-types functioning in a political role. That is to say, when politics is being
transferred from the State to the Church ... with intent to the latter's
furtherance, as evolution tends towards an exclusively religious stage from a
transcendental base. The priest who
involves himself in politics is less an anomaly these days - though Christian
purists will maintain otherwise - than an intimation of things to come, and
this even when he functions from a reactionary standpoint (as did a certain
well-known cleric in Northern Ireland).
Previously, throughout the greater part of the Christian era, politics
was a matter for politicians and religion a matter for priests. There existed a sharp distinction between
materialists and spiritualists, in accordance with the dualistic nature of
Christian civilization, torn between state and church. Prior to that, religion, to the extent that
it existed, was predominantly in the hands of politicians, as in ancient
Of course, in Marxist-Leninist states
politics remained, until quite recently, in the hands of Soviet materialists,
who functioned as quasi-electron equivalents in a post-atomic society, and even
now, under Social Democracy, politics is still, by and large, in the hands of
materialists, as before. Doubtless
politics will remain in such hands until states upholding Socialism are
eventually transformed, through the acceptance of transcendental truth, into
genuinely free-electron societies, with the correlative development of
proletarian civilization. Then the State
will truly 'wither', in Engles' oft-quoted phrase, as
spiritual types take over the reins of government and work for the expansion of
the Church, as implying the development of transcendental meditation in
suitably designed meditation centres. At
that point in time, Socialism will be well on the way to its total eclipse by
Transcendentalism, as particularly applying to the completely free, stateless,
classless, moneyless, paradisiacal society of the Superbeings,
or new-brain collectivizations, in the second phase
of the post-Human Millennium - the transcendental phase-proper. For Socialism won't be entirely eclipsed with
the advent of the first post-human phase of evolution, when the State, in both
senses of the term, will be superseded by the Supermen, or brain collectivizations, the millennial machinery of which will
stem from the expanding Church. Thus Socialism
will lead to Social Transcendentalism and that, in turn, to the post-Human
Millennium, which, after a relatively 'socialist' phase, will culminate in the
transcendental phase-proper ... of the hypermeditating
Superbeings, who, as the ultimate earthly life-form,
will be pending transcendence, and thus the attainment of pure spirit, i.e.
free electrons, to the heavenly Beyond in ultimate salvation from atomic
constraint.
In speaking of the two senses of the word
'state', I was, of course, referring, in post-atomic terms, to what is
literally the State in a socialist society, i.e. the proletariat, and to what
can be superficially mistaken for it but is in fact the machinery of state
which, in its bureaucratic and administrative capacity, is intended to serve
the proletariat. I have elsewhere used
the word 'state' in a more traditional sense, as applying to politics rather
than religion, and I am well aware that, from another traditional standpoint,
it can be used to signify landed or property interests, which are its earlier
and therefore more concrete manifestations - manifestations still accruing, in
some measure, to atomic societies. The
socialist use of the word 'state' normally emphasizes, by contrast, an abstract
manifestation, since the proletariat are an abstraction, not a concrete entity
like an individual or, more specifically in this context, an area of land
which, in national terms, signifies the root beginnings of the State from which
bourgeois landed/property and property/people compromises were successively
derived, these atomic manifestations of the State in turn being superseded, in
socialist societies, by the ideologically Absolute State ... of the proletariat
(initially in theory only).
Thus the overall evolution of the State, to
speak in atomic terms, is from the proton absolutism of the aristocratic
concrete manifestation to the electron absolutism of the proletarian abstract
manifestation via the atomic compromises of the bourgeois concrete/abstract
manifestations. With the post-atomic
stage of this evolution, however, the approach to salvation, that is to say, to
a post-Human Millennium, requires that Socialism should accommodate itself,
through Social Democracy, to Transcendentalism, in order that materialism may
eventually be superseded by the development of an exclusively spiritual
orientation of post-atomic society, as quasi-electron politics gives way to
free-electron politics and Socialism begins its 'withering' in the name of
transcendental progress. As intimated
elsewhere in my work, the supersession of materialist
leaders, or Marxists, by spiritualist leaders, or Transcendentalists, is the
key to the evolution of the Church at the State's expense. All states upholding materialistic socialism
will become spiritual in the course of time.
Dialectical materialism will be superseded by post-dialectical
transcendentalism.
In the meantime, however,
Transcendentalists and Marxists will have to learn to work together and to
trust one another. This should not be
difficult, since both approaches to salvation have evolutionary progress at
heart and should exist, in the future, on the same class level, not, as with
Nazism and Fascism vis-ŕ-vis Soviet Communism, in a bourgeois/proletarian
antagonism, the fruit of which was the bitterest fighting of World War
Two. Transcendentalists would not be
fascist but genuinely socialistic, if from a spiritual standpoint. Strictly speaking, there are no
Transcendentalists in the modern world but only, in absolute politics,
Socialists. For Transcendentalism
(communism or communalism) does, after all, develop out of Socialism or, more
correctly, Social Transcendentalism ... as the goal of earthly striving in the
ultimate post-human society of the Superbeing
Millennium.
AN ABSOLUTE ASPIRATION
Christians
have a fatal tendency to confound the Diabolic Alpha with the Divine Omega, to
interchange the two as mood and circumstance dictate. Not that we need particularly blame them for
that, since Christianity is, after all, a dualistic religion. Christ was no transcendentalist but a dualist
to the core, that is to say, a man who taught that the 'Kingdom of Heaven' lay
within, in one's spiritual development, but who nonetheless remained loyal to
the Father, to what I call the alpha root of evolution, as when he pleaded with
the Father to 'forgive them', meaning the Jews, 'for they know not what they
do.' There could be no question of
Christ turning his back on the Father in the name of a more exclusive
orientation towards the Holy Spirit, or creation of the Divine Omega. Christ had no knowledge of the Holy Spirit,
only of the Father, which Jews would have identified, more fundamentally, with
Jehovah. But he differed from Judaists
by teaching that the '
However that may be, the '
I, however, am not a practising Christian,
and neither do I write for dualists.
That is why I speak freely about theological matters, including the
distinction between Satan and the Creator, which is commensurate with a
difference in degree, though not necessarily in kind, between the central star
of the Galaxy and the small peripheral star that we recognize as the sun - one
of millions of 'fallen angels' which an explosion of gas sent hurtling out in
every direction, with the inception of the Galaxy. Probably there were millions of such
explosions throughout the Universe, bearing in mind that we now recognize
millions of galaxies, and their offshoots may have interwoven, so that
differently-constituted balls of flame came into relative proximity with one
another and thereby established the rudiments of a galactic integrity with its
- dare I say it? - Newtonian tensions between force and mass. Else we must ascribe the integrity of
galaxies to the quicker cooling of certain smaller stars, which went on to
become planets vis-ŕ-vis larger stars and eventually put a halt to the everywhichway divergence of stars in general. Gas was undoubtedly the creative force behind
galaxies, but we cannot speak of gas out of nothing, or creation out of a void,
which is a meaningless, not to say implausible, proposition. Certainly gas came into existence in the void,
but that does not mean to say it was dependent on the void,
that the void encouraged or needed it.
Creation asserted itself against the indifferent backdrop of the void
and did so, initially, in the form of gas or gases that went on, through
explosive pressures, to become stars, doubtless very anarchic stars until
brought into some kind of galactic order through the emergence of planets
which, in cooling, hardened into some rudimentary manifestation of an atomic
integrity, the electron aspect of which created an atomic tension between stars
and planets, that is to say, between subatomic absolutism and atomic
relativity.
All this speculation is, of course, at a
far remove from theology. But theology
is dependent on cosmic reality, it requires some concrete base from which to extrapolate
gods and devils and demons. Now the base
from which these theological symbols were extrapolated certainly existed, and
necessarily continues to exist, but man can outgrow theology in his quest for
the supra-atomic absolute. If the
Creator (especially in the guise of Jehovah) is a figurative extrapolation from
the central star of the Galaxy, and the Devil (as Satan) is a
like-extrapolation from the sun, then it stands to reason that the distinction
between the two is merely one of degree rather than kind, and that the Creator
is therefore a more powerful 'devil', or alpha absolute, than Satan. How is it, then, that Christians, deriving
the Father from Judaic precedent, have traditionally looked upon this diabolic
absolute as divine, as a being of an altogether higher order than the Devil,
whom they have regarded as the root of all evil in the world? The answer to this at first-sight insoluble
problem seems to me rather straightforward: they have taken a better view of
the Creator for the simple reason that He is not perceived as being directly
responsible for all the misery of life, since existing at a farther remove from
the world than the Devil. Translated
from the figurative to the literal plane, or from theology to science, this
means that the central star of the Galaxy, about which such smaller stars as
the sun revolve, is at too great a cosmic remove from the earth to do much
mischief there, whereas the sun, a mere ninety-three million miles away,
directly influences and affects this planet, thereby being the source of all or
much of the evil that Christians have traditionally seen fit to ascribe to the
Devil's influence. It is therefore the
'Fallen Angel', and not the 'Almighty Creator', which is the root of all evil
in the world, if in a comparative sense.
Considered from an absolute point of view,
however, it is the Creator, and indeed the millions of Creators, or central
stars of galaxies throughout the Universe, which are the literal roots of all
evil. For what culminates, as evolution,
in the future Divine Omega, or definitive globe of transcendent spirit, must
begin in the Diabolic Alpha, with numerous explosions of what we now call
central, or governing, stars. Scientists
would not speak of numerous Creators but, more literally, of numerous First
Causes; though for some obscure reason (probably not unconnected with
monotheistic tradition), the single Big Bang theory of the Universe's origins
still holds sway in conservative minds - as though the millions of galaxies now
in existence could be traced to a single root out of which they all
exploded! Granted an ignorance of the
pluralistic nature of the Diabolic Alpha, it is still staggering that so many
scientists should trace this immense multi-galactic Universe to just one single
source! Are we to suppose that galaxies
tend away from one another as from a central void in space, the origin-point of
their creation? To be sure, diverge they
do. But that is surely more from one
another, in a sort of kaleidoscopic interaction, than from a central void
which, so we are led to believe, was once an immense star before the Big Bang
got to it!
Returning from cosmic speculation to
Christians, perhaps it isn't altogether surprising that certain aspects of
nature, such as the beauty of flowers, were claimed to glorify the Creator by
their presence here, their raison d'ętre, as it were, being to glorify
God and give men pleasure in the process.
Now if the Devil is a convenient fiction for taking the blame for
whatever evil is afoot in the world, then it logically follows that the Creator
must be accredited with whatever natural good can be found there, including the
beauty of nature. But, considered
literally, it is not the central star of the Galaxy that causes flowers to grow
but ... the star closest to us, which we recognize as the sun. And so, it is the Devil, to revert to the
theological equivalent, rather than God (the Creator) that is glorified by the
beauty of flowers, since such beauty is partly the handiwork, as it were, of
one who, as a 'fallen angel' ... from stellar to solar planes, is by no means
impartial to beauty himself!
Ah, himself! How beguiling is theology! 'Itself' would be a more accurate description
of the subatomic absolute in question - namely, the sun, with its proton-proton
reactions. Gender only applies to an
atomic integrity, particularly to one in which protons and electrons are
approximately in balance, as during the dualistic stage of human evolution. An 'it' is certainly at the root of nature
considered in mineral, vegetable, or animal terms. The flowers would no more survive without
sunlight than other manifestations of the natural world, and the sun, as
already noted, is the source from which the Devil was originally extrapolated,
in due process of theological abstraction.
Nature depends on evil, is itself fundamentally evil, as the Church has
traditionally taught, and would only be praised as glorifying the Creator by
essentially pagan types, whose allegiance to Christianity was less than
transcendental. With its
'survival-of-the-strongest' ethos, nature is precisely what must be overcome if
evolution is to attain, via man, to a supernatural culmination in spiritual
truth. Flowers can be an obstacle to
that overcoming, as can vegetables, animals, and women. However, as a dualistic religious
development, Christianity could not be expected to overcome nature in absolute
terms, only relatively, with intent to curb the intensity and reduce the
frequency of naturalistic indulgences.
It could not turn against the Father; for Christ was Himself, to a
degree, 'three in One', being soul, flesh, spirit, and therefore Man. One would have
to turn against Christ, with his loyalty to the Father, in order to aspire
towards transcendent spirit on an absolute basis, to absolutely turn away from
nature.
Evolution on earth is still a long way from
directly pending transcendence, but a day will surely come when life is set
directly on course for ultimate salvation, as the new-brain collectivizations
of the ultimate life form on earth, namely the Superbeings,
hypermeditate towards free-electron absolutism in the
supra-atomic Beyond. Of what consequence
will all those who oppose utopian societies, from a humanistic standpoint, be
then? Evolution would have overcome them
long before, since men will arise who know that while human nature can only be
relatively changed on human terms, it can be absolutely changed with the aid of
the most advanced technology, a technology which won't merely upgrade man ...
but transform him into a post-human life form, transcending his body in the
process. As Nietzsche wrote: 'Man is
something that should be overcome', and, thanks partly to my teachings, we are
now, or soon shall be, in a position to know how to go about overcoming him ...
in the interests of salvation and in opposition to any bourgeois humanism, such
as would impede evolutionary progress by endeavouring to keep man chained to an
atomic, dualistic, Christian integrity.
Such an impediment cannot be endured for ever!
The men of the coming transcendental
civilization cannot aim for Heaven conceived in literally transcendent terms,
as did the Christians with their delusion concerning life after death, but will
have to resign themselves to developing spirit and aspiring towards the goal of
human evolution in the post-Human Millennium.
The goal of human evolution and the goal of evolution per se,
however, are two quite different things, and we should not confound the one
with the other, nor treat them as identical.
The post-Human Millennium is what lies beyond man in the life forms of,
first, the Supermen and, then, the Superbeings (as
brain collectivizations and new-brain collectivizations respectively), and is thus a goal for man
to attain to - in short, a relative goal.
But the absolute goal of evolution is Heaven, or the spatially
transcendent Beyond, and that can only be attained to by the Superbeings, who will be far superior to man in spiritual
striving!
This, needless to say, is not the teaching
of Christ but of a wholly transcendental teacher who, in his omega-biased
integrity, corresponds to a Second Coming.
This man does not pay tribute to the Father, and neither does he
confound alpha with omega. He is not
'God', in the sense that Christ was or became (on an anthropomorphic basis) God
to Christians, but simply a teacher who points towards the literal creation of
ultimate Godhead as transcendent spirit or, more specifically, the definitive
globe of such spirit at the climax to all evolution. Such a climax may still be a long way off at
present. Nonetheless, we are entering an
age when an aspiration towards omega divinity will be the rule rather than, as
at present, the exception!
CONCERNING SWEARERS
The masses,
or what may be termed the militant lumpen core of the
proletariat, are highly prone to swearing, particularly within the confines of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization. The
words one hears most often from their lips are sexually explicit four-letter
ones. Why, it may be wondered, do such
words figure so prominently on many proletarian tongues? Arguably a good question and I intend to
answer it from two points of view - namely a negative and a positive.
First the negative answer. These proletarians
generally lead hard lives under the capitalist/socialist yoke and, when various
personal and/or environmental circumstances are taken into account, haven't a
great deal for which to be grateful.
Hence the abusive recourse to four-letter words, the psychological smear
or denigration which they cast over the object of abuse patently testifying to
an aggrieved mentality. Often the object
in question is transcended in a general reference that embraces everything and
anything, turning life, for the swearer, into an
affair worthy of permanent denigration, and casting an ugly psychological smear
over whatever he thinks or says. The
mentality of the habitual swearer is probably too
familiar to most non-swearers to warrant further
exegesis here.
So let us turn to the positive answer. We know what the words are, but do we sense
any underlying implication in their use, any refutation or belittling, it may
be, of sex? I, for one, do; though that
doesn't make me any more partial to their use than before! To sense that either the
female sex organ or the actual sex act is being denigrated, if unconsciously,
by certain of these words ... doesn't necessarily make them any sweeter to the
ear. But it does throw a new
light on their use, a light which suggests that perhaps the proletariat, for
all their professed addiction to sex, are privately disgusted by it and
anxious, in consequence, to verbally belittle it whenever opportunity or
circumstances permit. Someone described
as a 'fuck*** cunt' is worse than just a 'cunt'; he is a sexually active 'cunt'
- an active sex organ. This, clearly, is
one of the lowest possible things that anyone can be described as, and it
indicates, I think, that the user of these words has an instinctive class
aversion both to the object in question and to its active use, an aversion
which, if not conscious, at least indicates a potential for post-atomic
sexuality, such as the proletariat can be expected to uphold in the
transcendental future. It also reflects
the fact that the user in question lives in a broadly homosexual/masturbatory
culture which, though relative, precludes any genuine respect for the female
sex organ. Even petty-bourgeois
liberated women tend, more often than not, to negate their vagina in a fixation
on phallic oral sex, which conforms to the masculine bias of the times. Were we living in an age the converse of our
own, it would be the penis that served as a term of abuse on the lips of the
proletariat.
If most liberated women are averse to the
employment of four-letter words themselves, the same cannot be said of the
majority of proletarian women who, despite their sex, are as prone as their menfolk to denigrate others, and by implication their own
sex organ, through the liberal use of such words. On superficial accounting, this strikes one
as singularly odd. But when, applying a
positive viewpoint to this tendency, one investigates the subject in greater
depth, it occurs to one that, unlike liberated females, proletarian women are
potentially Supermen, and will therefore be more inclined to take a masculine
view of their sex organ and to employ it as a term of abuse, with an underlying
implication of self-denigration in attendance.
The average proletarian woman of today no longer regards herself as a
creature entitled to sexist respect but unconsciously, if not consciously,
behaves as if she were already generically a Superman. Hence her willingness to demean her sex organ
by employing it as a term of abuse!
Having tackled these two answers, we may
generalize that the one implies the other, that
without the negative the positive side would not exist; that the denigration of
the female sex organ is implicit in the primary use of four-letter words as
stringent criticism of some adversary which springs from a deeply aggrieved,
aggressive, and resentful psyche. On the
surface, the object of abuse is being reviled, but the reviler
is acquiescing, instinctively or otherwise, in the fittingness of the term
employed in this abuse. He is acting on
the principle that there is nothing lower, from a human angle, than the organ
from which the term has been extrapolated and to which it indirectly applies,
compliments of the victim of such abuse who, willy-nilly, becomes that lowness
in the reviler's imagination, since, as the direct
focus of abuse, he symbolizes the lowness in question. To act on this principle is to turn against the
feminine root, to negate complacency in dualism and, by implication, to affirm
the moral superiority of a post-dualistic society. Such a person, of whatever sex, can only be
the crude clay, so to speak, from which a post-sexist, truly saved humanity
will be moulded.
It is my opinion that swearing of the
four-letter variety one hears, for example, in England is more prevalent among
the proletariat of a bourgeois/proletarian civilization than among proletariats
in socialist states, and largely because it reflects the oppression of the
masses under a capitalist/socialist system.
The exploited swear both as a reflection of their exploitation and to
avenge themselves, one way or another, on the objects of their oppression,
either symbolically or actually.
Probably this isn't the whole truth, but I am firmly convinced that it
is a significant ingredient in that truth.
Unless they are mad or incorrigibly bad-natured, ill-tempered, or
youthfully exhibitionist, people swear from an aggrieved mentality, which may
well be connected with capitalist and/or socialist oppression. Some, admittedly, swear all the time. But they are more to be despised than pitied!
Of course, socialist societies aren't
entirely immune to swearers, but will take measures,
if genuine, to curb swearing and make it a kind of offence against the People,
since it could be construed as reflecting poorly on the socialist system which,
in theory if not always in practice, is designed to ameliorate the living
standards of the masses and thus reduce or remove any excuse for swearing - a
habit which, whilst it may be justified in a capitalist/socialist society,
should have little or no place in a genuinely socialist one. Thus the negative aspect of swearing becomes
increasingly unacceptable, since there shouldn't be too many causes for
grievance in a society run on behalf of the People by their elected servants. That leaves - does it not? - the positive aspect, which has more to do with the
belittling of the female sex organ than with the slandering of an opponent.
A socialist state, if not an absolute
civilization, is potentially such a civilization. In other words, it is a state in which
proletarian women are almost, though not quite, Supermen. It is a state, in short, that denies
relativity. For while the implicit
denigration of the female sex organ may be acceptable in an extreme relative
state, the same cannot be said of a state tending towards the absolute, where denigratory references to the female sex organ would
suggest a sexist relativity incompatible with a bias for the absolute. Hence, even on positive grounds, swearing
would become unacceptable, because involving sexist discrimination. Doubtless as the socialist state matured
towards or was converted into a transcendental civilization, swearing would
become even more unacceptable, since by then those who, as proletarian women,
had been potentially Supermen would have actually become Supermen, and
all references to the female sex organ be taboo, not least of all because
Supermen were indisposed to using it in a relative context, their vibrator
sexuality being absolute - the vibrator becoming a kind of artificial penis
rather than simply a penis substitute.
So a day will come when, because all men
are brothers and sexist discrimination has been overcome, the use of
four-letter, or equivalent, swear words will be outlawed, their continual
employment by some people becoming a crime against the People which, like other
such crimes, may well be subject to corrective discipline.
THE FUTURE ABSOLUTE
A
transcendental civilization won't punish offenders against it, but will
endeavour to correct them. The
bourgeois/proletarian civilization of the contemporary West is certainly
interested in correcting offenders, especially in its more progressive
manifestations, that is to say, in countries whose relativity is inherently
more extreme, like
A transcendental civilization, to repeat
myself, won't uphold punishment, and consequently there will be no death
penalty. Neither will there be
life-imprisonment sentences, nor long-term prison sentences
which virtually amount to the same thing.
Indeed, there won't be any imprisonment at all, because no prisons. Instead there will be correction centres,
whether psychiatric or otherwise, and an offender's detention in such centres
will last for as long as it takes to correct him, and no longer! Should he prove recalcitrant or well-nigh
impossible to correct, then detention may have to be indefinite - that being
the exception to the general rule.
There are some crimes, however, that are
less a product of mental derangement or misguided belief than of cold-blooded
calculation, and murder and rape may be among them. It occasionally happens that a murder is
committed in consequence of tragic circumstances, whether developing over a
period of time or resulting from a sudden flare-up of tension or, indeed, quite
by accident, without the assailant's intending to kill anyone. In a transcendental civilization, assuming
murder was occasionally still committed, careful consideration would have to be
given to the circumstances of the murder, so that the exact nature of the act
was accounted for and the disposition or character of the murderer
simultaneously taken into account, the better to determine whether extenuating
circumstances should be upheld. For,
taken together, all these factors would determine whether the accused required
one type of correction or another or, indeed, whether in fact he required any
correction at all, it being necessary merely to detain him until a reasonable
verdict could be reached.
Of course, I don't wish to imply that
certain kinds of murder should go without censure. Detention could mean anything from 1-5 years,
depending on the criminal circumstances.
One thing I am certain of, however, is that no-one, whatever the
circumstances surrounding the act, would be sentenced to life-imprisonment in a
transcendental civilization. I would
like to envisage five years as being the maximum term of detention, with the
possibility of a longer period should such an act, or something similar, be
committed by the same person again, following release. Most people should certainly be released from
detention within a few months or, at worst, years of their confinement. Possibly no-one would think of committing
murder in a society where all men were treated equally and no-one had any reason
to be envious of anyone else - everyone living on approximately the same
post-atomic plane. We may suppose that,
as society evolves towards a post-human epoch from a transcendental base, all
or most forms of contemporary crime will disappear. Its causes, including alcohol addiction, drug
abuse, sexual rivalry, poverty, racial inequality, poor housing, inadequate
education, envy, greed, etc., will have been eradicated. When there are no longer barbarians in
existence because the society or, rather, civilization in question is absolute
rather than relative, there will be little or no barbarous behaviour. A civilized proletariat would have no cause
or excuse to indulge in crime. The
wonder of it is that, in a society where the majority are still effectively
barbarous, there isn't more crime than already exists. Certainly this may be said of most Western
societies!
If punishment would be incompatible with a
transcendental civilization, could the same be said of euthanasia - the
painless putting to death of the incurably ill, insane, or seriously
injured? In a relativistic society there
are various arguments on this matter, a fact which accords with its
relativity. In an absolutist society,
however, there could be no doubt whatsoever as to the validity of euthanasia
for certain specific cases. And the
motivation, the chief moral justification, for sanctioning it would be to put
an end to pain which, while tolerated and even admired by some people in a
relativistic society, would amount to a kind of sacrilege in one exclusively
orientated towards the post-Human Millennium ... in a post-atomic
integrity. While the diabolic pagan root
is intact, while, in other words, deference is paid to the proton-proton
reactions of stellar/solar energy through some theological abstraction (the
Father, the Creator, etc.), stoicism of one degree or another will be upheld by
the more traditional or conservative elements in relativistic
civilization. Once this root has been
transcended, however, no argument for the endurance of pain could be justified,
and consequently euthanasia would be officially endorsed for application to all
extreme cases of incurable pain. The
very sight of pain in a transcendental civilization would be an offence against
the spirit, a reminder of the centuries-old tyranny of the soul against which
proletarian humanity had rebelled before becoming civilized. Certainly there is no spiritual profit to be
gleaned from constant and deep suffering!
A Christian who revels in pain will be brought closer to the crucified
Christ, His transcendent salvation, however, receding into the psychological
distance. Such dualism will find no
sanction in the future! He who stems
from the Father will have been superseded by he who points
man towards the Holy Spirit - the man destined to fulfil the role of a Second
Coming. Such a man can have no truck
with pain!
There are, of course, other things with
which a civilization founded on the teachings of this man would have no truck,
including the maintenance of standing armies and the perpetration of war. It is doubtful that symphony orchestras or
other acoustic ensembles would be maintained, and we may surmise that all types
of acoustic music would cease to be appreciated - the same, I dare say,
applying to all types of naturalistic art, or art employing canvas and oils,
not to mention all types of narrative literature, from novels and plays to
poems and short stories, especially in relation to books, whether hardback or softback. A
transcendental civilization wouldn't uphold any form of traditionalism or
conservationism, like a relativistic one, but would be exclusively concerned
with what was relevant to itself. And
that could only mean what was absolutely on the post-dualistic level. Whatever pertained to tradition, no matter
how important it was once considered to be, would have been destroyed and/or
consigned to the rubbish heap of open-society history. To a civilized proletarian the past would be
something to ignore, so concerned would he be with living in the present in the
interests, needless to say, of subsequent evolutionary progress. He would not be concerned with a cultural
heritage - no more, for that matter, than were his barbarous predecessors who,
when they weren't militantly Marxist-Leninist in an overly state-socialist
context, existed as cultural outsiders within relativistic civilization - the
bourgeois/proletarian civilization of the contemporary capitalist/socialist West.
TWO TYPES OF CRITICISM
One can be
religious on one of two levels, though neither level is mutually exclusive. The level, in the first
place, of genuine religion, and the level, in the second place, of
quasi-religion - a distinction, in large measure, between the absolute and the
relative. Most people, at any
given time, are more likely to be religious on the second level, and certainly
this may be said of twentieth-century people.
There are, in the petty-bourgeois phases of evolution, adherents of a
genuine religion, be it neo-Catholicism and LSD tripping on the materialistic
side, or neo-Puritanism and neo-Orientalism on the
spiritualistic side, as it were, of each phase, but they are a minority,
probably a tiny minority within the overall confines of Western society - the
truly civilized members of bourgeois/proletarian civilization. Co-existent with this minority is that
overwhelming majority of people who, in the absence of a genuine religious
discipline, may loosely be described as barbarous, and whose religiosity will
accordingly take the form of adherence to one or more manifestations of
contemporary quasi-religion, such as football, cricket, rugby, television,
cinema, video, snooker, chess, quiz contests, art, music, literature, etc.,
depending on their class/temperamental integrity, that is to say, on whether
their main 'religious' allegiance corresponds to the earlier or to the later
phases of petty-bourgeois evolution, the lower or higher levels of
quasi-religious indulgence, or whether, on the other hand, it is in fact
largely proletarian, as in regard to pop music.
Probably these phases or levels can be divided into materialistic and
spiritualistic sides, as in the case of genuine religion, and I shall venture
the opinion that materialist indulgence in the earlier phase of petty-bourgeois
evolution will take the form of a strong interest in football, cricket, rugby
or some such physically-biased active sport, whereas its spiritualist
counterpart will take the form of an equally strong interest in theatre,
cinema, and television, which are all appearance-biased active arts. Following on behind this, as it were, we may
find materialist indulgence in the later phase of petty-bourgeois evolution
taking the form of a strong interest in snooker, chess, darts, quiz contests,
or some such intellectually-biased passive sport, whereas its spiritualist
counterpart will take the form of a strong interest in abstract art, electronic
music, experimental literature, and biomorphic sculpture, which are all
essence-biased arts. The 'barbarous' no
less than the 'civilized' are entitled to class/temperamental distinctions.
Of course, civilized people are not exempt
from an interest in one or another form of quasi-religion, in whichever phase
or on whichever side of petty-bourgeois evolution. Quite the contrary, most of them are keen followers
of some sport or admirers of various works of art, depending on their
individual temperamental predilections for either the materialistic or the
spiritualistic sides of life. Doubtless,
there must be some people whose temperaments fall, so to speak, between two
stools, making them if not equally then at least unequally partial to both
materialistic and spiritualistic achievements.
But, on the whole, it will be found, I think, that the majority of
people given to quasi-religious devotion are not civilized, in the sense we
have suggested, but non-participators in contemporary or traditional genuine
religion. Regarded in conjunction with
the proletariat, they are 'the Many', whereas the others are 'the Few', for
whom petty-bourgeois civilization is a spiritual reality - the class evolutionary
stage centred on them.
When we come to regard the age in this
light, criticisms levelled against the bourgeoisie, whether on political or
religious grounds (as applying to bourgeois art, science, literature, music, or
anything else), which are so widespread an aspect of modern life, become
intelligible from a class-evolutionary viewpoint as the rejection of the values
of a preceding governing class by their petty-bourgeois successors, who, in all
vital regards, rule the contemporary roost and are accordingly entitled to if
not respect then at least toleration from the bourgeoisie, including the grand
bourgeoisie, since there are worse things than criticism and we may be sure
that the petty bourgeoisie won't indulge in them, being a relative class themselves
- if on extreme rather than moderate terms.
Besides, the bourgeoisie would have a very difficult, not to say
impossible, task endeavouring to refute most of the criticisms levelled against
them by their petty-bourgeois successors, who are well aware that they have an
ideological superiority. Like it or not,
they are obliged to bow before the new civilized class and put-up with such
criticism, at times bordering on slander, as comes their way. This is particularly conspicuous in the realm
of so-called modern art, the abstract bias of which leaves many members of the
older class either cold or, more usually I suspect, completely bewildered,
unable as they must be, with their balanced relativity, to relate to works of
art which are near absolute in construction.
Their own representational preferences are of course mocked and, at
times, sardonically criticized by supporters of the avant-garde, who, as
members of the new class, consider themselves entitled to deal condescendingly
with what are perceived to be cultural inferiors. The bourgeoisie, as already remarked, learn
to live with this fact!
Yet if they are prepared to tolerate
criticism from 'above', the same most certainly can't be said of criticism from
'below', and by this I don't so much mean from their grand-bourgeois and/or
aristocratic predecessors (though such criticism is at times strongly resented)
as from the broad mass of people who, lacking genuine religious allegiance, may
be defined as barbarous - in short, the proletariat. Here, if anywhere, lies the distinction in
bourgeois eyes between a reasonable criticism based (no matter how much they
may privately resent the fact) on class-cultural superiority, and an
unreasonable criticism directed against everything bourgeois, in whichever
stage of its relativity, and threatening, by its radical vehemence, the social
stability and cultural integrity of Western civilization. The criticism of the bourgeoisie by the
proletariat is no mere extreme relativity directed against an earlier and more
moderate relativity, but something that appertains to an absolutism the essence
of which is the undermining and eventual elimination of relativistic
civilization in toto, regardless of whether the
focal-points of criticism be the grand bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie, or the
petty bourgeoisie. All criticism aimed
against the bourgeoisie strikes at the relativistic heart of petty-bourgeois
civilization when it comes from the barbarous majority, or from certain activist
quarters of it, and such criticism, it need hardly be said, is no less
objectionable to the new civilized class than to the old. Both will take measures to protect themselves
from this absolutist onslaught, even to the extent of proscribing what is deemed
to be particularly virulent and thus capable of undermining the relative
integrity of the bourgeois state.
Toleration of freedom of criticism does not extend to the absolutist
extreme in a relativistic civilization.
The so-called open society is really closed, in practice if not theory,
at the top, open, in theory if not practice, to virtually any depths below.
Were I to criticize the bourgeoisie from a
petty-bourgeois standpoint, my work would doubtless be tolerated by some and
even admired by others. Yet speaking as
one who, at least in theory, does not consider himself
an integral part of petty-bourgeois civilization but a barbarous outsider (if a
comparatively well-read and intelligent one), I cannot expect either toleration
or admiration from upholders of one or another degree of relativity. My spiritual temperament favours an
absolutist religion which, as Transcendentalism, will form the focal-point of
genuine religious allegiance in the civilization to-come. I could not, in all honesty, describe myself
as a yoga-practising petty-bourgeois extremist, still less as an extreme
puritan. I am less the upholder of a
contemporary religion than the founder of a future one, in which transcendental
meditation will play a part. Being in
favour of what pertains to tomorrow does not allow one to participate in that
which pertains to today. One can't live
wholly in two worlds at once.
Paradoxically, it is from the ranks of the quasi-religious that the
blueprint for the genuine religion of the future absolutist civilization has
sprung. That, after all, conforms to
evolutionary logic!
BETWEEN TWO GRAVITIES
In a
relativistic civilization too many people have an unfortunate tendency to
regard soul and spirit as synonymous, and primarily because, being relative
themselves, they fail to distinguish between the subatomic and the
supra-atomic, as regards the two most antithetical absolutes conceivable. They speak of the Father and the Holy Spirit,
but they don't regard the latter as being radically different from - indeed,
opposite to - the former. They may agree
that 'God is spirit', but are only too ready to treat soul as identical with
spirit, and thus to see in fire or flame not pure soul but pure spirit! This is in effect to confound the Diabolic
with the Divine!
We are familiar with terms such as divine
Providence, divine Creator, God the Father, and so on, but not many of us
bother to question whether the terms in question really do apply to
the Divine or whether, on the contrary, there is a clear distinction between
what is or would literally be divine and what has traditionally been considered
such. A monarch may justify his rule by
reference to 'Divine Right', but is it really God, considered literally as
transcendent spirit, or a metaphorically relative divinity which, if the truth
were known, is less truly divine than effectively diabolic or, rather, archdiabolic?
What is the difference, you may wonder,
between the diabolic and the archdiabolic? It is the difference, I maintain, between the
Devil and the Creator. In other words,
between a 'fallen angel' and the primary 'angel' from which, in a manner of
speaking, it 'fell'. Transposed from the
theological to the scientific plane, this becomes the difference between the
sun and the governing star at the centre of the Galaxy - in short, between a
petty peripheral star and the great central one. Objectively considered, the sun (Satan) is no
more evil than the governing star (the Creator); it is just that, from a
subjective standpoint, the sun, being much closer to the world, has more influence
on us and can therefore be accorded, in theological reckoning, a diabolic
status. The governing star, which is at
a much greater distance from the earth, becomes entitled, by contrast, to a
'divine' status; though I should like to distinguish it from what, as
transcendent spirit, would literally be divine.
By comparison to the divinity of the supra-atomic, the 'divinity' of the
subatomic can only be described in terms of the archdiabolic
when pertaining to the Creator-equivalent central star of any particular
galaxy.
If size and strength more than galactic
position (though the two are of course linked) determines the distinction
between the archdiabolic and the diabolic, viz. the
Creator and Satan, then what they both have in common as stars is a subatomic
constitution, as implying proton-proton reactions. This is the quality of pure soul, the most
negative sensation. By contrast, the
quality of pure spirit, as pertaining to the supra-atomic, is electron-electron
attractions, the most positive awareness.
This is no mean distinction! It
signifies the beginning and the end of evolution - the one beneath, the other
above the atomic compromise of temporal matter.
Such a compromise, manifesting itself on all levels of earthly life, is
only subject to radical change in man, and then on a class-evolutionary
basis. Pagan/aristocratic man lived in
an atomic compromise biased towards protons.
Christian/bourgeois man lives in an atomic compromise balanced between
protons and electrons.
Transcendental/proletarian man will live in an atomic compromise biased
towards electrons. The first class-stage
signified a radical stemming from the Diabolic Alpha. The second class-stage, in whichever phase,
signifies a moderate stemming from the Diabolic Alpha and a no-less moderate
aspiration towards the Divine Omega. The
third and final class-stage will signify a radical aspiration towards the
Divine Omega. All forms of diabolism,
whether conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect, will be completely alien
to it. Consequently, such a society can
only be atheistic with regard to such a concept as the Creator.
Man betrays himself at every stage of his
evolution, not just in terms of worship and/or self-realization, but also in
terms of his art, science, politics, sexuality, dress, even architecture. I use the verb 'betrays' in the sense of
revealing his evolutionary position at any given time, and one of the most
striking forms of betrayal is indeed to be found in his architecture, about
which I should like to theorize a little.
There is no clearer, more striking
architectural indication of a society radically stemming from the Diabolic
Alpha than through the use of conical or pyramidal forms. Such forms indicate a high regard for the
gravitational force of the sun as they taper to a point high above the heads of
men. A particularly striking example is
afforded by the pyramids of ancient Egypt, which are triangular in design as
they taper to a point from three sides.
It cannot surprise us that the ancient Egyptians, besides being
animal-worshippers, were confirmed sun-worshippers, and no greater concession
to solar gravity could be imagined than that evinced by each of the main
pyramids, originally erected as tombs to the Pharaohs. Even the Aztec civilization of Central
America, despite its overtly diabolical integrity, bespeaks a degree of
evolutionary improvement on the architectural monuments of ancient Egypt, to
the extent that the pyramidal forms taper to a point in step-wise,
vertical/horizontal progression, suggestive of an indirect rather than a direct
concession to the sun's gravitational force.
Other instances of a society radically stemming from the Diabolic Alpha
are not difficult to find, and even certain Native American tribes, with their
pre-architectural quasi-nomadic lifestyles, could be cited as a people whose
conical dwellings, or wigwams, betrayed a shamelessly direct concession to
solar gravity. Given the fact that these
wigwams were more usually conical than triangular, we may ascribe to Native
Americans a spiritual approach to the Diabolic Alpha, an approach similar, in
effect, to the revolution in architectural style wrought by the dome in
late-pagan and early-Christian Europe - the tapering somehow less radical
because curvilinear.
With regard to the bourgeois stage of
evolution, the acknowledgement of a transcendental ethos having reduced man's
commitment to the Diabolic Alpha (in whichever manifestation) and imposed on
him a moderate aspiration, through Christ, towards the Divine Omega, the
'Kingdom Within', we find that architectural styles came to mirror this
dualistic integrity by the new emphasis placed on the vertical,
gravitation-defying character of walls in their relation to stories, which
accords with Christian respect for the transcendent. And yet a concession to gravitational force,
whether from the sun or the central star of the Galaxy, was still in order and
appertained to the tapering design of roofs, with or without turrets, so that a
compromise was effected, in accordance with Christian dualistic principles,
between the diabolic-affirming and the diabolic-defying, as regards the
diagonal roof and the vertical walls, variations on the former according with
the epochal/class integrity of the buildings in question.
This brings us, I think, to the exclusively
gravity-defying architecture of the late-twentieth century and beyond, many of
the most conspicuous examples of which can be found in the USA, which, though
aligned with Western civilization and effectively a bourgeois/proletarian
nation, upholds a considerable number of proletarian tendencies, some of which
are quite civilized. With this
transcendental architecture, as I shall call it, man has turned his back on the
diabolic and pursued a gravity-defying style of building that maintains
unbroken allegiance to the vertical, as the parallel sides of these skyscrapers
terminate in the horizontality of a flat roof.
So gravity-defying are some of these buildings that, not content to defy
the sun, they also seem to float clear of the ground, as in Van der Rohe's work employing steel
supports reminiscent of stilts. Whether
or not a central 'block' support is employed at the base of the building, the
general impression created by such works is of the transcendent, as of a building
engrossed in the gravity-defying achievement of levitation.
As to the formal shapes employed, I would
maintain that angular or rectilinear walls betray a materialist approach to
modern architecture, cylindrical or curvilinear walls a spiritualist approach. Probably the best approach of all, from a
religious standpoint, would be the use of a curvilinear design pressing
upwardly outwards, as implying a spiritual expansion, and I know of no better
example than the church designed by Le Corbusier, namely Notre Dame
en Haut, which, while not exactly harmonizing with the Catholic religion,
suggests the possibility of future development in the context of religious
architecture, as applying to the eventual erection of meditation centres - the
appropriate type of religious buildings for a transcendental civilization. Thus it may well transpire that a strict
distinction between the secular and the religious will be upheld, as between
rectilinear and curvilinear styles.
Having briefly theorized on the relations
of architecture to man's evolutionary position, I should like to conclude this
essay by drawing attention to another context, often overlooked, in which
either a concession to gravitational force or a denial of it is maintained, and
with regard, in contrast to the above, to the gravitational force of the
earth's molten core - namely, with regard to footwear and trousers. For just as a concession to the sun's gravity
induces a proliferation of architectural styles tapering, in various degrees,
upwards, so the parallel concession to that of the earth's molten core induces
a proliferation of footwear and legwear tapering
downwards, either literally or metaphorically to a point. In the case of legwear,
as I have called it, a conspicuous example of this downwards-tapering is
afforded by the importance men once ascribed to leggings and tight, knee-length
stockings, which contrasted with their short, baggy trousers (breeches) in such
a way as to suggest what I have described as a concession to the earth's
gravitational force, and thus to betray a sartorial integrity, whether pagan or
aristocratic, stemming from the Diabolic Alpha.
In the case of footwear, we can have no hesitation in defining
high-heeled and pointed shoes as indicative of a similar trend, though one more
conspicuously pervasive among women than men, and not least of all in our own
time!
This brings us to the point that, as with
architecture, footwear and legwear will undergo a
corresponding change in favour of gravity-defying or transcending styles ...
with the progression from aristocratic to bourgeois and, finally, proletarian
stages of evolutionary development. If
straight trousers and slightly downwards-tapering heels on shoes attest to a
bourgeois stage of compromise or neutral relationship to the earth's gravity,
then it need not surprise us to discover that flared trousers and slightly
upwards-tapering heels attest to a proletarian stage relevant to a
gravity-defying transcendental society.
In an extreme relativistic civilization, such as exists in the
bourgeois/proletarian West, one can encounter virtually any style of footwear
or legwear; though the style generally worn by any
given person will correspond to his basic class, not to mention sexual,
allegiance. We may infer from this that
while such a heterogeneous situation accords with the everywhichway
integrity of relativistic civilization, no such heterogeneity could be
encouraged in an absolutist civilization, where only gravity-defying trousers
and shoes would be permissible, in accordance with its transcendental
essence. It is therefore highly unlikely
that high-heels and downwards-tapering trousers would continue to be worn in a
civilized proletarian society. On the
contrary, only such clothing as betokened man's freedom from diabolism, and
thereby attested to an absolute aspiration towards the Divine Omega.
UNDERSTANDING JAZZ
There was a
time when jazz could be described as the music of the black American, but in an
age of multi-racial interest in and commitment to jazz, that is no longer
necessarily the case. If anything, jazz
ceased to be a black man's music with the dawn of 'modern jazz', and we may
note an acoustic/electric distinction between the traditional and the modern.
Since the twentieth century was a predominantly
petty-bourgeois age, I think it only fair to define jazz as a form of serious
petty-bourgeois music. I would even go
so far as to say that it was the American equivalent of European classical
music, which, in the twentieth century, also developed a specifically
petty-bourgeois integrity, though one more conservative and, contrary to
superficial appearances, deeply rooted in tradition than its American
counterpart. Although, following
Schoenberg's lead, much of this European music is atonal or, at any rate,
relatively atonal compared to nineteenth-century Romanticism, it has remained
largely acoustic, not rivalled the best modern jazz in the use of electric
instruments. Furthermore, it has
retained, in the great majority of cases, a dependence on scores and
conductors, thereby betraying a respect for conceptual appearances which,
except in a small minority of cases, is not to be found in modern jazz, or
even, as a rule, in its traditional precursor.
Clearly, American jazz is more transcendental than European orchestral
music and thus entitled, in my opinion, to be regarded as a mainstream, as
opposed to subsidiary, form of petty-bourgeois serious music. And this in conjunction with a similar
distinction which I have elsewhere applied to art and which can, I believe, be
applied to most other subjects as well, depending on whether they pertain to
the genuinely petty-bourgeois nations of the Western world, like America and
Germany, or to the pseudo-petty-bourgeois ones, like Britain and France, which
are still firmly rooted in bourgeois tradition.
Thus, in art, the distinction between
Expressionism and Impressionism, as pertaining to the genuinely petty-bourgeois
civilization in the earlier stage of its development, and Cubism and Symbolism,
which pertain to their materialist and spiritualist counterparts respectively
within the confines of the pseudo-petty-bourgeois nations, is paralleled, in
music, by the distinction between jazz on the one hand and classical on the
other, a distinction itself capable of being divided into a spiritualist and a
materialist side in each case, so that we may speak of acoustic tonal jazz as
the materialistic counterpart of late-Romanticism and, by contrast, of electric
tonal jazz as the spiritualistic counterpart of neo-Classicism. We may also mark the evolution of jazz from
an earlier to a later stage, again paralleling the evolution of classical from
late-Romanticism to non-serial atonal composition on the materialist side, and
from neo-Classicism to serialized atonal composition on the spiritualist side,
which I shall define in terms of atonal electric on the one hand and atonal
acoustic on the other. Thus where the
one side signifies an expansion of spirituality with the assistance of electric
instruments, the other side signifies a contraction of materialism through the
use of acoustic instruments - something that has also happened in European
serious music, though, in my estimation, to a less radical extent.
If, then, jazz may be claimed to have
progressed from a stage stemming from bourgeois tonality to a stage aspiring
towards proletarian atonality, and to have done so from two points of view,
viz. a materialist and a spiritualist, is there any possibility, I wonder, of
its evolving beyond this latter stage to an absolutely proletarian one? The answer to this has, I think, to be -
no. For jazz, whether acoustic or
electric, would cease to be jazzy if it abandoned the one thing that keeps it
tied to the relative, albeit extreme, petty-bourgeois level - namely, percussion. Jazz, of whichever variety, is the wedding of
pagan rhythmic vitality and consistency to either tonality or atonality
produced on mostly artificial instruments, formerly saxophones and trumpets,
latterly electric keyboards and guitars; though the two kinds of instruments,
corresponding to an earlier and a later manifestation of the artificial, often
overlap in practice. Jazz is simply
incapable of evolving beyond petty-bourgeois criteria. It cannot be the ultimate music since, to all
appearances, it is a penultimate music, relevant to an
extreme relativistic civilization.
Beyond and above modern jazz must come the universal proletarian music
of electric atonality.
Why should music progress to an atonal
integrity? The straight answer to that
is: in order to escape from rhythm and thus be in the best possible position to
intimate of the Divine Omega, that is to say, to impress rather
than to express. Melody
reflects an atomic integrity to the extent that it is composed of rhythm and
pitch - the former horizontal, the latter vertical. Melodic music is therefore quintessentially
relative, a compromise, as it were, between rhythm and
pitch, which is only possible and morally acceptable during an atomic stage of
civilized evolution. Before this compromise
arose, music was absolutist on the horizontal level of rhythm, a music of the soul, feminine and sensuous. After it has passed, music will become
absolutist on the vertical level of pitch, a music of
the spirit, masculine and intellectual.
Such music can only be atonal, or non-melodic, the complete antithesis
of pagan music, having transcended rhythm in its absolutist dedication to
pitch, whereby a musical impression of the transcendent will be achieved. That is the moral significance of atonality,
and such atonality can only be truly transcendent, and therefore in the best
position to intimate of the Divine Omega, when projected from an electric basis
- the most artificial, or synthetic, technical medium.
By contrast, jazz never abandons the
percussive root and is consequently always part expressive. When atonal and electric it can be
predominantly impressive but, as already noted, it would cease to be jazzy (and
thus to swing) if ever it became exclusively so. There are, of course, jazz albums which
abandon the percussive root intermittently, and certainly this can be said of
the now-defunct American band Weather Report. But, overall, jazz predominates on such
albums within any particular composition, and must necessarily continue to do
so, in the context of relativistic civilization. Conversely, when the melodic or atonal apex
is abandoned, as it often is on albums that feature a drummer in the role of
band leader, the resultant music sinks beneath jazz to a purely rhythmic level,
approximating to the pagan, and may be defined as the most evil music
conceivable. Again, jazz usually
predominates on these albums, and sometimes the overall balance is such that
pure rhythm will be preceded or succeeded by pure pitch or, at the very least,
unaccompanied melody. For it often
happens that one extreme calls forth another, and certainly I can think of a
number of compositions in which frantic rhythm from the drums is countered by
electric atonality from either sax, guitar, or keyboards, so that the impression
created is of a music in which the parts are at loggerheads and seemingly
indulging in a musical tug-of-war between rhythm and pitch, alpha and
omega. This is not, to say the least, a
particularly laudable situation! But
neither, for that matter, is the analogous context of a 'melody' at war with
itself, now predominantly rhythmic, now predominantly atonal, and indisposed to
the preservation of a melodic compromise, or classical balance. And yet these situations mirror the
evolutionary struggle which is constantly taking place between rhythm and
pitch, as between evil and good, soul and spirit, in an extreme relativistic
age. Such struggles are also taking place in European classical music, though,
as a rule, on less radical terms.
When we ask ourselves what it is that makes
jazz a serious or civilized music, I think the basic answer has to be: its
commitment to instrumentality, and therefore relatively high degree of
artificiality. Vocals do of course
occur, but usually as a minor rather than a major ingredient in the overall
instrumental scope of an album, as pertaining, on average, to one or two
tracks, and then more usually of a religious connotation - one compatible,
needless to say, with petty-bourgeois criteria.
For it is virtually axiomatic that to be civilized, particularly on the
extreme relativistic level we are discussing, music must be either exclusively
instrumental or accompanied, in part, by vocals of a religious
significance. An album of romantic
songs, on the other hand, falls somewhat short of the civilized by dint both of
its excessive commitment to the voice - a natural instrument - and the sexual
or emotional content of the songs. Being
civilized, at whatever stage of class evolution, is to a large extent
synonymous with being religious (spiritual), though being sophisticated is a
subsidiary requirement more likely to find favour among materialists, whose
music, while being exclusively or predominantly instrumental, isn't consciously
intended to convey a religious notion.
No doubt, much of the jazz I characterized, a short while ago, as
materialist, through its dependence on acoustic instruments, is only entitled
to consideration as a civilized music on account of its technical
sophistication. But by this fact alone
it stands in an inferior relation to its spiritual counterpart, whether of the
tonal or atonal varieties.
While we may therefore be justified in
discriminating between the civilized and the barbarous, as between jazz of one
kind or another and such popular romance-biased kinds of vocal music as blues,
soul, funk, reggae, rock 'n' roll, pop, rock, and punk, it often happens that
respected jazz musicians abandon the civilized level not for the barbarous as
such - though the incorporation of, say, rock elements into jazz creates a
'fusion' music which may broadly be defined as bourgeois/proletarian - but a
kind of popular petty-bourgeois level, implying the production of albums with a
preponderance of vocals, and vocals, moreover, of a romantic and/or sexist
nature. And yet, as a rule, these
musicians cling by a slender thread to their civilized roots, even if
ambiguously, and retain at least one track of either pure instrumentality or a
vocal bias whose connotations are distinctly religious. With the greatest, most civilized jazz
musicians, however, there is little or no concession to the popular at
all. Musicians like Jean-Luc Ponty and John McLaughlin have been producing a succession
of instrumental albums year after year.
They are fast becoming something of an exception in the realm of modern
jazz, a small minority of the consistently civilized. Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that both Ponty and McLaughlin are European?
And yet a European in jazz is almost as
unusual as an American in classical, not merely in terms of performance but,
more significantly, of composition. Why
is it that, just as there were so many great European classical composers in
the twentieth century, there were, comparatively speaking, so few great European
jazz composers in it? And, conversely,
why should there be so many great American jazz composers but, by comparison,
so few great American classical composers?
Is not the answer to both these questions that whereas classical is
pre-eminently a European phenomenon, jazz is an American one pre-eminently, and
that, though cross-fertilization does occur, the mainstream commitments to each
type of music will be regional, accruing to the continental divide. The American jazz composers who adopt classical
influences are as rare a breed as the European classical composers who adopt
the influence of jazz. Rarer still are
the American classical composers and the European jazz composers, both of whom,
though working in an alien tradition, sooner or later tend to bend their
respective types of music back towards their native influences, so that
American 'classical' becomes jazzy (Copland, Gershwin, Barber, Bernstein, et
al.), whilst European 'jazz' becomes classical or, at any rate, retains a
respect and proclivity for classical procedure (Ponty,
McLaughlin, Catherine, Weber, Hammer, Vitous,
Ackermann, et al.). And this no less so
when the composer/performer concerned has spent many years on the other
continent, particularly in the case of European jazz musicians who have
emigrated to or chosen to work in America.
No great surprise, therefore, when we discover that the purest jazz is
composed by Americans and the purest classical by Europeans! And yet even this is not exempt from a degree
of cross-fertilization, whether conscious or unconscious. Certainly there is some classical in Chick Corea, just as there is some jazz in Michael Tippett. A
relativistic civilization, divisible into mainstream and subsidiary elements,
could not be otherwise!
PHILOSOPHY - GENUINE AND PSEUDO
There is a
difference between philosophy-proper and metaphysical philosophy, the
pseudo-philosophy which has developed with increasing tenacity along mainly
petty-bourgeois lines over the past 150 or so years - indeed, ever since
Schopenhauer, that great 'anti-philosopher', took it upon himself to dig into
oriental metaphysics and preach a doctrine of self-denial in the interests of
spiritual salvation. To the extent that
Schopenhauer was metaphysical, he was an anti-philosopher, that is to say, a
pseudo-philosopher. For philosophy-proper
in the West is not concerned with the essence of things
but, on the contrary, with their appearance, and this
whether it is on a grand-bourgeois, a bourgeois, or a petty-bourgeois level, as
pertaining to a critique of nature, a critique of ethics, or a critique of
language. A distinction, in other words,
between the natural, the human, and the artificial, as applying, in various
degrees, to the works of, say, Bacon, Kant, and Wittgenstein respectively. Of course, the critique of nature or, more
precisely, the classification and study of natural phenomena,
is the root concern of Western philosophy, and this is more likely to be
carried through with consistency and thoroughness in a pagan age than in a
Christian one. Thus Bacon could not hope,
in this respect, to emulate the work of Aristotle, who had the ideologically
naturalistic integrity of pagan civilization behind him. But neither did Plato go quite so far, in his
ethics, as Kant, and doubtless because pagan ethical thinking reflected a lower
scale-of-values, relative to an earlier stage of evolution, than its Christian
successor in the West. Needless to say,
there was no attempt at a critique of language by the ancient Greeks, since
such a critique can only materialize in an extensively urban civilization,
presupposing a greater degree of evolution.
Each civilization tends, within limits, to
evolve according to its own capacities and technological capabilities. If the civilization of the ancient Greeks was
unable to evolve beyond a town stage of evolution, then it need not surprise us
that its thought was likewise unable to evolve beyond a level commensurate with
such an environment. The Christian
civilization of the West fared rather better in the long term, though not
without having had to pass through intermediate environmental stages
corresponding to those of the ancients, in which a philosophical concern with
nature (Bacon) and ethics (Kant) took precedence. The evolution of philosophy to the stage of a
critique of language had to wait until Western civilization was at a
comparatively advanced environmental stage, as it was in Habsburg Vienna at the
turn of the nineteenth century, where Wittgenstein set the trend for subsequent
philosophers, including Berlin, Barthes, and Merleau-Ponty, to follow.
Wherever philosophy has been diverted from this central
twentieth-century concern with language, it has entered the realm of
metaphysics, as in the cases, to varying extents, of Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre,
and Weil, and thereupon become a pseudo-philosophy, descended, at least in
part, from the metaphysical preoccupations of Schopenhauer.
More overtly than this largely essayistic
writing, the utilization of novels and short prose as vehicles for the
exposition of metaphysical speculation, as in Aldous
Huxley, Hermann Hesse, and Simone de Beauvoir, developed in the twentieth century to a point
where such writings may be said to constitute the bulk of contemporary
pseudo-philosophy in the West. As
Western civilization is nothing if not relative, suspended between the pagan
and the transcendental absolutes of naturalistic philosophy on the one hand and
of abstract theosophy on the other, we cannot dismiss such pseudo-philosophy as
an aberration or unwarranted intrusion of the theosophical into the realm of
speculation. On the contrary,
pseudo-philosophy is an integral part of this relativistic civilization,
particularly in its later stages of development, when an aspiration towards the
theosophical, and thus extension of thought into essence, is becoming more
intensified. If formerly, under the
influence of aristocratic absolutism, academic philosophy had little or no
competition from a metaphysical rival (Christian theology being something
else), then with the advancement of Western civilization into an extreme, or
petty-bourgeois, age there can be no question that such competition will
develop and be intensified to a point where the 'pseudo' predominates over the
'genuine'.
In contrast to the West, the East has long
maintained a metaphysical tradition - indeed, so long ... that one has reason
to doubt whether there was ever a physical tradition behind it! Strictly speaking, the East cannot be
described as philosophical; for where there is no critique of nature or ethics
or language ... there can be no genuine philosophy. Rather, the Orient has long been
theosophical, concerned with essence, and thus antithetical to the Occident,
whether or not we include within that designation Graeco-Roman
civilization. As the West, even in its
Christian guise, has been philosophical and scientific, so the East has been
theosophical and poetic, theosophy being to poetry what science is to
philosophy - the empirical or experiential confirmation of intuitively realized
speculation and occasionally, no doubt, its correction. And, being theosophical, the East has
produced much instructive and devotional poetry, just as the West has produced
- the famous exception of the so-called 'Metaphysical Poets' notwithstanding - comparatively
little, since poetry in the West has more often than not been associated with
nature and feminine beauty, partaking of a quasi-philosophical integrity which,
in contrast to the East's theosophical one, may be described as physico-poetic. To
Keats, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty', and we have no reason to be surprised,
given his apparent bias (and this regardless of Aldous Huxley's defence of Keatsian
logic by reference, in The Perennial Philosophy, to a factual
interpretation of truth!).
By contrast to the East, however, the West
has produced a substantial body of academic philosophy, the most recent
manifestations of which will find few parallels in the East. And yet there has been a
slight shift of emphasis, in recent decades, from philosophy to theosophy in
the West, and, as a corollary of this, a corresponding shift of emphasis from
theosophy to philosophy in the East, so that an attempt at attaining to a
compromise is under way in deference to evolutionary requirement. For a world civilization - which is what
evolution would seem to have in store for humanity - cannot come about if the
two main hemispheres of the world are at loggerheads. On the contrary, it presupposes a compromise
between science and theosophy, as between physics and metaphysics, the one in
the service of the other as man struggles towards the post-Human Millennium -
an epoch when science, as technology, and theosophy, as meditation, will be
brought to a pitch of harmonious compromise, transcending all hitherto-imagined
formulae on the subject. An epoch, I
mean, when human brains will be artificially supported and sustained in
communal contexts, first as Supermen experiencing upward self-transcendence
through LSD or equivalent synthetic hallucinogens, then, following the removal
of the old brain from each superhuman individual by qualified technicians, as Superbeings, or collectivized new brains experiencing not
merely upward self-transcendence but the nearest thing, prior the heavenly
Beyond, to pure self, as the interconnected new brains of each Superbeing hypermeditate towards
total transcendence in salvation from the flesh (or its remnants thereof) and
consequent attainment to Heaven ... conceived as pure spirit expanding and
converging towards other such transcendences in order to establish, with the
eventual culmination of heavenly evolution, the Omega Point, i.e. the
definitive globe of transcendent spirit, the supreme being of the One, at the
opposite pole of evolution to the most infernal doing of ... the Many, i.e. the
stars (large and small), which constitute the Diabolic Alpha, but which
old-world religions paradoxically describe in terms of the Divine, i.e. the
'heavens'.
Be that as it may, men of the future
absolutist civilization won't follow suit, since they will have their minds
turned to an exclusive aspiration towards the Divine Omega through
self-realization, with no time, in consequence, to worship the alpha or its
theological successor in some kind of Christ-like anthropomorphic compromise. For as the 'Three in One', Christ combines,
to a relative degree, both Father and Holy Spirit within Himself as man. Like all men, He is thus a combination, as it
were, of alpha and omega, neither wholly one (the Father) nor the other (the
Holy Ghost), and therefore a distinctly 'Second Person' entity worshipped by
Christians as God. The future
transcendental civilization, however, won’t have any time for the worship of
such a man-god, but will concentrate, through transcendental meditation, on
self-realization as a step towards ultimate divinity. That such a divinity won't be fully attained
to during the duration of this final human civilization ... can be no argument
against the practice of TM. Men will
simply have to make the best of their situation and do what they can to create
a society closer than any previous one has ever been to the heavenly goal of
evolution.
The fact that this society will eventually
be bettered, come the post-Human Millennium, is no argument against its
short-term existence, since evolution proceeds by degrees towards a long-term
goal and cannot proceed straight from the Christian or petty-bourgeois (yoga)
civilizations to the Millennium in question, jumping over the need for and
justification of a transcendental civilization.
Neither can it jump over the post-Human Millennium or, rather, act,
through men, as though the millennial Beyond were unnecessary because some
people wrongly assume that Heaven can be attained to, in the pure spirit of
transcendence, from human effort alone!
Unfortunately that is far from being the case, and the Christian West is
not alone is assuming the contrary!
Given its traditional disregard for technology, the non-Christian East
is even more exposed to this fallacy, with consequences all-too-painfully
familiar to warrant further mention here.
For unless men are eventually superseded by Supermen (brain collectivizations), and they in turn by Superbeings
(new-brain collectivizations), there will be no
eventual attainment of spirit to the heavenly Beyond, in the absolute purity of
total transcendence. Neither the West
nor the East has realized this fact, but the world will have to realize it in
the future, as it adopts my truth as a means to Heaven, that is to say, to the
ultimate truth ... of pure spirit.
Clearly this truth has nothing to do with
academic philosophy, with a critique of apparent phenomena,
whether natural or artificial or somewhere in-between, but corresponds to the
furthest development of the pseudo-philosophical, the most metaphysical of writings,
suggestive of prose poetry, to have yet arisen.
Not the climax to a petty-bourgeois tradition, but the inception of
proletarian absolutism on terms which transcend the relative. This absolutism I distinguish from the
relative as philosophical theosophy - the root universal guide for the pioneers
of the final human civilization, global and transcendent, to follow. May they learn from me well; for theirs is
the road of pure essence, the culmination of all spiritual striving!
THE ULTIMATE MUSIC
Bourgeois
music is a music the melodic integrity of which is usually balanced between
rhythm and pitch. Either side of this
music, in class-evolutionary terms, is music that is of a melodic integrity
either predominantly given to rhythm, as in the case of the grand bourgeoisie,
or predominantly given to pitch, as in the case of the petty bourgeoisie, both
of which classes are themselves divisible into an earlier and a later stage,
the musical constitution of which will be either more or less extreme but never,
or rarely, totally extreme. By which I
mean absolutist, and therefore given to the production of either pure rhythm or
pure pitch. These extreme stages
correspond, by contrast, to aristocratic (pagan) and proletarian
(transcendental) absolutes - pre-atomic and post-atomic integrities either side
of a bourgeois (Christian) atomicity.
Consequently they are not, as a rule, to be encountered within the
confines of relativistic civilization!
The rhythmic purism preceded it and the atonal purism will succeed
it. The earlier stage of grand-bourgeois
music stems from the former in its predominantly rhythmic content; the later
stage of petty-bourgeois music aspires towards the latter in a predominantly
atonal context; though such music, whether as modern jazz or avant-garde
classical, is rarely atonal in the strictly post-rhythmic sense. There accrues to it at least a vestige of
rhythm in either melody or percussion, the latter particularly prominent in
modern jazz which, owing to its negroid roots, is
more susceptible to percussively rhythmic indulgence than most forms of contemporary classical.
Taking the evolution of music as a whole,
we can contend that its progression is from evil to good via an evil/good
compromise. There is nothing lower or
morally worse, in musical terms, than pure rhythm, while, conversely, there is
nothing higher or morally better than pure pitch. The one stems from the diabolic absolutism
... of proton-proton reactions, the other aspires towards the divine absolutism
... of electron-electron attractions. In
between, one finds the atomic compromise of melody, as pertaining to all stages
of relativistic civilization. Melody is
to music what Christ is to religion - the humanistic,
'intellectual' compromise coming in-between the alpha/omega extremes. Thus pure rhythm stands to music as God the
Father to religion, viz. the alpha soulful extreme, while pure pitch stands to
music as the Holy Ghost to religion, viz. the omega spiritual extreme. Being relative, Christian civilization is
content with a melodic compromise equivalent to Christ, either literally, as
balanced between rhythm and pitch, or biased towards one or other of the two
extremes, depending, to a significant extent, on the epoch in question. It has no desire to embrace a post-atomic
absolutism. That must be left to a
transcendental civilization, in which free-electron criteria will prevail.
Thus notes are to music what electrons are
to atoms - the spiritual, positive, expansive ingredient, and we may define
them as electron equivalents. By
contrast, rhythm may be defined as the proton equivalent - the soulful,
negative, contractive side of the atom, and in the musical equivalent of an
atomic integrity notes will be bound to rhythm in melody, either with or
without a percussive accompaniment. Jazz
and classical are alike subject to percussive accompaniment, which stands to
melody as God the Father to Christ.
Usually, as noted above, there is more percussion in jazz than in
classical, but quite often the treatment of percussion in the latter,
particularly in the orchestral guise of symphonies, is more violent than in the
former, if, as a mitigating factor, its use is rather more intermittent than
continuous.
Yet if classical is, on the whole, nobler
than jazz in respect of a less frequent recourse to percussion, it isn't, as a
rule, quite so transcendental as regards instrumentation and pitch, since not
only tied to acoustic means but, through scores and conductors, to tonal or
quasi-atonal notation as well. Indeed, the
term 'quasi-atonal' aptly serves as a definition of higher petty-bourgeois
music, whether in jazz or classical, since complete atonality, though possible,
would transcend relativity and thus render all forms of rhythmic accompaniment,
whether percussive (overt) or notational (covert), taboo - a situation hardly
compatible with a petty-bourgeois civilization, in which criteria of musical
excellence and moral acceptability are ever relative! Besides, no less than contemporary classical,
jazz has its own safeguards or inhibitions against genuine atonality built-in
to the instrumental integrity of the music, whereby the persistence of a
percussive root makes the pursuit of atonality all but impossible. A violin or a guitar that seems to be free on
an atonal flight one moment ... will be brought back into line, as it were,
with a concession to rhythm or melody the next.
This is a fair definition of the quasi-atonal. And yet, morally considered, it signifies a
distinct improvement on persistent melody, such as can be found in trad jazz and in most types of bourgeois and early
petty-bourgeois classical. The electron
equivalent is therein straining at the leash, so to speak, of proton
constraint, which can only auger well for the future freeing of pitch from all
forms of rhythm. Only when pitch is
completely free to exist on its own spiritual terms ... will music attain to a
climax, becoming, in consequence, purely transcendent. Such a climax, it need scarcely be
emphasized, cannot be achieved or furthered by the adherents of relativistic
civilization. It will fall to those
nations/musicians specifically concerned with the development of an absolutist
civilization.
Which instrument or instruments, you may
well wonder, would be most appropriate for a truly atonal music? Certainly none of the traditional acoustic
ones, whether predominantly made of wood or of brass. Not, either, such typically petty-bourgeois
or, rather, bourgeois/proletarian instruments as electric guitars, bases,
pianos, organs, and the like. Although
signifying an evolutionary improvement upon their acoustic counterparts, these
instruments require a degree of manual manipulation incompatible,
it seems to me, with the transcendental criteria of an absolutist
civilization. The playing of an electric
guitar, for example, presupposes a compromise between rhythm and pitch, the
fingers of one hand being concerned with notes, either separately or
collectively, and those, or one or more, of the other hand having to sustain
the notes through a variety of rhythmical procedures either independent of or,
if more civilized, dependent on a plectrum.
Clearly, such musical relativity would be
incompatible with an absolutist civilization!
The electric guitar is nothing if not a quintessentially bourgeois/proletarian
instrument. For
though, as an electric instrument, it signifies an expansion of the spiritual,
its technical manipulation presupposes a degree of respect for the rhythmical. This, however, isn't the case or, at any
rate, needn't be so where synthesizers are concerned, which can be programmed
to realize a variety of atonal sequences independently of manual control, being
susceptible, in any case, to the minimum of manual effort. I would be extremely surprised if such highly
synthetic instruments didn't play a leading role in realizing the music of
tomorrow, a music programmed in advance and conveyed by remote control, thereby
relieving composers of the obligation to perform their own music in public, an
obligation which, though concerned with the cultivation of being, entails a
degree of doing. A civilization with an
emphasis on transcendent being couldn't countenance very much mundane doing!
And yet, the performance of a particular work by the composer himself, either alone or in conjunction with other musicians, is preferable, from an evolutionary standpoint, to the performance by a number of musicians of someone else's work, and we may note here an important distinction between modern jazz and its classical counterpart, the latter of which entails, more