White Boy

I remember listening to this song in 1973 or so, with very little idea of what Paul Kantner was talking about, except knowing that in some sense, he was talking about me.  The times were probably the peak of White Guilt, or at least the last time at which it was so subconsciously induced.  Fresh out of the Civil Rights, Women's, Hippie and every other kind of movement of the '60's precursed by the Beats in the 50's, flaming Liberalism and straight-out Revolution had seized the druggy minds of most of those who'd made it to the 70's.  It's not my briefer intent here to rehash that time.  But I remember listening to this seeming out-of-place song on Baron Von Tollboth and the Chrome Nun and thinking... what..??

Almost forty years later, I'm sitting here reading a great 1921 bio of Lokamanya Tilak, Indian nationalist of the era before Gandhi and author of The Arctic Origin in the Vedas.   If you're not familiar with the Polar mythos of Arktos, this book is not a bad intro and not nearly as lurid as its title and cover.  Whether it's Tilak or the more multicultural (though vastly more suspect for other reasons) Theosophical speculations (or revelations, depending on whom you believe) of Madame Blavatsky, the origin of the Aryan race in the former (before the last shift) North Pole is a very popular theme in some very non-popular circles.  I really don't want to rehash it all for you here, though I am definitely encouraging you to check out the subject if your intuition inclines you to such things.

Another topic NOT subject to total re-hash at this point is the whole idea of races of man.  If you're one of those rapid multiculturalists who wants to deny even that such things exist... well, why are you reading me in the first place?  Because it doesn't take a doggie supremacist to admit that Irish Wolfhounds and Poodles are different breeds.  I would, however, recommend the excellent discussion in what I find the most interesting chapter of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which is I think the most readable, fascinating and valid exposition of the modern concept of man's history that I've encountered.  Though I don't buy the Out of Africa theory - I tend to think that "mankind" originated as multiple species in multiple places that "somehow" bred together - and Diamond's presentation presents merely the evolutionary history of man, in other words, his ascending history - as opposed to his descending history as taught to us by Tradition and the Vedas - it is still more than worth a read, especially for his chapter on Africa, the history of which is more complex than I'd imagined.  Did you know that there are currently five distinct races of mankind, two of them found almost uniquely in Africa?  Did you know that there are six distinct families of Semitic languages, and only Hebrew is not found exclusively - guess where? Hmmmn....

Anyway.  What I found as my true awakening into manhood, around 2004 (chronicled in more detail here, and in other articles on that blog site) was when I discovered that in between Eternity - the undivided One - and the purely Now, the world of transitional and impermanent forms - is a whole lot of interesting stuff.  As a matter of fact I seem to have devoted my life to swimming in those interstices as much as possible, and am getting a lot of satisfaction out of doing it.  It led to my abandonment of institutional, American Zen - which I had discovered has all the authenticity of a Renaissance Fair, and at any rate pretends to an understanding of, and background in, a culture of which I think I can safely say that very few modern Americans, and almost zero of those who come to it through the New Age quest for "self" (which is based on Westernized individualism in the first place), understand.  I discovered through my own meditations that I am in fact part of larger entities on many levels, not just "the One", or the "nothing" which might better be labelled a goal of Zennies (though they deny having goals, in some facile wordplay that makes them unchallengeable in their own delusions).  And yes, I come from a family, and a clan, and a tribe (although those are lost, dissolved) and a Race.  I am of primarily German and Scotch-Irish descent, as best I can tell.

The denigration of the Indo-European - dare we say, Aryan? - peoples has been in full swing since at least the end of World War II, and is probably nowhere more rampart than the deteriorated societies of Europe.  I needn't argue the ridiculousness of this, except to cite that as always, the winner of the wars write the histories.  The most obvious fallacy of this derision that began in the late-fifties was the concept that somehow racial pride was a good thing for Blacks, for Indians, for everyone except Whites, who were supposed to feel guilty. It led to a lot of social problems and contributed to the rise of the Welfare state in American (already underway since the '30's) and is currently just one more factor in the imminent total collapse of Western civilization.  But enough for all that, for now...

It is indeed a historical mystery, the origin of the White race.  "Did you come from the Earth? Did you come from the Sky?"

Vishnu at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts

by Kalki Weisthor

The legacy of the Frist family is a dark one, and not in a good way.  Their legacy, as received by America in its current state of final decline, consists largely of the Hospital Corporation of America, and Bill Frist.  HCA, the corporate medical megalith pleaded guilty in 2003 to fourteen felonies and admitted systematically overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable, by striking illegal deals with home care agencies, and by filing false data about use of hospital space.  It paid two billion dollars in fraud settlements in 2000 to 2002, which the U.S. Department of Justice boasts as the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history.  Bill Frist, one of two sons of the HCA founder, was George Bush’s Majority Leader from 2003 til 2007.   Need I say more?

In some semblance of giving back for sucking the blood of the country, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts was founded at the end of the American Century in downtown Nashville, blocks from to Union Station, a tomb of the railroad history which flourished there during that same century.  Nashville is usually seen as the buckle of the Bible Belt; when I left the museum after my first visit to the exhibit Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior, which appeared at the Frist from February 20 through May 29, 2011, the crowds of slack-jawed geeks I had to dodge as they wandered through traffic like giggling zombies, were on their way to see Joel Osteen, the curse of Sunday morning TV, at the Bridgestone Arena, the home of the Nashville Predators, which seats over seventeen thousand Last Men.  I’d just spent a relatively quiet couple of hours with the images of Vishnu and his avatars, however, searching for the shadow of Tradition, and I had been rewarded. 

The exhibit itself, if poorly titled and often poorly lit, was both well designed for its audience and ultimately rewarding to someone like myself, a more than casual viewer.  Since the exhibit is reported headed to the Brooklyn Museum for the fall and summer, I will speak of its continued existence, and encourage you to attend, if possible.  According to its catalog it consists of “more than 170 paintings, sculptures and ritual objects, dating from the Fourth through the Twentieth Centuries”.  Not surprisingly, its oldest objects are stone and rather worn, the oldest being sandstone! while the most distinct objects tend to be bronze; the paintings are of course more recent. 

The exhibit is of course a reflection of Indian history, so interwoven with its philosophies and religions, as seen through modern Hinduism, and that image reflected again through the deluded historical sensibilities of modern man, with his unconscious but dominant belief in the Myth of Progress.  The “educated” Tennessean beholds the glory of Rama from the Age of Heroes through the veil of the Enlightenment, thinking that his understanding has moved beyond that of the statue’s unknown sculptor, not realizing that he is but a depraved and decadent descendant.  This is in spite of the fact that the exhibit informs him in large bold type, as the Rig Veda teaches, that he lives in the Kali Yuga, the last of the descending ages in the world cycle, which began somewhere between 3,000 and 600 B.C. (depending on your source and reckoning), in which Man is but a shadow of what he once was, the last bitter whisper of the Being which Became him many ages ago. 

I go to such an exhibit with the knowledge of my limitations, my inadequacies and my shortened grasp, in hand.  Most of the world’s great traditions teach of the world cycles.  In the Vedic tradition and its heirs including Buddhism, these are known as kalpas.  All of these traditions teach us that the age in which we live is the last and the most decadent, in which the higher truth that clearly shines in the earliest times, and is mirrored in the second as memory and Being fades.  In the third age, the heroes attempt to arise amidst the coming sleep brought foreshadowed by the second, but they ultimately fail, and we enter the last, the true Dark Age, which is ended only by destruction, and the cycle begins again.

The Vishnu exhibit centers upon images of the Hindu god probably most acceptable to the victims of Modernism, Humanism and watered Christianity who are its most likely and common viewers.  Of course there are hundreds, thousands, or millions of Hindu gods, depending on where the distinctions are drawn, but modern Hindus are usually devotees of Vishnu, Siva, or Kali (Devi).  From another angle, we can look at Brahma, the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Siva the destroyer.  Analogies to the Fates or the Norns hold, but just so far.  Suffice it to say that the sad title of the exhibit refers to the fact that Krishna, in mainstream Hinduism an avatar of Vishnu (though the Krishna cult sees it the other way around) is sort of the Hindu Jesus, although he probably wouldn’t’ be too acceptable at the Osteen rally down the street because of his relentless promiscuity with the milkmaids (gopis).  Nor would the sect of male followers who dress themselves as milkmaids hoping for Krishna’s attentions be cherished among most Baptists; but I digress.

Vishnu was only a minor character in the Vedas, the sacred texts of the Aryans who rolled into India on a wave of conquest between 2000 and 1000 B.C.  The Vaishnavites teach that it was Vishnu from whose belly Brahma arose to create the world, and who retrieved the Vedas from the ocean of chaos at the end of the previous world cycle, preserving the teachings for our own ages.  But the Aryans, the descendants of the Golden Age, whose teachings even in their decline spawned many of the Western world’s most virile belief systems, including those of the Iranian precursors of Zoroaster and the Wotanists, were warriors, as were their gods. They brought their Indra, royal god of thunder, in chariots of war into the valley of the Indus River where they encountered a curious people known as the Dravidians.  And from the marriage of these was born modern Hinduism.

Authorities differ on the influences of the Dravidians, who were all accounts a smallish, dark people, on and within modern Hinduism.  My Indologist professor followed the interpretation of Heinrich Zimmer, a teacher of Joseph Campbell, insofar as the Dravidian culture was seen as the source of the more esoteric, meditative aspects of Hinduism.  Zimmer maintained that Yoga and its philosophical aspect Sankhya, as well as Jainism and even Buddhism were re-emergences of the forest-dwelling, introverted religion of the Dravidians, which was absorbed into and eventually emerged dominant within the warrior religion with which the Aryans baptized India in fire.  Traditionalists like Baron Julius Evola disagree, and maintain that Buddhism and Yoga - the most successful of the non-Vedic Indian teachings – are instead the renaissance of the original Traditional understanding of the Aryans, after a period of descent and decay.  We may never know; the Dravidians left no writings, and we have only the documents in Sanskrit and Pali left by the conquerors and their heirs.

Evola’s view of tradition states that the original, highest teachings which came to man were the products of a golden age, the age of solar powers, and the man of the age, should we call him such, was a transcendent being.  The following age, the silver, was a slight decay into a more passive, feminine element.  The third age was the age of heroes, in which man tried to regain the glory of the first, to overcome the sloth induced by the second, but could not, due to his degeneration during that long era.  The fourth age is the age of decline and end; the twilight of man.  It is from this diminished perspective that we gaze with dimmed vision at the glory of the earliest times, but we cannot see.  We can see only its reflections in the remnants of an age that was itself diminished.  It was the intuitive call of this vision that drew me to the exhibition of Vishnu.

In passing I should note that the above disagreement is interesting, but not, to me, critical. If the theory of diminishing ages is correct, why can the Dravidians themselves not have been the descendants of their own golden age, or of the same originators, taken another route?  Evola sees the Dravidians as just another autochthonous people, worshipping nature or its manifestations; in fact, archeological finds in the region north of the Indus indicates that the Dravidians may have had their own previous solar religion, decayed further and faster than that of the Aryans. So perhaps their higher culture was older and more pristine in its origin than the Aryan one, or one that took a faster route to decay.  How can we know? We know only what we intuit when we heed the call to the higher within ourselves that the remnant images can help to draw forth.

The exhibit is a two-dimensional representation of the multi-dimensional truth of the teachings that produced it over a course of nearly two thousand years, and the truths of the teaching that may extend for millennia before.  Perhaps the clearest example of this is the clearly depicted series of avatars, or incarnations, of Vishnu (read: the godhead) over the course of this world cycle.  The understanding behind this is that Vishu the preserver periodically appears to maintain the world cycle on course, as it were – occasionally in his true form (as in the most frightening and memorable scene it the Bhagavad Gita, as the Vishvarupa.), but most often as an Avatar. Strangely, for a system that was firmly in place in most of its elements by about the Fourth Century B.C., the earliest avatars recapitulate the phylogeny of evolutionary theory – an apparent challenge to the opposing theory of historical devolution, which I have yet to see addressed by the Traditionalists.

At any rate, Vishnu appears first as a fish, Matsya, who retrieves the Vedas from the bottom of the ocean at the beginning of the world cycle and saves Manu (man) from the “Flood” (really more analogous to Ginnungagap), so that he can continue from the last cycle to this one (another interesting survival is the sage Markandeya).  The second avatar is Kurma, a tortoise who holds the world on this back.  The second is Varaha, the boar whose rescues the earth from the primordial ocean (a better Flood analogy, I think).  From there we move on through a man/lion to a dwarf, then to a vengeful Brahman (see below), to Rama, the King and hero of the Ramayana, then on thru Krishna, the Buddha, and then Kalki.

The latter incarnations especially deserve explorations in our latter days.  Somewhere around the appearance of Parashurama, we begin to entertain the faintest images of recorded history, and begin to see the impact of man’s recording thereof.  Parashurama is, as seen from the viewpoint of modern Hinduism, a vengeful Brahmin who comes to put the ascendant Kshatriya, or warrior class, back in its place.  Herein, we see how history is written by the victors, vis-à-vis the caste system.  To wit:

The caste systems in its less degenerate forms has four main division of labor, analogous to Georges Dumezil's three functions of society.  The top class consists of the Brahmins or Priests.  Second come the Kshatriyas or warriors.  Third is the Vaishvas or merchants.  Fourth is the Sudras, or laborers.  Below this we find the castless.  The ordering of these four above is that of modern Hinduism. Its aspect that is important to us with regard to this avatar is the conflict between the top two classes.  Dumezil’s classification says that the top two classes are in fact a double aspect of the priest/king, such aspects being equal but usually split within a society.  A major split between the two ‘modern’ schools of Radical Traditionalists, those of Evola and of Rene Guenon, results from this issue: Guenon maintaining the rightful primacy of the priest class, which would accord with and put Guenon in agreement with the mission of Parashurama.  Evola hold that the Golden age was that of the unified entity of the Priest/King, the divine ruler, and that the usurpation of supreme power by the priesthood was the degeneracy of the Silver Age.  Apparently the Silver Age has occurred and the Priests won; hence our Avatar.

So with Parashurama we enter Evola’s Silver Age, which is in other dimensions scene as the Atlantean (as opposed to the Hyperboreanism of the Gold).  Many, many years later we encounter Rama, the prototype of the modern prince or hero, and namesake of the Ramayana, one of the two major epics of Hindu tradition, set down a few hundred years after Homer and roughly contemporaneous with the traditional form of the Old Testament of the Hebrews.  At this point we have clearly entered the age of heroes.   At the same time, or a bit later, we get the written incarnation of the Mahabharata, the other main epic, which ultimately included the Bhagavad Gita, probably the best-known holy writing of the Hindus, which predominantly features Krishna and enters into the age of devotion, or Bhakti.

Bhakti can be beautiful, and may be in its highest form the only beauty available to modern man – the worship of the other in the highest form he can conceive it. Bhakti as seen in the Gita and in the remains of the Heroic tradition, is the playing of ones role, the enactment of ones dharma, to the hilt, without attachment to consequences or results.  It is the aspect of Zen that is trashily and modernistically interpreted as mindfulness.   It has its Apollonian aspect, and its Dionysian.  But the most serious advocates of Dionysus, who miss the transcendence of the Apollonian – who fail like Nietzsche to perceive the transcendent, and who abandon the transcendent for the Superman – fall ultimately into their own animal nature, of which the Superman is but the biggest and strongest aspect.

Zimmer indicates that the proper practice of modern man in this Final Age of Iron is Tantra.  Tantra is more evident in the devotees of Shiva than those of Vishnu, and in certain forms of Mahayana Buddhism, most notably the Tibetan.  It is akin to magic.  But even this, involving action as it does, still involves an effort, a striving for a higher consciousness.  Once that is abandoned, once man is devolved to far, there is nothing left but the empty form of worship of modern man, which is modernism.

Modernism is the spiritual practice of modern man, a creature so depraved that he can no longer emulate the gods or aspire or ascend to godhood, but can only slavishly worship them, in the hope that they – the divine external – can lift him up, improve his essence and status, so that perhaps in the next life he can aspire to better prospects – perhaps to an incarnation in the world of gods (which are still far below the ultimate reality). Modernism is the religion of slaves.  It is the practice of the modern mainstream Hindu, of most and all modern Christians, and its most materialistic, debased form, of the religions of Humanism and the Myth of Progress, with its fading sects of Capitalism and Communism. Modernism is the devoted self-abnegating nihilism that currently manifests as multiculturism and totalitarianism, as humanity slides into the scum at the bottom of the barrel, at the end of the current age.  It is the mindset of the followers of Joel Osteen.

Such is the end state of current religiosity.  But there are two more avatars of Vishnu: Buddha, and Kalki.  The appearance of Buddha in this pantheon is problematic and interesting.  The historical Buddha was one of six non-Vedic teachers who arose around 600 B.C., in response to a decline of the Vedic teachings.  The initial teaching of the Buddha opposed that of the prevalent Bhakti, and asserted that man could still transcend the bonds of karma and the illusion of Maya.  The earliest Buddhist scriptures tell the story of an Aryan prince who, tired of the world’s luxuries and informed of its inevitable woes, intuitively sensed that his possibility was more and higher, and embarked on a quest to realize a higher meaning.  After trying the teachings available at the time and finding no satisfaction in them, he sat in quiet contemplation for a number of days (or weeks) until at last he transcended the bounds of his personal consciousness and reached enlightenment. 

Those same sutras tell us that upon reaching enlightenment, Buddha realized that what he had found could not be taught, and resolved to make no error to do.  At this point, however, Brahma, chief of the gods, appeared to him and convinced him that there were others, maybe a few, who could benefit and be inspired by his teaching.  Thus the first sangha began, and Buddhism began to spread, assuming many forms over 2600 years and perhaps experiencing its last gasp of vitality in America today.  Of course Buddha’s teaching has devolved, too; from its original manifestation as the way which was by definition unteachable, it was corrupted through the monkism of Hinayana, the missionary proselytism of Mayahana and the magical rituals of the Vajrayana (Buddhist Tantrism) until it became just another religion, devolved at its worst into a religion of Humanism and ‘Psychology’.  A few years ago at a Zen center in Atlanta I saw for sale a t-shirt that read “Zen is for Everyone’ and began to realize that I was in the wrong place to look for eternity.

The Buddha is the strangest of Hindu avatars; he occupies a place in the family of Vishnu similar to that of Jesus among the Muslims.  That is, he is venerated, but not much.  Hinduism teaches that Buddha came to spread false teaching! And by doing so, to draw off the fools, so that the correct worship may proceed without them.  He, along with Parashurama, is the least depicted of the Avatars.  When he is depicted, he is depicted as sitting quietly (as befits a Buddha) as opposed to most of the others, who are depicted in action.

The final Avatar of Vishnu is not yet come, and he is the Avatar whom we await in our day.  Kalki comes with a sword, rides a white horse, and comes to end the modern age in blood.  He comes to abolish the degraded age, and to return its essence to the cosmic soup, so that it may began again its rise into the next world cycle.  Such a dynamic figure of destruction is curiously absent from our modern awareness, despite the growing majority of those who see that the world as it is cannot hold, and will not endure.  Gore Vidal wrote a pretty good novel about him, but in our culture he is usually overshadowed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or some other borrowed myth.  He is the instigator of Ragnarok, in a sense.  We await his cleansing fire.

I have been to see the exhibit entitled Vishnu: Hindu’s Blue-Skinned Savior twice.  The first time I was rushed through and I went back on a Sunday afternoon to bask in the timelessness of the powerful images from another existence.  The strongest of the images, the casts of the warrior avatars in stone and in bronze, and the beautiful later paintings embellished with gold and silver, held me for that space and spoke to me from out of time.  The final rooms of the exhibit brought me back to modernity.  We see how the images of Vishnu have survived into and been used by the modern world (the adoption of Hanuman, the monkey god, in the revolution against the British).  We are presented with a Hindu shrine, a model of the manner in which the modern Hindu in his home, no longer aspiring to godhood in his own life, propitiates the higher essences in the hope that he may be ennobled in some future time (which, being in time, will not come).

The music at the exhibit plays softly in the background.  Occasionally I recognize the beauty of some Ravi Shankar piece that I have in my own collection.  During my first visit, the visitor was rudely interrupted by the incongruous blaring of electrified guitar and folkish warbling from the lobby, and I remembered where and who I was, in my little manifestation, down the street from where the mindless hordes of Osteen were congregating.  I was OK though.  The images of Higher Tradition had already spoken to me, through the veil of manifestation and modernity, and for a time I could remember Myself, and reside At Home.

The Inner Life of a Gnome

by Carnuntum

I am an optician. It’s a profession not a definition. Like many in the world today, I spend a large part of the waking day working to keep body and soul together. My designated area of toil is a section of a large warehouse. Yes, I said warehouse. In the new meta-life created from blueprints provided by the Electric Jew an optical establishment is both demanded and provided by the faceless global corporations who shoulder one another aside like myopic titans in their supreme effort to blot out the sun. Here, in the dank confines of the workaday world, hubris has given way to the blunt edge of spiritual dissonance.

The Fool

At least hubris had a goal.

The area in which I dwell during the infamous ‘hours of operation’, is a guttering lamp of competence and professionalism in an inky blackness of mediocrity. The Doctor and I will hold the conch for only a short while before the heart of darkness devours us. The cannibals are canny and, having no other sustenance, will consume anything that presumes to rise above a level consonant with that of flat earth.

During the day we are provided with two state-mandated breaks and a lunch. These must be taken at specified times since a less organic drudge, the computer system, has been set to lock out anyone who fails to obey. This step was taken because the global corporation in question abused its slaves in the past. They do not wish to anger the parent corporation, commonly known as The Government, and so make an effort to comply. The Beneficent Overseer known as 'Uncle Sam' decrees that bricks may be made without straw so long as the shape and size are determined to be fair, regular, and equitable.

The Corporation nods. Their Ronald McDonald smile outshines the sun.

During the working day- a time I call ‘the dead zone’, a panoply of figures dance before my eyes. Mexicans, Africans, Pakis, Hindus and Asians bully and bargain their way through the stone walls of our mutual cultural prison in varying shades of brown and yellow. The Mexicans wear t-shirts with American flags to show careful loyalty to their new country. They are sure their illegal status will not make them taboo to the God of commerce who rules their somnambulant host. The Paki’s and Hindu’s, slightly more worldly, seek only the passion of the bazaar and the thrill of bargaining. They care not who they step upon in their desire to win at the game of material steeplchase-those races for whom race itself is the saddle of victory .

We have taught them well, our new Global Citizens.

As I use my training and experience to help our newfound friends I am informed, by loudspeakers nested in the girders above, that they are the essence of diversity. Burdened by Kipling’s flawed soul I fail to be moved by the trumpets of Jericho echoing above. The walls of my soul are still, sadly, intact. Yes, my friends, it is possible that I am so spiritually afflicted that I do not recognize that true diversity is found in cultures which project only slightly varying shades of color, both skin, hair, and eye, whose cultural attributes do not exert a magnetic attraction even among their own, and who approach me wearing mass produced ads which contain more variety, both of colour and original thinking, than do the wearers. For modern Americans the t-shirt is the new symbol of the soul, our Lascaux. Lacking even the rudiments of Universal Love when regarding the horde of cultural ambassadors arrayed before me I do not see the colorful costumes which would describe their unique spiritual essence. Instead, they appear in a variety of modernized garb confiscated from the society they have invaded so successfully. Mammon and Mad Max- they dance like Fred and Ginger over the corpse of our European identity.

“Habla Espanol? Do you take Medicaid?” The cry comes frequently and with pathos. They will spend over a hundred ‘gringo dolla’s’ to buy their colored contact lenses. Green-eyes Senorita? Spain was never your home…

The loudspeaker intrudes on our one-sided dialog,” Diversity is our greatest asset. America is built on diversity.”

I think of my friends and family, Southerners, with hair the color of sun and of heather, with eyes of blue, green, brown, and with the language of Shakespeare flowing from their lips. This could not be true diversity, I am informed.

” Diversity is our greatest asset in America.” The speaker attempts to penetrate my inner soul as I ponder my own inability to understand the subtle distinctions. Remedial diversity classes, offered by the ‘corporation,’ may help me to understand my biological defect.

The immigrant before me becomes more insistent. With the patience of Stonehenge I explain that, ’one must have a prescription,’ in order to make glasses, and that , ’ No , I cannot sell you glasses for your mother in Madras without a prescription.’ They attempt to bargain me down, sure even first-world standards must give way before the Greenspan's Titan. I repeat my mantra of order like prayers at the Alamo. This tiny bridge to the stars will fall hard.

The Lunchman Cometh.

The computer obfuscates my attempts to function. I must eat now or forever hold my peace.

Lunches are taken as far away as possible from the warehouse. A variety of multi-cultural establishments are at my disposal. Mexican, Asian and generic fast food buildings cry out at the noontime hour in shades of brown and green, the proud new flag of our nation. Many of the immigrants who own these eateries come to the cantonment where I work to receive their eyewear. With futility, I describe the limits of science with regard to optical possibilities. Had I known that the feild of optics was an esoteric gnosis I could have requested a more grandiose title than that of 'optician'.

The computer Overseer speaks, stopping my work for now, and I wend my way to the break- room. Known as ‘the dump’ by the denizens of the New World Order, it is dirty and unsanitary, nevertheless, is it diverse. Several languages echo from its concrete walls, a crossroad of confusion rather than a metropolis of understanding. The peeling paint and unsanitary conditions are predicated more on the condition of the denizens than upon any specific circumstance. When you live someplace, you care. When you merely inhabit something, the soul of a gypsy rides upon your shoulder. It is in this nurturing environment that I attempt to read my book, an escape from the inverted society around me.

I settle down in the cafeteria to nurture the mind, if not the body:

Page 19, On Being Pagan, by Alain DeBenoist:

‘That affiliation established, there is generally serious underestimation of the differences that exist between Judaism and Christianity. In practice this often leads to the attribution to paganism of features that supposedly radically distinguish it only from Judaism or- as is much more often the case-’

(Yo, d’you see dat game?)

‘-It has often been maintained, for example, that Greek thought was dynamic, concrete, and synthesizing in opposition to an essentially static-’

(I saw dat. I done fell asleep wit dat game.)

‘-In fact it was certainly the opposite, as shown by James Barr, who correctly opposes “ the Greek type of thought, analytical, creator of distinctions and pieces, and the synthetic Hebrew type of thought.” Furthermore-’

(yo man don’ hab no right)-shrill

(I know he don’)

‘-Furthermore, Semitic languages spontaneously lead to synthesizing and the concrete; partially lacking in syntax-’

(various Sinitic gabble-they are not discussing Taoist philosophy)

Night begins to fall. Back in our den the Doctor and I huddle around the computer, spreading our palms for warmth. Was it like this at Rorkes Drift? As the shadows climb the walls we hear them coming. The Doctor attempts a false bravado, telling me of his youth in Spain. I give him bonhomie in return but fail to ease his mind. Soon, others will control the Conch. Soon, others will practice our professions but with different worldviews and standards that the inheritors of the Acropolis will not find measured among their Gods. We who created and propagated this particular science and the very word ‘profession’ will be no more.

What will come after?

The loudspeaker blares once again. “Thank you for shopping at the Worlds Largest Retailer. Remember, Diversity is one of our greatest strengths…”

'This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper'

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Original story by Carnuntum posted on May 3, 2006.  Used by permission.