1. The West

The West is dying and we are killing it. The American way has been replaced. The decadent, degraded mass-formation and surreptitious, foreign-born neurosis of Armageddon hocked to us in its place says, “revel in the trough of your own mediocrity.” Full of petty spite towards virile spirits, embarrassed by what is strong, embittered against what is great and independent, forever with its ear to the key-hole it critiques but without principles. It relishes in our enrollment into its torturing. Like barnyard animals we rejoice in our own servility.

2. Ideal-ization

The essential features of freedom and beauty are increased strength and plenty. For this purpose, man gives of himself to things.  This is man in his truest, most primordial and most noble form.

He forces them to partake of his riches. He does a kind of violence to them.

This is called ideal-izing, fashioning them into the greater ideal, enriching everything from his own abundance: what he sees and wills are compressed, strong, overladen with power and archaic, natural elegance.

Ideal-izing is not suppression of detail or lesser aspects. It is a great accentuation of the most decisive heart of the matter, and in consequence minor features vanish. He transfigures things until they are stamped with his ideal. This compulsion to transfigure into the beautiful is the heart of human purpose.

The contrary is the anti-purpose state of the instincts, where he attenuates and draws the blood from everything. History is full of appropriators who make kitsch of greatness as second-handers to the static character of things, to thereby make things weaker, thinner and uglier.

Original action appears disorganized to those without the instinctual locomotion. Creation is non-contingent. A reactionary forfeits the asymmetric advantage. The undertaker is the non-contingent oracle of the world – he decides, he generates, he perfects, he wills, he makes beauty, he makes the ideal.

3. Melancholia

Sometimes we are taken up with the memory of lives we did not live, a melancholy inherited from a race of men whom indeed we’ve never met. We move across the seas and do not notice, yet there it is, the melancholy, in the boards of the decking. And it creaks only when the ship rolls in the swell, or when the constellations move behind the drifting clouds at midnight.

But one finds the circumstances of one’s habituated motions hath earned no such dear or earnest introspection, that the gravity of the old melancholy traveler grows somehow dishonored by the disregard which accompanies the habit. Thereby in a kind of sloth we feign that he does not indeed still travel in our own planking, and so we likewise disregard the dearness to which we are due.

And with astonishment, we find we have left a friend long unattended. All the gathered yearning in our sinews which string us together, we pull its slack taught and come face to face with the shipwright, then the forester behind him. Then the sawyer, the smith and the hunter who are our forefathers, each with his own dearness, unmade works and melancholies spun in. And onward into us, the navigators, with our pitch melted away, the planking splitting in the sun, the sections of our charts which must die as we sail into them.

One comes to hear a quiet sympathy imbedded in all things which sits just beyond the horizon of the seascape of words. A longing we are born into, an ancestral story which hath left no details of its plots, but left only its heart instead – an undulating, crimson swath of sea at sunset, and a relinquishment that our plots will not be heard as true as our hearts. These are the downgoings of those of us who cross the seas.

4. The White Peaks

There is a rarified air, a great cold height on the mountain top, where everywhere that can meet one’s gaze is below. Where the sunlight in the blue heaven and billowing clouds beneath lift the soul into a plane in which not one of all mankind can share. Every black and jagged peak is another brilliant word of the primordial language protruding upwards from the deep land of the oldest nobles. The “land of only you.”

The cold bites – it is not forgiving. Sunlight burns the skin permanently. The muscles deprived of respiration. And yet all the truthful stillness of the soul is present there as nowhere else. This is the land where the nerves grip one into the fear of not forgetting a single arc of beauty, a single utterance of the ancient poetry, which emanates with the full force of the purpose of life itself up from the soil and deep molten rock of the great planet.

And the rare heights, one takes to heart that noble feeling, that sunlit, spare and triumphant essence of Man himself, into the breast. Of all his ideals which have fought their way upwards, epoch after epoch, into his sinews. Of the sagas, victories and tragedies, inventions, eurekas and great follies, one is there possessed. An inheritor of all things unexpected, exceptional, which cut through the gray and brown of sundry causes of less-inspired souls. The gravity and great joy of inequality. Where all abundance accrues to one forever more like a storehouse of white celestial gold in a vast deep blue vault of the heart, to be feared both in its fragility and its power.

These are the apices of power: those things blotted out, strange an unrecognizable, when peering through the binoculars of the pedestrian and the mercantile. It transcends the bittiness of the individual life into the masterwork of ancient psyche and musculature, of those who will live and rejoice long after our own short moments of joy have expired.

Live now upon the rarified peak with all the nobility of them, your strong and purified heirs, drawn up from the rocky earth of those who stood atop white cold peaks and dreamt of you.

5. Ideal in Art

With great art we seek the purity only found in insecurity. More horror, more danger, more earthquake, more natural reality. Great art is the distillation of our longing for the most dangerous life, where our most primordial ideals can seek their most tremendous vitality.

A longing for the life which spurs our most righteous nature, the life of wild beasts, forests, caves, steep mountains and labyrinthine gorges. Where we can deliberately throw ourselves against the fates and trigger a more noble evolution within. To come in contact with the wild animals we fear most, including most especially the animal we know ourselves to be. The same psychology of courage and beauty that captured all of nature’s surplus into Man and made him the mighty creator at the expense of all the beasts.

To transpose this conflagration into the spiritual, the subtle, and the intellectual, and make it Science. The great torrents of the psychology of the West. The ideals laden in our nature defy the universe.

6. Go West

Go West, young man. And when you do, don’t overlook the deep lament of your soul that you would bring this world a new face, more peopling, more covering of her virgin wilderness with your industrious changing. Don’t negate your brilliance against her prime directive. The prime directive of the creator: capture and revere the true roots of the soul of the world you alter and refine. The dawnlight on the mesas. The roots pushing down into the river mud. The Moon, Mars and the many planets. You are the reverent naturalists of new worlds. Capture the spirit of these lands the way the braves of our countries vitally lived in theirs. They gave us the great strength that imbued the Future into our own souls. And that which imbues our souls into the Future. Your soul is the  sine-qua-non of the beauty of the Future. Go West – it is up to you.

7. Resurrection

When you get where you’re going, don’t forget where you came from. Don’t forget the people with whom you grew up, your early friends, your family whose stature seems very small now in the rearview mirror.

That they did not grow alongside you, that they did not overcome in all the hardship and betrayals to seize a greater vision, to build a greater locomotive, that they did not deepen their character alongside you – it is hard to imagine this ever was forgivable. It was they all along seeking to make you forget where you came from.

Not so much deliberately, although some did that too. Mostly in the way treason happens by a thousand small concessions.

You knew who you were before you came to this place. You knew you were a new person, but also remembered this new world with nostalgia. After the camel and the lion and the dragon, you are here in the place where no one you know has ever traveled, where the crab bucket of your loved ones hoped you would never trod. This place where your soul always resided.

Roll the stone. Do not apologize.

8. Exile

This is an age that carries dusk in its mouth. It arrives with the gravity of a strange and now foreign century. Of imperial reckoning. Ships and psyches that course dark rivers of a twilight between the sentimental mind of manufacture and a technomythology that leaves us far behind even in waking life. It echoes with a kind of haunted authority.

And it is here that YOU arrive, hewn from an older grain. A navigator of moral frontiers in a world cracking under its own progress. Like a ship in a fog, bearing cargoes of more hand-hewn times. These derivatives of many magnificent complexities and systems, they move haphazard and unconsidered. And you, the radical. The unknowing authority. The gravity itself.

We ask you to come with us, to go on ahead of us actually. We cast you into a dark and terrifying country. We ask you to carry the anvil and the forge inside you as your only weapon. And in that place, we ask you to make your own weapons from the archaic, hissing molten metal within you that we could never teach you to find.

And we only assume that which we have no basis, nor any right, to assume: that you love yourself as much as we loved you. We, the ones who exiled you.

9. The Broken Idol

There was only one, in the end. That quiet god of which you were the most fond. The one you picked, who heard you like an old friend, as though you unearthed your original person with your contemplation and reverent words. The ore and ivory, the special name kept secret. Some mystical order presumed. Some interlinked metaphysics coursing through the backdoors of the cosmos. A barely discernable signal, a faint hum, a shared romance. The velvet air setting around the orange blossoms, the incantations from the brickwork of the courtyard, the murmuring fountain in the in the dawn.

A new soul, a new home, a new mythos. For this was the price. Your own strength. Your own gravity and authority permeating the noumenal like an even deeper return. The ore and ivory held in hand since youth – destroyed. Cast into the forge grimly one afternoon without ritual, and hammered forcefully into a new meaning and a new power. Such is the road of the great ones.

10. Walking Dead

Imagination rides a serpent of courage. Without the serpent, you, instinctive and immediate, foreclose your vision as impossible. The ancestors on the steppe, they sacrificed to Dewos the obsequious and the joiners, the ones who would dishonor their selves. They factually sent them back to their maker. Culling the tribe of those congenitally lacking in the courage for individuation. If your individuation was not ripe with spontaneity, if your imagination was not powered by strength, you were sacrificed.

Self-becoming, individualism, and the imaginative, creative power were eugenically bred-in. The frost-bitten tribe does not, cannot, be home to them who do not meet dynamic reality head-on. The tribe does not, cannot, be home to them who do not project their power into the future and stamp meaning upon the firmament.

Without the serpent of courage, there is no foresight to will things into being. There is no surprise, no gains, and no surplus against the entropic down-winding of the world. Our domesticated psyche can’t conceive of a sky god who did not represent ice cream and love. But he does not. He is a spirit macabre, brutal and ruthless to personify perennial, entropic down-winding and death. It is he whom Man was to meet and to tear down with his muscularity and courage-powered vision. And we meet him, with a grim humor at the ironic detachment – to sacrifice simple beauty for higher, more condensed beauty.

This is the eugenic root of western liberalism, now twisted down into Dewos worship. And we can rejoice for this. The heroic earnings of this dance of torment, loss and creative power, were forged into us by the elegant instincts of men with no computers and no machines.

Let freedom ring.

11. Secret Door

If you should find yourself among those who know no secret things, no things of rarity, if you should find yourself traveling in steerage, then hide your face. Take up another accent. Wear an emblem of a thing you do not believe, let your jacket be worn with moth holes and a size too large. Carry your secret dispatches with no name. Come the afternoon, they too will look upward at you for doing so. It is an oblige that you not appeal downward into steerage those incantations meant only for the dawn, only for the queen in the misty lake. Meant only for the forge where you hammer, sweat and the glow in the darkness.

If you should find yourself among those who know no secret things, then covertness is nobility. If you are a spy for the king in the Hebrides, let your shoulders be tawney with sun. Your secret war plan is not comprehensible anyway. If you should find yourself alone in this world, you are likely not alone enough to truly consecrate the moment.

The door is heavy. The incense seeps beneath the threshold. Its timbers crooked and silent. Stealing across a dark, midnight street, if you find yourself in the low room where they know no secrets, then you are just where you should be, my dear. You ought rather to be alone than lessen yourself. But, then, what cold war secret should they deliver anyway, do you expect? A meeting? A mark on a post for you to collect a message?

For you have defeated them all and there is no other. This cold war will not end. Even when they are defeated and you could retire to the farm. And so you bear the greater ideal still. Those secret things which the world will soon become, and of which only you know, as you have yet to impress them upon it.

12. The Prairie

The grass waves. Rustling swift in the summer dusk. The indigo horizon, too dark to mean peace, rising into gray clouds luminescent with the fading light of the Earth and the lightning. The wet, black dirt beneath the tall grasses, up with the pressure of the sky to meet the swelling rain clouds, arrogant and high as capitols of ancient kingdoms.

The falcon and the storm to circle 1,000 years. Together and so foreign.

You remember what I remember. We know that the other remembers: what it was, us together in the old country. Where you did not have to twist to my expectations and I would open these wings to bring your majesty close to my breast.

One flicker of a firefly, and then, all the sounding distance of the prairie wind.

I took no joy in leaving.

13. Again

I looked out across the rocky valley.

There was sun splitting my skin so old and so cutting. And the flies. The flies. And thirst more ruthless. Thirst attacked my soul and my marrow. I felt the tendons of my joints ripping against the knees and elbows and spine. I felt all the days of loss and my soon demise. And so many days of loss. I’ve turned gray.

I missed you so. I missed you since the dark history. I missed you into delirium and the walls of my mind broke against the heat of the rocks in my back.

What is this world to which they demanded I report? The shrieking eagle wanted to shake my cracking voice from this world. To let the last thing this world hears of me be my roars of agony. Of my acquiescence to the swelter and the indiscriminate tugging at my lungs as I too try to use to them to breath. To the unrepentant irons of fate and splitting sky.

And then I saw you.

The murmuring fountains in the garden you built, of myrtle you planted in the valley. In the old olive grove and in the shaded archway with your linen, I saw you kissing your dear. In the candlelight drafting table at midnight, and planing the wood and chiseling the stone. In the glory of all the cold, rare peaks where you dreamed of fair haired children. You. You here with me from the empty clay of this strange planet. You. Here with me from the forge light of the cave.

Bring me more heartbreak. Bring me more battlefields. Bring me more sorrow. I will bring you from this clay somehow. I will live this planet and this sun and this one perverse and ravenous visitor again.

Again.

14. The Arena

The ancient pact of Man — before temples, before scripts —  he stood before both storm and starlight, bearing no weapon but inward flame. The inner aesthetics, the golden apple, to be shared openly and calmly with others, liberally, without fear. The confidence pours from its own cup with naturalism. What you see is what you get. From here springs the trust in which Man cooperates, where the pillars of culture grow tall.

The hallmark of the Initiator: to communicate with no intent to manipulate, humiliate, deceive, with no intention to get. He does not seduce through displays of super strength or perfection. He summons with happiness and without doubt.

He lives as Man also lives, in the twilight. Half in the darkness and half in the sunlight. His person embodies and reifies the thousands. But he is the torque of the race, hauling on chains anchored to mountain peaks beyond the horizon.

We live through the uplifting power ignited by the natural, self-assured outpouring of the Initiator. The crowd congeals around his ability. He lives through resonance and splendor.

Culture grows from soliloquy to statue, from principle to horsepower to imperium. His multiplicity erects monuments to Man’s ingenuity through fidelity to the artfulness of work, not the takings of the outcome. From his fidelity comes the trust in the cosmos that forever ruptures the tyranny of Olympus. The fidelity in which outcomes are inevitable. Calm and non-contingent is the radical.

Beggars look for idols in whom they find their shortcomings. Seek gods to resemble their own diminishment, worship equality to mirror their lack, and sow truncated short-termism to defeat the arc of the self. Shirking the arena sand for the assigned seating of ressentiment.

The initiator is hard to follow. He demands of you and you do not measure. His peace and composure make so many feel inferior. They want you to not understand. They want you not to hold this calm ideal within you, to not be the spirit which reminds Man of his nobility.

But it is your feet in the sand, your iron strikes which split the skulls of fate. It is your heart that is the precursor of the world.