On the verge of history’s first wave of globalization, Victorian imperialists venturing into foreign and undiscovered countries had to maintain an ever-deeper connection to the ways of the motherland. The temptations of the opium to wash away the grueling and the dehumanizing filth, the suspicious yellow eyes of the dark islands, to sink one into a retreat of the soul. It is even more so with us. Although the ways of our “motherland” are not alike, the call to belonging, Beauty and the transcendent are more precisely critical than ever.
In that age, the globalizing enterprise was rough-hewn. The coarse hemp and groaning timbers and the martial discipline of the maritime crew were what remained of those formative ways and they were felt in the muscles of the body. Our psyches were thus contoured, as if the primitive technologies themselves curated the sensibilities of the worldview. And the tall ships and cutters giving way to the stunted cast iron and cracking of steamships, a kind of unforgiving blackness crept into the weltanschauung.
In our new epoch it is also like this. The slow analog has given way to untold layers of digital simulacra and a humanity too multitudinous to imagine. The cancerous zeitgeist of nondescription and nondifferentiation thrashes to survive and consume the host in its final hours, frantically spurting the dark ink of ressentiment to draw in those youthful cells.
There is a war for our soulfulness like in no other time, as though biotechnics and panoptic digitization have curated our worldview which seeks to wrench and marshal a pliant psyche. And so in this new epoch, we must even more earnestly preserve the unfabricated beauty we have inherited. It is the unfabricated which reminds us that our beauty and the triumph of Man are emergent from our basic building blocks which cannot be engineered or gerrymandered. Coming in contact with ancient architecture can thus also help give meaning to our lives when all about our modern and digitizing world we are losing it.
In the era of the Second Cold War, with the American Order relaxing, a fragmented world order replaces the totalizing forces enjoyed since 1945. The world of our lifetime will likely rhyme better with the ancien regime of overseas territories and great power competition. We are on the cusp of rediscovering that the world is full of very different people after all. These differences bulldozed by globalization are re-emerging. We aspire that they reemerge as sources of great richness and romanticism rather than curdled strife.
It will be an era of secrecy, of the political and of the deeply personal, of the rediscovery of the tension between the known and the foreign, where our sense of belonging is no longer dulled by grasping and deconstructionist anesthetics. Where pathos is more piqued, and where a lover once again represents an existential sacrament and an untouchable beauty.
The cabal desires to orchestrate lives for us of “organized loneliness.” The CBDC, grid-dependent electric transport, experimental gene therapies, mass formation psychosis, the digital ghettos of InQTel-funded tech corporations, all weapons in the war chest. We here refuse this.
WEF Today
Come, find communion with those you love in the heart of our murmuring courtyards and grand peak views among the tall grasses, built with one purpose: to intimately hold the sacred entwinement of spiritual and romantic love. In the eras of the formation of Man, romantic honesty was a matter of survival. Betrayals of it, most especially of our own internal poetic vision of ourselves, were forms of capital punishment. The intent of this agenda of orchestrated estrangement is no different.
Today, a dystopic fragmentation and fevered grasping of digital simulacra, a psychic aloneness, has been birthed into our world-mind. And today is the day to wage war on this derangement. To make weltanschauungskrieg, world-view warfare, against those forces of ugliness and alienation. Let Zeus and Caesar do what they will – ours is to dig into the depths of soul and rescue the flame of beauty, of ecstatic belonging, of romantic communion, and sequester it away from totalizing poachers of our transcendent nobility who attempt to recode the Beauty and poetry of our Selves. The Promethean heart of Man is the discovery of Beauty as the signaling hallmark of the truthful and transcendent reality occluded by commonly-held suppositions and the totalizing forces of the state, of primordial Zeus. This instinct of discovery and its experiential signature of Beauty and meaning is Man’s defining nature – all man hath streamed this way. These are the landmarks of the predecessors.
Join us at Shadowline in honoring your nature. Beauty is weltanschauungskrieg. It is the headwaters of civilization.
-RC
She was an Eastern ship…
Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.
One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness — and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction. And it isn’t because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation — a bit of one’s own.
One goes on recognizing the landmarks of the predecessors, excited, amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together — the kicks and the half-pence, as the saying is — the picturesque common lot that holds so many possibilities for the deserving or perhaps for the lucky. Yes. One goes on. And the time, too, goes on—till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.
This is the period of life in which such moments of which I have spoken are likely to come. What moments? Why, the moments of boredom, of weariness, of dissatisfaction. Rash moments. I mean moments when the still young are inclined to commit rash actions, such as getting married suddenly or else throwing up a job for no reason.
This is not a marriage story. It wasn’t so bad as that with me. My action, rash as it was, had more the character of divorce — almost of desertion. For no reason on which a sensible person could put a finger I threw up my job — chucked my berth — left the ship of which the worst that could be said was that she was a steamship and therefore, perhaps, not entitled to that blind loyalty which. . . . However, it’s no use trying to put a gloss on what even at the time I myself half suspected to be a caprice.
It was in an Eastern port. She was an Eastern ship, inasmuch as then she belonged to that port. She traded among dark islands on a blue reef-scarred sea, with the Red Ensign over the taffrail and at her masthead a house-flag, also red, but with a green border and with a white crescent in it. For an Arab owned her, and a Syed at that. Hence the green border on the flag. He was the head of a great House of Straits Arabs, but as loyal a subject of the complex British Empire as you could find east of the Suez Canal. World politics did not trouble him at all, but he had a great occult power amongst his own people….
The Shadow-Line
Joseph Conrad – 1915