Ghost and Princes Revised Edition 2003

A treatise on the highest and the best; no small undertaking! In fact such a magnificent project, the stars of which are so grand, so powerful, that only a wisp of blinding right may be presumed as I humbly but heroically endeavor to understand these magicians of spirit, these founts of the most radiant gist. From Manfred upon the lonely cliffs of his own terror to a serious young songstress pouring her heart out upon our blessed altars of perception, the incarnation of what is highest and best is often elusive, intangible; it is a matter that involves the most refined of sacred essences. These highest expressions of the soul vary in intensity but share the same undying commitment to the noble truths that enwound our human hearts. Like sweet indigo silks, they tighten to bleed their sweet lights upon us.

The heroic poet’s attention to the value of ideas is one of his greatest glories. Such a creator has what is almost an intuitive understanding of the creative principle in both spirit and nature. A creative spirit of this kind operates unbridled, and he remains unbroken by the world at large. A passion for life, and an unmoving will to find life in life, to glean the most radiant aspects from every experience, is central to the emotional approach of such Credent Regalists. I believe that ideas of the highest and most spiritual nature are central to each man’s life, and I believe that these ideas are often ignored or betrayed due to an imposed conformity, or because of a fear of the life-changes that are demanded of the perceiver when he truly sees that which is beautiful,—and then integrates that sense of the beautiful into his entire life.

I endeavor to forgo all of the fear in my life, to meet each radiant prospect or encounter with the same zeal that Byron had—all the time.

The gift of fury is a rare essence that the radiant soul taps and locks into. It is the will to do something, anything—as long as the action taken burns and ignites our feelings at their very core! I spurn those who float upon the easy tide, gliding through a seaweed series of half-discerned entanglements and mental conflicts,—‘conflicts’ that do not engage the real challenges involving the highest questions of life, but instead rehearse the kind of intellectual impotencies that render the reader helpless and make their author a victim of his own foul lies. A rage for experienced truth can help bring an individual to the abstract conviction that he has the ability to perceive his own feelings correctly and meaningfully. Such a rage has no patience with the easy self-deceit of cliques and fashions—all of the lies and misdirections that one comes to accept in place of original convictions.

Often it is a matter of several generations before the rare ‘rage for order’ and originality of such a creator is recognized by those creators who come after him, and then, eventually, by the public at large. Once recognized and appreciated, they stand before us as irreproachable and unassailable in their accomplishment. We can only describe them by naming them, as when some tragic hero’s name becomes an adjective that indicates the unique crux his imagined experience has illuminated for the rest of us. Why does the true poet require this multi-generational ‘judgment of his peers’ before his word is law? Because the true poet, using beauty as his talk, speaks as an individual to other individuals and—if one believes in all the fractions of the Hindic system—only some infinitesimal proportion of mankind comes in each generation to the light. I myself would throw off such systems and have each man stand independently and reign over himself as he is, and as he may come to be in all the scope of his human possibility.

Today, individuals who come to this blinding passage of perception and self-assertion are confronted by a state of almost mythic fragmentation. It seems to them that the unity of being that they feel and know subjectively, on a personal level, cannot possibly be real, or at least cannot be consciously acknowledged as real. Taking such ‘subjective’ experiences seriously would demand too many ‘impossibilities’ if it turned out that they were really true. If my subjective hopes and feeling participate in reality, then all of reality must respond to my personal experience; my tears and my laughter can potentially transform the world—how utterly important then is each grimace and grin! And so, the first experience of an individual trying to claim the Credent Regale that is humanity’s inheritance is often—almost inexorably—mixed with a kind of whipping self-torture.

Given each Regalist’s gift/curse to perceive, experience, and codify the sublime graces of the ideal into a voice unbelled from the heavens, they are unfortunately, much of the time, simply singing to the deaf. To truly hear and internalized the power of another’s felt perceptions and to acknowledge their reality demands that you acknowledge the power and effectiveness of your own felt perceptions—and begin to take self-conscious responsibility for their effects in the world. Better to shut one’s ears to symphonies than acknowledge the challenge that we must raise the baton ourselves! And so, the mass of mankind hears no good, sees no good, and speaks no good. This is the torture of the artist and it imbues not only his work but every aspect of his experience, which demands that a perfected divinity of action result from every rote motion of existence. The Credent Regalist does not accept life as it is dealt to him; he reconstructs life from the spiritual gems of his own infinite seas—his felt perceptions—and erects monuments of everliving word. This recreation of reality comes to the poet like the voice of Michael the Archangel telling the devil to go to hell, and it is his only salvation in a world where LIFE is not held sacred.

I am always held in awe by the tortured furies of such modern Regalists. The shattered essence of the artist: born in pain, and destined to die young—who understood this? Not the watery eye of a rotting Beat poet, but often those who idolized the Beats. Many modern Romantics struck their riches by folly or by trainwreck, often inspired by what they perceived as a Beat aesthetic. Richard Hell, Patti Smith, T. Verlaine, Colin Newman, Devoto, Lydon, etc, were Romantics and Credent Regalists by example and lifeforce rather than as self-conscious artists.

I am well aware of all the detailed dickering and sinisterly infinite mechanisms modern consciousness has imposed upon the anointed joy of poetry. Such attitudinal or ‘stylistic’ restrictions are helpful in a pinch, and they may keep the modern reader from wincing. But only the high and mighty ‘frank talk’ that honesty imposes will ever build a civilization out of these fragments of consciousness again. Our discussions must be severe and high and sincere—how else can we ever again hope to be these things ourselves? We must not fear this seriousness in ourselves because of some morbid or nitpicking taste; what flower ever stopped blossoming because it thought itself ‘too beautiful?’

Signed, in the commission of a defense of Poesy:

Gregg G. Brown

Daniel B. Dermond

Respectfully submitted as:

THE LORD DERMOND

GREGG GLORY

THE LORDS OF WORD

HEROIC CREATION

Heroic creation beatifies the creator because of the creator’s knowledge that, while his creation is eternal, he must die. (This is also why any eternal Creator’s worlds are a botch.) And yet he creates eternal things—not out of the possibility that he might enjoy them (as a child might create and think)—but to assert himself over the universe through effective ethical action AS AN INDIVIDUAL HUMAN. The efficacy and truth of this self-assertion also gives rise to the occasional, extreme love of the artificial, or man-made, exhibited in some decadents; they are smelling their way towards individual heroism. Decadent artificiality also demonstrates the individual’s absolute superiority over his circumstances, etc., and his ability to maintain his own imagined world in the world’s despite. Assuredly, the decedent’s is a more cluttered vision, filled with lacquered trinkets and color-coordinated dinner parties, but it is a vision of individual human action, value and imagination—over and above that which is merely imposed on the individual by circumstance. In this way the creator acknowledges, masters, and defines his situation.

But is the moral question being asked in this situation the correct one? Namely, that an individual—in order to exist, must assert his equality to, and then superiority over, the universe? And, how does making the assertion that an individual man is superior to the universe define that man? Why is this the necessary ethical situation? Is it merely the ethical situation? Is it the necessary situation because it is the defining situation, or vice versa?

The cry of definition or asserted awareness of individual self is the first necessary step to anything else because any action that follows will require either an actor to execute the action or an object to be acted upon. Without the differentiation between universe and the self, which is created by the assertion of that self’s awareness, nothing separate from (or within) the universe would exist in the first place. Lacking individuation, there is nothing to prove its moral equality, superiority, or failure either to the created individual or the silently witnessing universe—or to anything else for that matter.

Each man must act heroically—either creatively as defined above, or tragically as do Oedipus, Macbeth and company—in order to become more rightly aware of his ethical situation (and thereby exist more deeply and fully as an individual). Man acts to prove to himself that he is indeed the individual he asserts and claims himself to be. This act of ‘proving’ causes the individual to become increasingly conscious of his situation—and of beauty. Oedipus becomes fully conscious of his situation and THEN pokes out his eyes—voluntarily embracing his suffering. By the end of the Oedipus trilogy his awareness of beauty is also extreme and he ‘enters heaven’ as an equal—beatified totally. The tragedies that express and share these individual examples of self-valuation are among our most beautiful artifacts as well.

Byron, Shelley and Prometheus (who is a man in the pagan god-like sense, and not a god in the alienating Christian sense) are masters of themselves because they have, like Zarathustra, collapsed into their humanity. This collapse into self is the result of nothing other than their being in a situation that demands that they assert their individual equality to the universe or cease to exist as individuals; each hero decides to re-affirm or discover his individuality, no matter the terror of his circumstances; they are re-made, self-created and defined as Ubermensch thus. Tie on the cape, pals!

Christ himself was an example of a man performing this same ethical oblation, but the liberating power of his story was taken away by the organized church which said that Christ died for the sins of all men. With that being the case, no more Christs were needed, or indeed, even allowed; this manifestation of self-redemption was unique. This type of foreknown and foredoomed embracing of heroic suffering would, in the rest of Western tradition, normally be termed ‘tragic,’ with Christ dying, not for our sins, but for his own glory: the cold and ineradicable proof of his existence as an individual, in time, in the world, for all time.

Christ was the model of an individual man, not an anonymous godhead.

Is this initial assertion of self itself an act of creation, or does it instead acknowledge that there may be grace in a universe that can throw into existence something that is not that universe? Does this assertion create or discover a new morally independent universe in each individual? The answer to this second question is immaterial—since it is the conscious assertion of existence that allows the individual to go on and take actions to prove this assertion true—first to his own consciousness and then—as a gift almost—to the rest of the world and to the universe itself. In the case of heroic creation, the process goes a step further and asserts its superiority over the universe, and then goes on to prove this even greater assertion true.

And it is this created object of the artist—and, in the supreme case of the poet, the poem—that must bear this stress and perdure ineradicable in the created consciousness of generations of individuals. How can such an ‘eternal’ object be created in time, where all must meander or race to the grave, with the sticks and bits that patch our civilizations together, be they huts or skyscrapers? What are the qualities of such objects, and of what materials are they made?

A poem is chiseled from the immovable rock of a purified imagination, and as such it is its nature to be original, i.e. to be what it is. And it is exactly this individuality embodied and made manifest that may prove the heroically creating individual’s assertion of superiority over the universe true. In other words, there is no necessity that the universe can impose on the free individual, since that which is individual in us is exactly that which the universe does NOT define through necessity. At the same time, the heroically creating individual can (and indeed must, to be heroically, individually creating) impose his volition on the blank eternity that the universe presents. What the existentialist might define as a ‘gratuitous act,’ is the only morally and ethically necessary act (because self-defining) that any individual must undertake. They defining qualities of this action will be discussed in greater detail throughout this essay. In the meantime, I will say that the only thing that is ‘gratuitous’ about such acts is that they occur in a state of freedom, and they are not necessitated by the circumstances of their actors. The existentialists, like the decadents, are smelling their way toward individual liberty.

The imagination that is needed to undertake such a projection of self, or out of one’s self, is purified by the individual’s volition to exist as an individual, and as such cannot take part in anything that is less than one-hundred percent itself, and is therefore, of that necessity, original. A poem cannot borrow the vital portions and unique breadth of another’s soul, just as a man of virtue cannot hide from who he is, no matter how heroic or monstrous the envisioned shadow his imagination projects.

A lord of word takes no shortcuts to glory when it comes to his work. A poem can only respond to that which is an intrinsic part of each individual’s soul, having nothing to do with the more casual styles or quirks that an age may impose or an individual may assume. In the end, a poem, like a human being—which is to say as an independent source of moral and imaginal excellence and self-existent force—must be true to its own form, bearing in its being a singular soul that indeed and in every way becomes a living spirit itself, spinning free in the rational space provided by the radiant vision its creator upholds.

Such creations endure through time, and beyond, by the ethical impact their beauty has on other self-aware individuals. The ancients may have seen this increasing of consciousness as the material worlds aching and progressing back to spiritual Oneness. I prefer to think of it as the unity of ignorance being refined and inspired into the manynesses of the individual.

An unborrowed conscience that consumes all it touches in blessed magnificence is the spiritual pulp necessary to contain, arrange, and create such words of unerring vision. This is the challenge forced upon every writer, and it is what makes him write in the desperate hope that a sufficient segment of humanity has not forgotten how to recognize the enduring, individual value in themselves. For if they have, they will never be able to truly appreciate a great poem, which, as an individual itself, demands the total response only a fully conscious individual can muster to be able to rise in the capable sun of a new day and to reach for all that such a self-awakening might bring.

PUNK ROCK, ETERNAL YOUTH, AND THE BACCHANALIA OF LIBERTY

BLANK GENERATION

Y’know its fascinating the difference between those

who have...

There’s those who make it and those who never make.

And y’know its fascinating because its really very clear

Either you’ve got it honey, or you ain’t!

—The Rich Kids, Ghosts of Princes in Towers,

circa 1978

Punk rock tore an ascending arc over the 1970s.

It is an arc that does not falter still, emblazoned in the permanent whirl that all imaginative exertions trace. Often mistakenly labeled nihilists, they instead codified an era of the individual more unerringly than any tribe of artists since the flaming Romantics. There had to be some reason, some real reason, why, in the cynical innocence of seventeen, when some anonymous hand put on the Stiff Little Finger’s ‘Gotta Getaway,’ I was trapped, smiling into the darkness.

There was, in all this ecstatic and angry utterance, no damning naysaying of the nihilist, but rather an essential stripping down of all that could not become, or sustain, the single individual in his fierce pride and abject plight. And once all extraneous distraction of status or erroneous feeling is stripped out of a man, or falls into the dust—as with Lear on his bald heath or Richard Hell in the elemental landscape of Downtown—a man alone must extinguish or soar.

It is only the assertion of self among the destruction of all else that can allow or compel the individual to then ascend, alive for perhaps the first time in the Credent Regale of his imagination, smiling into the darkness. This is always the inviolable work of the imagination, commanding each of us to make real the moral infinity of our individual possibilities—that we draw fire from the dross of this existence. As the lyricist says, “among our chances there’s a chance we can choose.”

So these ghosts, these princes in towers,

It seems to me they got it made:

Because they sulk, and destruct, for no reason!

Well maybe they ain’t afraid!

When Shelley, in his ‘Defense of Poetry,’ talks about the “invisible effluence” sent out by the great perceptive individuals of antiquity reaching into contemporary minds and thus “sustaining the life of all,” he is NOT taking the Platonic line about how some immensely distant ‘Ideal Realm’ is accessible because permanently unchanging in any epoch—what he is talking about are self-created men asserting an ethical effulgency of unimaginable strength: the strength of an individual. Shelley is asserting the fact that the ethical efficacy of the individual, as literally embodied in poetry, can never be negatively estimated. No limit to its effects can ever be measured because that which is beautiful will never stop having an impact; it will keep effecting things for as long as things continue to exist. As old Ez has pointed out: “Literature is news that STAYS news.” This is why punks were never nihilists, and never could be, alive in their asserted shiver of selfhood. No limit of the individual is assignable. Poetry and the individual are, in this sense, indivisible.

They’re ghost of princes in towers,

They’re the sharp ones, then and now.

And it’s ONE: that we’re one of them.

TWO: and it’s true

that THREE: it’s free and easy that

beFOUR too long, [they’ll] come back to THIS!

Its as simple as the song: “before too long, come back to this.” Only those who truly live and exist as individuals can move in any direction at all, take any direct action, or have any effect on either history or themselves. The history a true individual makes, or creates out of the infinite moral imagination of his mind can never fade or fail to have its effect; we must, if sincerely asserted, “come back to THIS.” Only when executed sincerely is the infallible returning to “THIS”—the ascendant assertion of the individual over the context of history and into the creation of it—a creation of that returning self as well. Each man must, with noble and self-loving divinity, consecrate himself to this awesome task. To return to the sacred assertions of others without the supremely conscious intent to undertake the creation of oneself, is merely to read and not to do. This is the ethical nullity of the archivist, and not the victorious ascendancy of the Credent Regale.

The assertion that is necessary to make the undying return to the permanent words of an individual, and to truly touch those words and let them pinch yourself open, is itself an assertion that is in accord with the initial assertion that resulted in the creation of the selfhood of the recording poet in the first place. This is reading with intent. The recording poets, or Credent Regalists alive only in the assertion of their imaginations over the universe, are the “sharp ones [who] got it made,”—which is to say, they built themselves; they are asserted individuals, created as individuals by the grace of that assertion. How did they come to find that grace and build themselves? “Well, maybe they ain’t afraid.”

Just a singing ‘bout the ghosts of princes in towers

Said some boys, and how!

The princes in towers are ourselves, when, and if, created by the gilded assertion of selfhood. These princes are the self-created individuals of every clime and time talking to us in the permanent poetry of their consciousness recorded. And that poetry documents that consciousness’ self-creation. But, it is more than a document—that poem is an object of beauty that calls on us to create ourselves anew so that we can experience the beauty that it talks about firsthand.

And it is the act of saying, and thus seeing, in the trim minute of the poem the “boys” speak—that makes them princes of themselves. To know and create oneself the first time is the model of all other returns to or re-experiencings of that act of creation. Any such ghostly visitation of the “past” (or recurring assertion of infinite self over the dim universe), costing not less than everything, the individual necessarily stripped to his skinny essence in order to even understand the creation he is witnessing and participating in, is itself a recognition of that divinest self the erring world perpetually masks and plunders.

The boys saying, or singing, about the princes in towers, is the HOW of the princes in towers as well; it partakes of their principle of self-creation. The doing, the saying, the singing, and the recognition that demands not less than everything, is itself the ethical act of creation: the observation, understanding and act of creation co-occur in this single action all at once. It cannot be divvied up into heavens of elsewhere or dim dreams of afterdeath. Everything must happen in the individual’s undying instant of self-recognition. Time is the illusion that we cannot shake, and the one challenge that let’s us take a chance on dying forever or truly existing as deathless individuals in the moment. Without time, which undercuts us all, all actions would carry an equal value; there would be no way to sequence or prioritize anything at all; having nothing happen would be exactly the same as everything happening at once; in fact, there would be no ‘at once.’ Any Zen ‘now’ would be equivalent to the Apocalypse. Each thing and every experience would drift effortless and defunct, a wasted day at the beach immortalized in unpurchased acrylic—the picked shells arranged for easy remembrance.

Time is supreme over us in this way. In this way, as Richard Hell would say,

Only time can write a song that’s really really real.

The best a man can say is how it’s played or did this feel

And he only knows as much as time to him reveals.

But once man is aware of time, beauty is made possible because a large part of ‘beauty’ is expressed in the sense of beauty’s own perfection passing away. As Wallace Stevens defines it, beauty is “the fitful tracing of a portal,” the immortal memory of inextinguishable glory alive again for an instant in the brain of an apprehending individual who knows that he must die, and that his death will shatter his perfect apprehension of that still vital perfection.

Heroic suffering is beautiful because the sufferer, asserting himself over the universe, is beatified by this assertion. The hero then embraces the voluntary ‘inevitability’ of this new beauty’s death heroically, in time. This final act of embracing volition serves as icing on the cake of asserted selfhood, proving, beyond doubt and beyond time, that the individual’s case, or assertion, is TRUE.

Johnny Rotten—and later John Lydon—made this same vital assertion twice under two names: an unrehearsed man knowing himself individual and capable against anything the world could throw at him. His burning theatre prayed for the audience to create themselves alive—one self-creation insisting on a myriad others. This would reveal the original creator’s regale as real, so that he might then ascend and never dissipate. To exist enough as a self-asserted individual that another person creates themselves as an individual in order to meet you or your creation in the Credent Regale of your rational liberty, proves that you have truly lived, at least once, as a self-created individual. The only social community that such self-created individuals can possibly share is the community of beauty. It is only through the individual perceptions of beauty that they share a mutual world of beautiful objects—which includes their own self-created, self-asserted individuality. Any of Richard Hell’s fabled performances are equal to this test. And to the degree that each performance was a creation of self, the audience’s reaction could be dropped as an insignificant afterthought. Only those who re-invented themselves to be more capable of appreciating and responding to another individual were really able to witness anything at all anyway; so, at least, I would assert. W. B. Yeats created himself as an individual by having his living creation Red Hanrahan respond to him within the bounds of yet another creation of his, the poem ‘The Tower.’* This is how Yeats ascended into the ‘second heaven’ of his imagination, his asserted individuality, to ‘never dissipate.’

Punk music is beautiful because in it is encoded the actual ACT of individuals asserting themselves over the universe. The music was never it. As Sid said: “Who cares about the music?”

I am always held in awe by the tortured furies of such modern ascendance.

REASON AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CREDENT REGALE

Reason is that which identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses. This process results in the guiding rules of a rational life; this ideational integration of the senses and meaning provides a purified fount for both our rational actions in the world and our most sacred gestures about the world.

Reason ferries information from the senses (which is not accessible to unmediated questioning) and holds that information rightly before the mind that can then, without distortion, find in these blocks of world that have entered us banners to blazon forth ourselves. The act of creative identity (allusion being its lowest form) is a property of the mind proper. This is the heroic creative essence of man, undimmed by time, and endowed with the grace to express itself in this dying realm. Reason finds meaningful action in man to the extent that it takes action upon that which is permanent in him.

It has been widely held that those partaking in any Credent Regale discard personal experience in search of broader themes. This subordination of the individual to some amalgam of vague understandings or half-understood abstract ideals can never truly be expressive of individuality. This is a flawed and dismissive understanding that, surprisingly, garners serious consideration to this day. The Romantics, when acting as spokesmen of the Credent Regale, exalted the idea of the individual as one of the highest of stars; only matters dealing with the highest and lowest emotions were utilized by the Romantics. Such emotions have troubled and encouraged man and been at the center of artistic endeavor since day one. It is nothing less than the attempt to give meaning to a human’s life on this planet and to understand the emotions that are universally acknowledged as providing that meaning.

‘The chain of linked thought,’ unbroken through the ages—and of which the Romantics form a participating link—is, as Shelley knew, the understanding shared as human beings that lends permanent value to poetry and life.

This chain of linked thought is composed of the expressions that individuals have given of their individual existences. Such expressions, called beautiful, have permanence imposed upon them by the creative faculty of the individual which shapes and transfers these expressions into the world through reason. The proof of this permanence manifests whenever another individual brushes across the individual’s expression and grasps the essence of it. This is the chain, an understanding embodied and then ‘shared’ or re-experienced by subsequent individuals. The links are embodied expressions of self themselves, the radiant nodes of dutiful beauty. More than reason alone is responsible for the outflux of such expressions—they are a rare touching of all three aspects of our total reality: outer world, ferrying reason, and inner creative self. All creativity, all self-consciousness, and all communicable human experience come down to this self-defining power we have to willfully recognize the individual essences that we bear burningly within us, and then to powerfully say: I am, and will be! Or, as I would submit, to recognize this pre-existing condition.

Man’s most noble and glorious purpose, his ultimate goal, is to seek and secure his own happiness. The will of human imaginative conception expresses an undying commitment to what the mind perceives. Intuition, leaps and guesses, are greatly explored in Regalist works. It is, however, the unwavering commitment to what the mind perceives to be true that is at the forefront of Regalist concern. A poet of the highest order trusts his senses before any claims of supernatural inspiration or ‘automatic knowledge.’

True Credent Regalists recognize no god who is said to exist separate from their own faculties, rather they embody God in each line of radiant verse, and in each sacred gesture of their self-consciously lived lives. Any limit placed upon this individual freedom to experience and express anything—even God—is evil, a devil exacting a minimizing obedience from the unencumbered mind. We reject a god of qualified charms and instead embrace our own divinity and idealism. Does God exist? Credent Regalists don’t know any more about this than any given handful of mystics sticking around their own dark caves of delusion. God may absolutely exist! Some varieties of the Christian religion state that God is alive inside of each one of us. Bon Dieu! Exactly! Define your terms and reveal a god unto the soul of each man, every soul its own savoir, reveling in the moment of its conscious apprehension and self-conscious expression.

Reason as it applies to the artistic endeavor of the Regalist poet is as vitally necessary as air is for the proper operation of the lungs. Reason is the unique faculty of the human mind that perceives the material provided by the senses and through a process of integration gives meaning to that material. A Lord of Word has a heightened capacity in this regard, since he perceives more and from that can derive more essential truths from that raw imagery. Reason as the guide of all rational human action is even more essentially awakened in the mind and voice of the divinely exalted poet.

Perfection. The thinning glimpses of a light so uniquely purified in the opalescent lens of a beheld tendency, a grace so obliquely denied to all—except to the Lords of Word who revive this tendency in each undying breath of a renewed grace. The true Regalist of this modern age perceives and recreates experience as it might and ought to be—which is the essence of Romanticism—rather than wasting time mired in the mundane, non-participatory superfluities of this imperfect spectre. Simply accepting experiences as they come to you denies your part in those experiences, or at least does not self-consciously apprehend your part in them. The human will and imagination are ever-active, and are never the slave of what some would try to pass off as “mere fact.” To consciously participate, with the imagination, in reason’s integration of facts into meaning indicates a perfection of spirit, a symmetrical angel unbound in a revelation of truth so indomitable—so spiritually exact that not to realize and revel in its discovery is an abnegation of your humanity to a degree without limit; and yet this blindness is, and remains, artistically, the moral code of our day.

What purpose does reason fulfill for the self-activated, self-achieving and self-asserted individual?

Reason is the noble faculty that carries into action all that makes an individual himself. Without this fiction, or function, we would be no more than wraiths crying aloud to the unlistening air.

This leads us instantly to the mental state—and to the eventual reality of the states of being or surpassing moods of Hope and Expectation. Hope and expectation. First consciously recognized through a life of triumph and then fully realized by a triumph of life, the act of living through a pure imagination and unresigned will. This is the individual’s triumph over tragedy, a purely human thing that is the highest expression in art of man’s ultimate purpose.

Expectation, in terms of the poetic vision’s relationship to life and death, can acquire the character of a faith. This is so because true poetic vision apprehends a confluence of realities that endures beyond ourselves. The assurance that such a vision gives takes on a prophetic character in the foreknowledge that that which we undertake today with our truest selves itself partakes of that which will still be true tomorrow. Such permanent creative acts embody a beauty which will still speak to any individual at any time in any future. Such acts proclaim the existence of individuality—and of that individuality’s victory over the decaying universe—all within the scope of a single lifetime; the fulfillment of such a prophesy requires no agent outside of an individual life’s experiences. And if death is all that intervenes, how can such a victory be different in any individual’s future?

Hope and Expectation are necessary constituents of any moral stance to be adopted by an individual who recognizes himself as an individual. To know oneself as an individual capable of glories equal to all the visible feast we feed on, and to then not have such hopes and expectations of oneself that would make skies blush would be a matter of intimate, and nearly infinite, self-degradation. Indeed, one would not demand such uninhibited victories of oneself, but rather expect their ready accomplishment.

Any such victory and all such accomplishment is essentially moral in its character. It embodies a directed meaning that includes self-consciousness, rather than a simple meaning which can never be more than a mere fact of consciousness. Such a victory has the quality of an individual’s enhancing stance toward the world. This does not mean that the victorious Credent Regalist thinks that his imaginative apprehension of the world can magically control that world, as when a child thinks that he can magically move an object just by wishing it would move. That is a caricature of the Credent Regalist position, not its living aspect.

The hopes and expectations one has for oneself move by an instantaneous sympathy to all other humans—what is true for me can be true for all. These others have only to claim this individuality for themselves to become self-fulfilling harbingers of the same hopes and equally great and human expectations. But so many spit the manna from their mouths. This vast self-devaluation of others in the world can easily become a consuming contrast for any vivified individual. With Byron, the perception of such a contrast led him to imagine the world was a desert with no objects great enough in it on which to express his individual moral force. Indeed, there is tragedy in such circumstances. But it is not material to the individual’s self-revelation. Language, however, is always equal to any individual’s expended effort because it, like reason—though superior to it—language partakes BOTH of individual consciousness and uncolored reality.

The effort to establish a Credent Regale here on this earth, in this life (was there ever any other heaven?) is crucially facilitated by the right use of reason.

Reason is that faculty that helps to maintain the sovereignty of the creative, individual essence in a man. It feeds the source with outer realities and carries back to the world images of itself colored by the sovereign rarity of man’s central sun—his self-consciousness. This is the radiance that we feel in unblasted moments, deemed mystical by the unapprehending, but recognized as personal and real by all who feel it. It is, in the scope of this essay, the frank talk of one individual to another. As the sun brings forth every lifeform of the earth out of itself for its yellow eye to witness, as in a perfecting, infective and creative mirror, so in the same way does the individual release unbounded fragments of himself into the world with fertile grace: In this way he has an immortal, infinite, individual moral effect. Scraps of this violent wind that shakes our souls we name ‘the beautiful.’

Reason keeps the connection between the creative self and the world alive, letting our moral center have its actual impact in the world. It is through reason that we live, in the moment and in this world, not in another; and it is the right use of reason that saves this existence from being nothing but vanity.

REALIZED DESIRE AND THE INFINITE BOUNDED

Credent Regalists make the hugest statements imaginable utilizing the infinite elysium of the mind.

This is part of the expected hugeness of any Regalist statement: that individuals eternally exist, or will come to know themselves as existing, and that this self-percieved existence will be permanent and universe-annihilating in any time past, present, or to come. It first descries and than cries out about the infinite moral value of its own individuality self-discovered and asserted. It then trusts, and, rationally, through the senses, with art and sensual cunning, stunningly demonstrates and states that this individuality can affect the universe and subvert to some extent the time that rules it, BY THE ACT OF ITS OWN CREATION. For the asserted perception to be valid, this must be so, since any morality perceived or created only has its value to the extent that it tells us correctly How To Act.

These creations, once apprehended, provide the blossom and the proof of the present argument. For the individual they provide the substance of his self-salvation and the ultimate context of his existence in this world. They embody his personal moral force and tell him how to live!

Out of the living context spawned by the making of these “hugest statements,” several realizations consistently recur. These realizations are some of the necessary markers of individual consciousness; milestones of that arrive at the defining self out of experience’s undifferentiated fog: When a man has his distractions stripped from him, how much more clearly stands before him the grace of his individual wish!

To realize or expand in the moment as much as the soul intends is both the obvious and only goal of any extant consciousness.

The situation of the individual reveals each man as absolute lord and disciple of his own divinity—the master of an unnamed fate. Art is a process involved in this revelation, good art is a process that assumes its glorious incarnations through what may be termed a sculpture of the soul.

Through the wished incarnations of an art of realized desire, an individual may step into his self-created existence as an ineradicable entirety—his moral force intact and his imagination brilliantly in place: his immortal mind will have come to some perfect expression in this world—in a victorious moment that can NOT, strictly speaking, be imagined, but must be lived before it can be conceived. An infinite individual manifestation of that individual’s moral force embodied in the bounded world of time. A miracle? No—it is the Credent Regale’s reasonable and expected vivification and experience of life. And it is by reason that this credent regale is erected.

This is how an individual man, defying time, becomes at once both ghost and prince.

The immortal mind and the infinite bounded—these oxymorons point to the ethical essence of the new Regalist spirit this essay unfolds in enduring simpleness.

The motive for metaphor—the desire to be Other, to be other than, to be elsewhere, is included in an individual’s hope, and in the hero’s capable expectations he has of himself. All that Plato and Kant were doing with their abstractions was rescuing metaphor for rational contemplation. With these philosophers there was a permanent elsewhere to which we could never, by definition, ever have access; for Plato it was the realm of Ideal Forms, for Kant, it was reality itself, the so-called noumena. As long as these realms existed, possibility existed, and imagined, metaphoric indentifications remained possible; all tables might indeed be Table. The sympathetic metaphor of compassion in Sanskrit’s ‘tat tvam tasi’ (thou art that) is one moral expression, or use, of metaphor. Plato and Kant reserved hidden, or inaccessible, realms where these metaphoric identifications could still take place. Religion retained its ‘heaven.’

The importance and impact of properly operating metaphor should never be underestimated. Fundamentalism is the death of every religion. A metaphor is desire encoded, not codified. Fundamentalism codifies the metaphors of various religions and thereby kills the very faith it claims to be the fiercest proponent of. What was a living fountain becomes a frozen cage—encasing and killing an alienated individuality. When prisons are used for punishment instead of rehabilitation, it tolls the death-knell of a society’s imagination. Society no longer has faith in the individual’s ability to re-imagine himself as a productive member of that society—Charlie Manson wins his argument when he abjured personal responsibility for his actions and claimed that “you [society] made me.”

Instead of this failure and death, the Credent Regal demands that every self-consciously self-asserting individual retain and express their ability to be an other self—a self self-imagined. The heavens of the Credent Regale are the possibilities of one’s future self, and the necessity of its moral manifestation in time. Such a self must die in order to have its final definition. Without death, there is no grace in life. This intense focus on individual selves and independent imaginations and histories lends a poignancy to our missions that an external heaven, or reclusive realm of Ideal Forms, or and inaccessible noumena, could never give. To live this newly created self, this manifested metaphor, is an act of realized desire that brings our heaven home.

Plato, Kant, and the dry philosophers of mind have always solved the dilemma of the readily apparent truth of the “immortal mind and the infinite bounded” by dividing the world into visible and invisible, or perfected, or spiritual, realms. Instead, the individual asserts moral unity, AS AN INDIVIDUAL, allowing us to see and feel the singleness of every impulse and creation and expression this life drives into us and sparks from us.

The true and utter independence of this spirit must out!

It cannot be contained, even by imagining a heaven of infinite perfection ‘elsewhere’ for it to wear itself out in. This is one of those dull scabbards Shelley spoke of when he wrote that “Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”

Zen’s no-heaven and the bhuddists’ “the defeat of desire is the imagination of desire’s ultimate expression and purpose” is another haggard scabbard as well. Any comfort or distraction these thesises provide must disappear the minute a man wakes up to himself in asserted, conscious, blessed and perfected independent life.

Poetry, more than any other art, confirms this magisterial joy and commission of honor, and damns the pernicious waste of every other form of swaying evasion because it is conscious, directed, and articulate. It comes from a specific, asserted consciousness and MUST enter another to have its effect. Nothing less than a total response is required of the reader—or co-creator of the imagination’s means and meanings.

A theory of ‘misreading’ or misprision in circulation in these late decades misses the point entirely—claiming that each goofed up reading of a poem creates a second poem, etc. Instead, each correct reading of a poem creates a second INDIVIDUAL!!!! Not one inside the reader, but the reader himself, dragged into his divinity for the first time. A poem DEMANDS that it be read with exact clarity before it can even exist--- because it is one with consciousness. It is the indelible jello of this life’s susurrations.

NOTE: “the infinite bounded”: it must be bounded and bonded by the length, love, and example of a single individual’s life. There is no “infinite” or “perfected” realm as Plato proposes. In this specific, limited sense, the poetic ideal is ‘bounded’ and made ‘real’ instead of being invested with a dead spiritualism. And yet, the individual is infinite in a very real sense since, when weighed in the balance, the universe itself cannot lessen or desecrate him by gross comparison. But what sort of infinity are we talking about? We are talking about what a man does in life, and therefore we are talking about ethics, and morality, and society to the extent that individuals touch, colliding their highest of worlds in harmonious union.

BEAUTY IS THE ONLY MORAL COMPASS

A dancing pageant, or any instance of the beautiful, assumes its ‘intellectual beauty’ on the basis of its divinity in real experience. The perfection of such a perception artistically embodied is an intellectual achievement of the highest order. A poet of the highest order is an evolving individualist whose imagination is composed of heightened perspectives. Chance, death and human misfortune are considered the ruled pawns of a reflective spirit and self reveling in an imaginal bound. Only this imaginal bound, an aesthetically imposed moral definition, is real to the self-creating individual creator.

Once the individual and the independent spirit, as defined in this essay, are held up as a real ideal, a manifest perfection touchable by everyone willing to create himself in the assertion of that self’s existence, anarchy becomes an easy necessity, as does atheism. Anarchy is simply the lack of imposed, instead of discovered, social rules or conventions; atheism, in this case, is the lack of social rules or conventions that others claim exist as a result of God’s existence. In this state, what is to be the moral or social compass for man?

The apprehension of beauty.

Every poet who has ever lived and generated genius has done so in a sober, well-lived life; when this is not the case, he is not creating. His evils are as dust in the balance. Individual creation is the only redemption that can occur in time. The degenerate king or unprincipled despot is locked into the manifestations of sin (and the confining network of the social contract) far more irreparably than any independent layabout. Those of individual genius who have apprehended their moral case and its inherent freedoms arrange their brief lives automatically around the apprehension of beauty, since that is the highest and best use of all that is highest and best in man.

But what makes these individuals the highest and best?

Their apprehension and forceful claiming of themselves as individuals in a universe of nulls.

All this talk of self-claiming, self-asserted creation and Will gets taken by the Hitler idiots as ‘will over others’—the mass—instead as the self-mastering ‘will over oneself;’ it is a mastering of the inertia of birth, at least to the point of self-creation. After that, all other activity gains its moral credence, as activity even, from that initial willful apprehension.

As soon as any man understands and/or asserts his value and existence as an individual, he naturally addresses himself to eternity, since death instantly sets itself up as the last block the unthinking universe can throw up before him to interfere with his individual’s perpetual, unique and value-creation-oriented existence. Then what does all the spastic and hectoring spectre of death become but another inducement to beauty and all the highest and best productions and reminiscences of those imperishable moments of ecstatic consciousness?

It was said of Shelley that: “By calling the heart to an ideal, and by bringing about what Shelley describes as ‘transforming enlargements of the imagination,’ poets become ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’” This ideal, towards which we are constantly either called or corralled, is constantly—and I think incorrectly—labeled the same Ideal that Plato preached: a separate and untouchable heaven of ideal forms. I would like to draw a distinct difference between any such realm and the Ideal that a poet must hold in his heart to have an effect on his life that would allow him to undertake these meaningful ‘transforming enlargements of the imagination.’ Shelley’s own experience of this Ideal realm, as described in his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, itself argues against this realm being described as ‘untouchable.’

The completeness of the visitation enacted upon the speaker of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ is almost a rapture that, instead of taking the raptured person to heaven, brings heaven to the person, argues against this beauty being remote at all, and is a witness against its existence being thought of as a mere ‘shadow vision’ and not as a palpable reality. The ideal that the heart is called to in the poem, and in the hearts of all poets and, as I think, in the heart of every individual, is the complete acknowledgement and apprehension of that individual’s own freedom. This is an immediate and life-altering experience of ethical liberation that is anything but remote; it is instead intimate in the extreme—as is the style of experience described by Shelley in his poem.

Plato’s Ideal Realm may only be considered as irreparably separate these days because of the complete imaginal hegemony of Kant—who split the world into mind and body, or spirit and form, and whose philosophy demands that they never touch. Plato’s metaphors, however, may quite possibly not have been understood by the Greeks or Shelley as quite so untouching, but rather as taking on more of the sort of meanings and sense this essay undertakes.

Shelley’s ‘transforming enlargements of the imagination’ may also be understood as those inter-changing and inter-charging leaps of the individual’s asserted sense of self and the moral beauty which draws that self into the universe by its claims. The transformations can then be understood as part of the ongoing life-process of heroic creation, constantly calling on the imagination to claim its invented universe. This claiming and inventing then takes on the organizing characteristics of legislative order as the ideas of Beauty, Individual, and Created System become more and more indistinguishable—the beatification of those saints indwelling in ourselves.

The apprehension of beauty becomes the moral compass of the individual because that is the only way that heroic creation can take place; the only way that bits of soggy reality can be organized into permanent representations of the absolute consciousness that races in us as the universe races in God’s mind. It is a principle of organization that supercedes and precedes any conception of ‘the good.’ It includes the Good as a fire must include fuel, to refine for use to produce the brightest flames. The Good only has active meaning for humans as an incentive to morally good future acts; it is not some dead substance that can be hoarded or spent. Only individuals can perform meaningfully original actions—and the only self-conscious individuals that exist understand that the only actions worth taking are ones that are beautiful, or which result in beauty. Death is meaningful in this context only in that it gives a definition to what is done, an endpoint to one life’s possibilities. Death helps to shape the moral meaning of individual acts of beauty. It is a sort of spectre and goad to goodness, meaning and beauty. What happens after death is not of immediate concern for the living; death is meaningful not in and of itself, since it is a place beyond or other than life, but because it gives us a place to stop being. An abstract, ineffable, and unapprehendable heaven is even more useless to living humans—since it only gives us a place where we may one day continue being, but never in life. Neither death nor heaven put meaningful limits on the self-consciously willful individual; neither the grave nor the cloud participate in human possibility.

Heroic creation, in this way, gives man the chance to ‘flirt with death,’ and still claim, ‘but I don’t care about it’ with an undying cry. To the degree that his deep apprehension of beauty guides and decides an individual’s behavior it is the ethical force of the universe. Shelley saw Milton’s excellence and moral suasiveness in the energy imparted to Satan in ‘Paradise Lost.’ This excellence is perceived exactly to the extent that that energy and excellence are given to Satan to make the poem more beautiful and fill the brilliant individual’s defeat with defiance. So the creation of a brilliantly individual and defiant Satan becomes a moral act of beauty.

Morality is the flower of beauty in the world.

So, what then might avail in man’s pinching circumstance where false heavens and the distraction of death have been deleted of their abstract and compelling characteristics?

Beauty. Beauty draws each man to it to the extent that its vitality increases each observer’s liveliness. It sweetens without sickening and ever gives pleasure to the purest portions of an individual, which it helps to awaken for the purpose of having that pleasure more greatly enjoyed and received. There is no model for this concept in history or life other than the innate idea of unending and increasing pleasure and beauty called by the godless LOVE. The greatest harmony and order of perceived beauty reaches so far into the individual that it eventually demands that the individual create harmony, order and beauty out of himself, so that this interpenetration may have completeness and demonstrate the reality of the original creation. That which is beautiful, creates beauty in those who correctly perceive that beauty. The only ‘proof’ that the original creation’s beauty has been perceived is that those who come in intimate contact with its beauty themselves become more beautiful. This may seem to resemble a religious conversion, but it is more like the act of falling in love. If there is any insistence in this co-creation of the beautiful, it is only that of our own ardency; that which is beautiful calls on that which is beautiful in us.

Beauty demands of the individual only himself, never subservience or bland acquiescence.

When a man is excited to the point of genius, he is the most himself and the most universal in terms of vital individuality. Because only the most self-asserted individuality can create beauty, and because the most beautiful is that which is created and partakes of the intimate eternity of the individual, the two quickly consummate an inseparability in the history of genius. How could anything from a lesser source give true pleasure to the free individual? Beauty can begin the siren call at any and every level of perceptible pleasure, and if that call is followed it will eventually demand the abolition of God, predetermination, hate, and all that debilitates the creative faculty in the individual. Beauty will demand to be answered by beauty, nothing less will suffice.

When an individual claims himself and his freedoms, poets become the acknowledged legislators of the world because poetry is the only way free consciousnesses can communicate, via the eternity of beauty which heroic creation produces—individual to individual.

Therefore, beauty is the only moral compass for the individual because it is the only outside agent that can actually reach his independent center and demand that that center respond. It is, perhaps, the only real object in the universe for the individual to respond to, act upon, etc. In a world of beautiful objects, every action becomes a demonstration of Love, every commitment a simple entirety as deep as ourselves.

Ethics is all about what a man does in this life, and what he should do: if beauty is the only object sufficiently real and individual for a man to act upon, then it is obviously intimately tied up with all ethical action.

Beauty is the moral compass of the individual because it is the agent, result, and object of all truly individual activity.

THE DEATH OF THE BEATS AND THE AESTHETIC OF THE VILE

BEAT GENERATION

The age of the Beat poet has reached its unacknowledged terminus.

No single human emotion or phase of thought is of strong enough composition or duration to serve as the prismatic foundation of any really revolutionary artistic movement or expression.

And yet, this is exactly what, in essence, the Beats have attempted to accomplish. The emotions and domain of their concern are exclusively those of the social outcast and the improvisationally personal expressions of the ‘unedited’ mind. Only what has passed uncritically, and unedited, from the ‘true’ self is permissible. This is not the Romantic ‘look into your heart, and write’ type of creativity—the kind of creativity that explored exalted, heightened, and supremely human moments of a ‘spontaneous overflow of feelings’ that were then ‘recollected in tranquility.’ No, not at all. Although they would claim some of these tactics to be their own, Romantic expression is too centered in the human to satisfy the Beats’ need for authority and rule. They claim the status of lawless outcast only to make other systems of meaning less competitive—to discredit the ‘competition’ at the outset of their new empire-building mania. No inherited rule of society or previous expression of greatness in ourselves or beyond ourselves was good enough for the Beats. They must first destroy all in order to create anything—or so, at least, they told themselves. By trusting nothing, or not enough, of the wide vagaries of what previous human experience had brought to order and beauty, the Beats were driven, almost inexorably, to seek for example and guidance almost exclusively in the religious mindset. Only that which jumps beyond our human context could be saved for their system; they rejected the experience of others, and were left cornered in a burnt-out nave with some bastardization of Plato’s ‘Ideal Forms.’

They have spread their insidious notions through every subsequent generation so that even the untempered vitalities of the youngest in society can see no cohesive form of self-purchase or individual expression outside the dead forms imposed by their grandfather’s rebellion. And this rebellion was instantly, as with almost every effort to eschew the wide vagaries of the lawless heart in man, converted into what amounted to a monastic cult, complete with anal exercises, the eating of dirt, and the subjugation of the flesh’s revelations and mind’s pure emanations to an iron rule, an aesthetic of the vile, taking the place of Loyola’s indignities.

There is little left for us to save from among their languid utterances; little that is not void of man’s sense of being alive in the world, and joying or despairing in the face of that.

Among its best phrases and contortions there is always the appeal for outside help, a despairing wish to have some immortal judgment imposed to save themselves from their own thoughts or feelings. Or occasionally, and equally despairingly, there is expressed a wish for God. Even the most famous of their lines carry this limitation:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection...

Saints are always most at home among the rats and fleas; the mental wards are full of divine personalities.

It is as if the fit, the fever, the contagion of this despair had gone into the home of every prosperous nullity of our society and settled on his children. Raised in a masterless house, they tried to find some system of thought that, nullities themselves, would save them and damn their parents.

But, guilty themselves of what they considered the ‘sin’ of judgment, what they hobbled together took themselves apart.

An entire, sickened generation occupying their precious time shaking off the ‘dust of this world!’ In their bland spiritual hunger, they are driven to taste of discredited religion. For shame! A generation of preachers selling ghettoized (as they always are, obscure at the start, squalid to the end) lives of the saints—too often themselves!

Of course, this eventually led to the airless rapture of disincarnation, and the philosophical stance of a no-self void-embrace mentality. The sinuous East had captured their too tranquil souls. All of this activity holds our fascination only to the extent—and in the same way—that each man’s damnation is different. From my pie-eyed perspective, it seems we’ve had a silly five decades of lotus-eaters.

Beat poetry. An appropriate title. Although poetry of this order is not entirely without anything to redeem it, the guiding reason of its creations is corrupt in its inception. Because Beat poetry seeks to debase its own art form with a religious aesthetic of vulgarity and emptiness to the exclusion of all other sensible objects, any of the more delicately differentiated emotions that have ever made human beings feel like living spirits with value and purpose are thrown out in favor of kowtowing to an absent divinity. Indeed, they are necessarily excluded in favor of some more strictly ‘personal approach,’ that, because of its very narrowness, can never truly speak to the soul of man, the visionary individual triumphant and self-redeemed.

Clothed in the gilded will of the artist they endeavor, from whatever the psychological—possibly schizophrenic—source (and all of their energy is of no deeper or greater source than that), to destroy the purity of those actions undertaken from a ‘tragically’ exalted point of view and embodied by the reason in the world as faultless totems of the individual.

Symptomatic of these destroyers is their sainted adherence to the aesthetic of the vile. Drugged revelations of the needle or the knife constitute their entire range of experience. No music swoons the temporal ear to increase the dose of their vitality.

Most Americans find their escape towards poetry in the regimen of a chosen or imposed religion, their sacred texts a bizarre outpouring of the human heart. The Beats, concentrating on a single color, or ‘effect’ able to be extracted from human experience and put into poetry, have constricted the bandwidth of the individual spirit, emaciating through rigorous doctrine even the supple body of the texts they turn to. This has happened in many instances throughout human history, and the result is always an impoverished aesthetic, the construction of a few rotting temples in the hills (or rank tenements in San Francisco), the tortured religious impulse of a degraded youth desecrated to the rote behavior of idle worship.

A more essential, Regalist, doctrine must leave no faction of our experience untouched. There must be no quarantining of humanity for an increased ‘effect;’ there must be no single, supreme purpose deemed sacrosanct merely for the sake making some obscure, cultist ‘point’ in argument. At the same time, neither are order and beauty to be deleted from the ecstatic sum of what we are, but the hierarchy revealed, if any, is to be one discovered, not imposed.

CODA

2003. We have been largely engulfed over the latter portion of the last century by the will to be modern at the expense of everything that gives art value, i.e. real meaning. I have been the unfortunate witness to the worst kind of adulation heaped upon the sour, rotting corpses of those who hide behind their wrinkled beards spouting some foul diatribe about their miserable lives in a pernicious attempt to escape reality. Such a critical fallacy has removed us from any true dramatic elevation of the self and thus an elevation of the senses. There is a deliberate avoidance of the a soul’s primary intransigence and in its place there is merely a mature recognition of human limitation.

HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY

In my experience it seems that there is a perception among the masses that the creative hero (and the Credent Regalist essence of art) is often has its reality dissolved by some supernatural osmosis into the vacant aether. They argue that the protagonist is not fully realized since he does not suffer and destruct from his own despair. This is a grave perversion of how Regalist art actually operates. Yet, it was via this negative image of beauty and hope, through this despairing critique, that I was first introduced to the unaging muse of the Credent Regale. The true hero, whatever suffering he endures, uses his pain to elevate himself and his imagined world above and beyond that suffering, perhaps viewing his life’s wreckage from a heightened vantage, seeing the images of his wreckage with an aesthetic sharpness that burns more clearly and more cleanly into his revivified consciousness as pure form. The Romantics knew that the tender attentions the consciousness feels, granted by these elemental shadows of pure form, could be codified by tongue, note or brush into angelic glimpses that supremely enter our temples of solitude on the perfected wings of holy return. I must endeavor, always, to receive such sweet communion at the altars of this infinite entirety.

The modern ‘despairing critique’ of the Credent regale was most often expressed as an imitation, or failed, tragedy. The modern ‘tragedy’ had the individual suffer and self-destruct from his own despair—helpless in a hopeless circumstance. Imagination, if it was called on at all, was called on to magnify the impossibility of salvation—the necessity of self-extinguishment became all. The modern ‘tragedy’ misunderstood the whole point of ancient tragedy—or remained willfully ignorant of its graces. In ancient tragedy the suffering and destruction of the protagonist invites him to re-imagine his experience in a way that rescues meaning and dignity from the tragic ‘deconstruction’ of his character. Tragedy is an example of an individual whose self-truth is discovered by means of a creative self-expression of his individuality under severly straightened circumstances. In ancient tragedy, the individual found a way, through suffering and self-destruction and despair, to embrace his fate without suffering the additional loss of his individuality, often at the cost of his very life—dead but individual in a hopeless circumstance.

Tragedy finds its self-definition in the heroic endurance and embrace/acceptance of a ‘fate’ halfhidden from the protagonist. This frail victory of the individual despite death displays the greatness of that individual as measured against the entire killing universe. Tragedy is, in this way, essentially a type of glory play bursting radiantly from the unrivalled depths of the Greek imagination’s respect for the human mind.

The protagonist’s personal fashion of facing his exquisitely unraveled and eventually revealed ‘fate’ demonstrates the moral equality of the two halves of the proving equation: man = universe. This demonstration is both excellent and powerful, in its way. But still, it is a tragedy—what of the victory? Why not have the individual change history and fate, triumphing finally in a radiant spate of expelled imagination?

A victory would be another sort of proof that the individual, self-asserted and self-revealing, is equal to all that impinges upon him, the universe and time, all things past and present combined. Once again: man = universe, in terms both infinite and moral.

What different qualities, other than the uncircumscribed striving of the protagonist, are called into existence by the vital notion of creating a Victory? There is called into necessary existence, it seems to me, not heroic suffering fatally embraced, but heroic imagination joyfully triumphant. To change history requires that the universe be reimagined. As in Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ self-definition is derived from the hugeness of the imaginative leap heroically undertaken by the protagonist. This seems related to the notion of a paradigm switch in the history of science where entire fields of knowledge and understanding are suddenly revealed to us as existing in an entirely new and credible relation, replacing previous assumptions.

In the Victory, this process would include a radical touching of the infinite in ourselves (through the protagonist’s willful act of asserted self-awareness of individuality) and then impacting the world with that moral inner-infinity. The well-known ‘butterfly effect’ in weather forecasting is one demonstration that the individual is indeed capable of such hugenesses. The fictional possibility has a basis in reality’s own flexibility—its capacity to change and be re-arranged. The butterfly effect relies on an inherent chaos or freedom in things themselves that allows the individual to have a sort of ‘cascading’ effect on reality. One act influences another act, which influences another act....

Heroic endurance, the self-acceptance of one’s ‘fated’ role, and the depth of volition conjured in all tragedy give us plenty of examples of the ethical necessity for the initial existence of the individual within and AGAINST history. Individual imagination and self-consciousness remain unimpaired despite the rotten circumstances—the circumstances themselves often cast by the Greeks as semi-conscious operatives such as Nemesis. Consciousnes is a quality pervasive in the universe itself then and not simply a human intrusion. The necessity of individual existence to assert itself, however, makes it possible for the individual in a tragedy to change history—to alter his ‘fate’ and master his impinging circumstances. Without this ability, this power, and this freedom to choose on the part of the protagonist, his eventual embracing of his own suffering would be meaningless—a forced and foredoomed choice. In a victory, the emphasis on the individual’s situation changes from: Can one man retain his imaginative capability to change history despite his circumstances (in other words, can he sufficiently demonstrate his potential for individual existence) to: Every man MUST change history.

By the end of a tragedy, the hero has successfully engineered a way to have imagination invest his own existence with value and self-understanding. Usually he is standing at death’s deep gate: this is tragedy’s hectoring victory. The imagination is revealed as real and powerful, defining and saving an asserted individual under tragic circumstances, in spite of all. Shakespeare’s King Lear only begins to discover and value himself after every passing tidbit of life’s superfluities has been tossed away—at first neglectfully (his kingdom to his daughters) but then and increasingly and with increased consciousness and conscientiousness (eventually giving even his very clothes to the raging howling storm).

It is then, naked and alone by choice as much as by chance, that Lear discovers that he is an individual MAN and invents and saves himself. Circumstances have, in rare configuration, combined to convince him to allow Imagination’s victorious invasion. I exist! The I of ‘I exist’ is infinitely real and my own. My ‘I’ is imaginatively and morally capable, despite the roaring storm. It is now that he can again kill and eat, and sing about going to prison. He is, as captain, king or prince, freest and first in the undominated landscape of his own imagination.

A man alone must either extinguish or soar.

I think that man does change history all the time. The trick of it is to become conscious of this impact/creativity—thus proving one’s volition and individuality: to give meaning to Byron’s cry: “Shelley, I WILL do SOMEthing.” Byron was an individual intimately conscious of his potential, his ethical situation, and his capacity to have a meaningful effect. Oedipus suffers and saves his individuality, Byron and Shelley create and change history out of their individuality. Dadaists ‘do anything’ and still have their impact, because they have self-consciously involved man’s blessed volition as did the Greeks et al, proving the ethical equation (man = universe) true and vital still.

But Shelley and Byron were the masters. When they ‘did anything,’ they did what was highest and best. They were the most themselves and the most of themselves, the most human, the most man-like, and greatest. Taking their superiority over the universe for granted, they created a second one out of themselves almost out-of-hand, unavoidably. This continual, effortless self-creation would be the Victory’s area of aesthetic exploration. This exploration would be done not in some solipsistic wish-fulfillment dream-world, but in an active, sympathetic involvement of all with all resembling something more like Love. The Victory is an image of the Credent Regale made manifest. As Lautremont has said, “Poetry, if it is to be made AT ALL, must be made BY all.” The Victory would show such poetry in its evolving state of lively co-creation. Individual worlds would be interactively shared and would impact on each other with a vital growingness—all the richness of Shakespeare’s pageant AND all of the singularity of a Richard the Third. It is a matter of each character’s vital self-assertion of individuality in circumstances where all of the other characters are also self-consciously themselves. And, since everyone has this impact on everyone else all of the time anyway, it is really just a matter of each character becoming self-aware of this impact. Each bit player must elevate himself to a playwright in a world without pre-determined limits. And, as for realism, wouldn’t this be the truest picture of our lives in time anyhow?

Time itself, without the assistance of any other agency, may lend poignancy and tragedy enough to all of our imaginative self-assertions, even in the Victory. Memory gives time reality to man, birthing beauty’s possibility. It is almost sufficient to retreat into that alternate eternity of the past, which has total meaning and is capable of absolute, fixed and resolved beatification. But, of course, as aesthetically perfect as the past is capable of being re-made in one man’s mind, it is only the ACT of sharing that past in the present and the future that can share that vision of things with the world at large and thus express and ‘prove’ that individual’s vision to be aesthetically and morally true. There is no selfhood without acts of self.

“Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,” because beauty comes as a result of a man’s recognition of this conscious nexus—time itself adding a necessary, proving and ephemeral poignancy to the eternities we play with, the bright universes that WE shelve or unjar.

Today: The situation remains unchanged.

Done in the knowledge that that which is best can never fail.

Gregg G. Brown

Daniel B. Dermond

THE LORDS OF WORD

Poem and Essay Order of the previous edition of Ghosts and Princes

The Invoking

INTRODUCTION

The Damned

HEROIC CREATION

Heroic Creation

In Holy Illume

PUNK ROCK, ETERNAL YOUTH, AND THE

BACCHANALIA OF LIBERTY

A Temporal Exhalation

Hymn

REASON AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF

A CREDENT REGALE

Penitent Skies

To Tenderest Purity

REALIZED DESIRE AND THE INFINITE BOUNDED

I Marysa

II The Winter Princess

III Ariel in Excelsus

BEAUTY IS THE ONLY MORAL COMPASS

Renegade Pearl

To Her Asleep

Night Storm

THE DEATH OF THE BEATS

AND THE AESTHETIC OF THE VILE

A Mortality Enclosed

HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY

The Immortal Words

Apollo Belvedere

* The complexities of this trick pulled by Yeats are explored more fully in another essay.