On the Intention of the Poet

Does he want to injure, or heal? Is he base, or noble? Would he transgress and so ruin his patrimony, or elaborate and so glorify it?

It is in practice pretty easy to tell, no? It is not after all so hard to parse this, or therefore to decide which side deserves your lot. Go then; decide. Which poet shall you heed?

There is in the final analysis nothing else that is in your power. Everything else, from the morning coffee to the changing of the diaper to the valor of the battlefield is a faint echo – a mighty, magnificent, immensely important echo – of this basic decision.

Is it about you, you worm? Or is it about something more? If it is about something more, then: is it about the Ultimate, or is it about something damnably less?

Let’s on with it then, brothers. Into the fray. Deus vult!

 

Traditionalism is the Reductio of Modernity

The tradition of modernity is to repudiate tradition per se. It’s right there in the term: ‘modern’ is from Late Latin modernus, from Latin modo, “just now.” So ‘modern’ means “what is just now.”

Traditionalists take the modern tradition with utmost seriousness, thoroughness, and consistency: they repudiate the tradition of modernity.

Traditionalists are the iconoclasts of iconoclasm. So likewise are they then the true postmodernists. In their hearts and in their minds, and so far as is possible in their acts, they live into whatever it is that shall inevitably ensue, once modernity has finished eating itself, and collapsed; once the people have awakened and shaken it off like a nightmare or Soviet Communism.

Traditionalists are ransacking the cupboards on the morning after Belshazzar’s Feast, looking for the coffee as the sour dregs of the Party lapse into biliary nausea, bitter existential regret, and alcoholic coma, and as the Persians begin to assemble their siege engines.

The Orthosphere Has Begun to Succeed

How can we tell that we are on the right track? When they are shooting at you, you know you are over the target. Maybe not the target you took off to destroy, but a worthy target nonetheless.

We learned over the last few days that we seem to have been shadowbanned by the orcs at Facebook. Professor Cocks and a regular commenter both tried to post links to Orthosphere essays to Facebook pages, and both got instead messages that such links to us are disallowed because they are not pc. Or something.

Terrific news, right?

They are scared of us. Yes, folks, the Enemy is scared even of the Orthosphere, with our puny traffic. We seem to have them on the run!

So, here’s to more posts on abstruse Christian metaphysics, ancient political economy, pulp fiction, folk music and 20th Century composers, Texas geography and history, aetymology, Berdyaev and Gödel, physics and the Church, and so forth.

Oh, and that stuff about monarchy and reaction. I suppose that’s how they twigged us. Or perhaps it was the rumor a few years ago that we were the rightmost site of the reactionary web. Shucks, folks; it’s not that we are *trying* to be outrageous.

The lesson seems clear. Speak the truth, *about anything,* anything at all. That will do the trick.

Onward, friends.

******

PS: if any of you have expertise or experience in replicating a site, I’d like to hear from you. If FB has banned us, I suppose it is only a matter of time until WordPress does likewise. We’ll need a fallback option. All I know how to do is download the site to my drive. More than that is needed, if we are to keep flying missions over Enemy territory.

More Knife-Edged Comedy from J. P. Sears

Calling All Evangels: Battle Stations!

So here’s a question, quite serious: have you been feeling unusually depressed in 2020? Have you been feeling more and more depressed, over the course of the year? Have your feelings of depression been far more intense than any you have ever experienced?

The question arises from my recent correspondence with an orthospherean friend of many years – of many more years than there has been such a thing as The Orthosphere (most of you would recognize her name) – in which I learned that she, like me, has been thinking about death a lot over the last few months. I learned from her also of the recent suicide of a prominent pastor. That got me thinking.

The Incipience of Irresistible Truth

Things are come over the last few days, and indeed hours, to a peculiarly acute pitch in America, and so in the wider West of which she is by historical accident – which is to say, by divine Providence – at present the head. America is now, for better or worse, the lead ram of the herd. Whither America goes, the rest shall follow. So we find that the entire West is at this hour poised on a world historical knife’s edge. If things go one way in America, the entirety of Christendom outside Russia will fall into rank apostasy, and so, into social chaos, poverty, and war. If they go the other, then might the West join with our Russian brothers in a renascence of Christian orthodoxy, and so of social health; of sanity, and so of peace, and of justice.

Green Grocer Placards, circa 2020

The Concerted Salients of Our Demoralization

The morale of the West – and, thus, its capacity to morality under pressure, so then its economic vigor and geopolitical power – has throughout 2020 been assaulted on many fronts at once, more and more acutely. It is odd that things seem to have gone so badly in so many ways, all at the same time, and as it were in concert. The question naturally arises, whether that concert is orchestrated.

Never Panic

There are two options now before me; before America; before the West; before Christendom, as we all approach what seems to be a cultural crisis hundreds of years in the making: either to panic, or to commend our spirits to God, so renewing our pledge of fealty to him our Captain, and then to keep fighting, and before all else to keep praying.

There must be a demonic aspect to the present crisis. Our adversaries on all sides are too various, distributed and yet spookily coordinated for any merely human agency to have organized them so well. Another clue to their demonic inspiration: they are rather dense, as befits an army dedicated to confusion and disorder. They make stupid, obvious mistakes, such as threatening election officials – a federal offense – and then posting recordings of those threats online.

Synchronistically, I just finished the book Daimonic Reality: a Field Guide to the Otherworld, by Patrick Harpur. I have been reading about demons and angels a lot over the last five years or so. I had not wondered why, until yesterday morning. The topic is interesting, but so are many others. Why had I got on to it? Perhaps, I then thought for the first time, out of the blue: perhaps, it has something to do with our present crisis. Perhaps I have been prepared. Or we: for, I am not special. Lots of people in recent years have begun to take angels and demons rather more seriously than had been the case since 1900 or so.

On to Martyrdom & Everlasting Victory

Whatever the outcome of the present electoral controversy in the United States, it seems that we are bound soon to some radical political crisis, that will profoundly shape the American future – and, so, the future of all Christendom, such as she still is.