Behind Blue Eyes

No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes

And no one knows what's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free

No one knows what it's like
To feel these feelings
Like I do, And I blame you!
No one bites back as hard
On their anger
None of my pain and woe
Can show through

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free

No one knows what it's like
To be mistreated
To be defeated
Behind blue eyes
No one knows how to say
That they're sorry and don't worry
I'm not telling lies


But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free

No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man,
To be the sad man,
Behind blue eyes.

-The Who

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaekgRtsTiQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MSqF_rQ6Mw

The Fugitives

Though many American poets have attended universities and taught in them, the Fugitives remain the one outstanding poetic school which developed naturally from a campus environment. The fact that a university was as much the "native" environment for the Fugitives as the South tends to demonstrate that for a long time it was the last stronghold of European aristocratic culture in the midst of a thriving democratic society. If the American university is no longer such an aristocratic stronghold, being forced, like the South, to yield to egalitarian pressures, nevertheless, during the period when the Fugitives were most active, it could be said that the university was the South, or at least the most enduring part of it.

Something like this has to be said, in order to make clear the ambivalent role the Fugitives played as Southerners. That they were Southerners, there can be no doubt, as much as Robert Frost was a New Englander or Robinson Jeffers a Westerner. But from the first, their loyalties were mixed: "THE FUGITIVE flees from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South," they proclaimed in their first issue, and in all subsequent issues they continued to argue the point. There was at first no consciously regional bias in their poetry; in fact they quarreled publicly with what they took to be the restrictive view of Southern culture, as expressed in an editorial in Poetry magazine that seemed to call for a Southern poetry that would be nostalgically and quaintly local. When Harriet Monroe, the editor, disclaimed such a view in her next issue, The Fugitive editors explained that "we fear to have too much stress laid on a tradition that may be called a tradition only when looked at through the haze of a generous imagination." They made it clear that they were against both "atavism" and "sentimentality" in Southern writing, vices that were all too familiar in the "moonlight and magnolia" school that had arisen in the South after the Civil War. In an editorial in the June, 1924, issue of The Fugitive, Davidson listed among the "Fallacies of Modern Poetry" the assumption that "A Good Poet must have Local Color." He went on to explain:

"Frost has written of New England, Sandburg of Chicago, but whatever is good in their poetry is good not merely because they wrote of specific places. Place is incidental; it is subordinate; it may even form a definite limitation, and perhaps does in the case of much American poetry. At the best, it is merely a picturesque addition, not the inner substance of poetry."

Perhaps the best evidence that the Fugitives were not sentimentally, but critically, Southern is to be found in their poetry, where the ironic tone cuts through the veil of myth surrounding the scenes and characters, and reveals the age and decay crumbling the Old South into ruin. Ransom wrote of the "Antique Harvesters" that peopled the Southern landscape, looking like figures from a tapestry rather than real farmers with a field to plow, and he made of his "Captain Carpenter" a figure of gentle mockery, a sort of Southern Don Quixote who courageously but weakly defended his code of honor, until finally there was nothing left of him but a carrion for the kites; and he pictured himself in "Old Mansion" as an "intruder" who looked hard at the "house whose legend could in no wise be brief," and mused:

"It was a Southern manor. One need hardly imagine

Towers, white monoliths, or even ivied walls;

But sufficient state if its peacock was a pigeon;

Where no courts held, but grave rites and funerals."

The images of age and death that are present in so much Fugitive poetry are in one sense a link with the earlier Gothic South of Edgar Allen Poe ("Our Cousin, Mr. Poe" as Tate acknowledged in a discreetly appreciative essay), but they are also evidence of the obsolescence of Southern culture, and proof that the poets were much aware of its transience and fragility. In the most famous of Fugitive poems, Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," there is a similar point of reference to earlier Southern poetry (specifically, Henry Timrod's brief "Ode" for the dedication of the Charleston cemetery, just after the Civil War) but an equally strong disclaimer of blind loyalty to the past:

"What shall we say who have knowledge

Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act

To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave

In the house? The ravenous grave?"

Though no solution is found to the poet's dilemma, poised as he is between an unrecoverable, heroic past and an indeterminate, chaotic present, he has no hope of clinging to remembered glories: the isolation of the figure in the cemetery is final, and his only consolation is that it is a common evil all men must face:

"Leave now

The shut gate and the decomposing wall:

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,

Riots with his tongue through the hush -

Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!"

Tate's Southern version of The Waste Land shows man trapped in time, honoring the past but unable to live by it, a victim of his own self-consciousness, tempted like Narcissus to embrace his own image and drown, but too stoic to give in to the despair he feels in the presence of evil and death. As Davidson perceptively wrote to Tate after seeing an early manuscript version of the "Ode" in 1927: "Your Elegy is not for the Confederate dead, but for your own dead emotion..."

There is so much in Fugitive poetry, in fact, that directly parallels the experience so powerfully expressed in that other great writer of the modern South, William Faulkner, who was equally severe in criticizing the land he never ceased to love. To place Tate's "Ode" beside such novels as Sartoris or The Sound and the Fury, written at almost the same historical moment, is to see how strikingly they portray a common experience: that of the South in crisis, too weak to throw off the old shell of the past, so entangled in an outworn tradition that the only choice left to the sensitive individual is suicide, a choice actually taken by Bayard Sartoris and Quentin Compson in Faulkner's novels, and vividly imagined by the spokesman in Tate's poem. Only the tragic grandeur and sympathy of the portrayal in each case relieves the hopelessness of the human situation.

To place Faulkner beside the Fugitives is only to recognize the dominant roles they have played in the Renaissance of modern Southern literature. Between them, the spoils may be almost equally divided. If Faulkner is unquestionably greater as an isolated genius, the Fugitives have been greater as a civilizing instrument in Southern letters. There is still no novelist the equal of Faulkner anywhere in the South, and there are still no poets who can compare with the Fugitives in sustained achievement. If Faulkner is the prize example of the natural talent, or what might be called the rewards of self-education, the Fugitives are the prize examples of the tutored talent, or the rewards of formal education. What bound them together as artists and men was loyalty to their native region, in spite of its decadence, and adherence to the old ideal of Jeffersonian Agrarianism.

This is not to identify the Fugitives with the Agrarians, which would only lead to confusion. The Fugitives and the Agrarians were two separate schools, one of which was exclusively literary, the other just as exclusively social and political. The Agrarians were not organized until after the Fugitives had disbanded, and then they included only four members - albeit the major ones - of the previous group: Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren. The Southern Agrarians, whose symposium, I'll Take My Stand, aroused so much criticism as a "reactionary" social document, must be understood in the context of the Depression years, when radical solutions to the American financial crisis were being proposed on all sides. The Agrarians were political idealists of the South, who tried to take a broad view of the common predicament, and who believed as Jefferson had believed (and as Faulkner also believed) that human culture has its grass roots in agriculture: destroy the intimate relation between man and nature, their argument ran, and you destroy the fertility of human imagination, and with it both men's satisfaction with life and their pleasure in art. The belief in an agrarian society was too deeply rooted in Southern life and character to be easily out-grown, and when the crisis of the American industrial system came, it was natural for Southerners to turn to what they thought was the one sure way of sustaining life and character. The Fugitives had not been conscious regionalists; in fact, they had opposed the regional approach to poetry; but in becoming responsible critics of society, they discovered their regional bias.

As Tate put it for the whole Fugitive group:

"They were willing to draw upon all the resources of poetry that they knew, for it was obvious that their sectionalism, if it existed, and their nationalism, if that existed, would take care of themselves...Fugitive poetry turned out to be profoundly sectional in that it was supported by the prejudices, feelings, values, into which the poets were born."

What is most Southern in Fugitive poetry is more than Agrarianism; it is a special compound of local qualities, some of which are historical, some geographical, and some temperamental. Among the historical, one would include the many Classical references, the Greek names and Latin phrases, that so richly season this poetry. The Fugitive poets, like the little girls in Katherine Anne Porter's story, Old Mortality, seem to have been brought up in the belief that "one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments" But the historical would also include the broad perspective from which these poets view the contemporary world:

"Where we went in the boat was a long bay

A slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone -

Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,

And we went there out of time's monotone:"

So begins Tate's "The Mediterranean," with a majestic sweep of space and time that seems to place one above the earth, looking down from a great height. Again,

"We are the children of an ancient band

Broken between the mountains and the sea,"

writes Warren, seeing his westward-moving race in a more tragic Exodus to the Promised Land, which they can never quite reach or claim. Southern poetry, like Southern culture, is heavy with the historical sense, which as T.S. Eliot defined it in a famous passage

"compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer on and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."

The geographical element is equally prominent in this poetry, not as quaint "local color," or painted backdrop, but as a felt relation to the land:

"Autumn days in our section

Are the most used-up thing on earth

(or in the waters under the earth)

Having no more color nor predilection

Than cornstalks too wet for the fire,

A ribbon rotting on the byre,

A man's face weathered as straw

By the summer's flare and winter's flaw."

It must have been just such a stanza that inspired so cosmopolitan an American poet as Wallace Stevens to exclaim: "Mr. Ransom's poems are composed of Tennessee." Reading through a collection of Fugitive poetry, one realizes anew that the South has a religion of place, a mystique of locale, that is impossible to defined by any means except poetry. Southerners specialize in local deities, and can raise a wild bear into an image of God, as in Faulkner's The Bear, or can penetrate deep into the wilderness, as in Davidson's "Sanctuary," where

"Men have found

Images carved in bird-shapes there and faces

Moulded into the great kind look of gods."

This same Southern love of place is what forms half its temperament, for the slowness of motion and speech, the indolence and "drawl," as well as the hot-bloodedness, are properties the climate instills in all races of the South. The other half of the Southern temperament, however, is not a matter of climate, but has to do with the feudal character of Southern society; it comes out in the courtly politeness of manner, the reverence for the aged and the dead, the sense of stability and permanence in human values - all vestiges of the older order of things. It does not matter that the South failed to establish this "old order" in the New World for more than a few generations, at most; what matters is that the feeling for a hierarchical social order remains, like the love of land and the faith in God, as a kind of essential rightness, to betray which would be to betray oneself, and to lose heart completely:

"True, it is said of our Lady, she ageth,

But see, if you peep shrewdly, she hath not stooped;

Take no thought of her servitors that have drooped,

For we are nothing; and if one talk of death -

Why, the ribs of the earth subsist frail as a breath

If but God wearieth."

------

Though the poets dropped their pseudonyms, after two issues of The Fugitive, and revealed their proper names, they left the name of their magazine undefined. "It seemed to be a secret among us, though no one knew what the secret was," Ransom said many years later. That it was a secret, even to members of the group, points to the esoteric nature of their compact, and links them with the Imagists before them, and still earlier, with the French Symbolists, the original group from which all modern poetry has sprung. But it points even further, to the necessary mystery surrounding poetry in all places and times, indicating its ultimately religious source. Sydney Hirsch may have been wrong in many of his fanciful etymologies, but he was right in his primary intuition that poetry is a sacred art, an attempt always to translate the Word of God into the words of men, and he is usually credited with inventing the name, "Fugitive." What he may have meant by it remains a mystery, but was probably best explained by Tate, who put it that "A Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer, or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the secret wisdom of the world." The shared belief of the Fugitives that poetry was something more than a pastime or diversion, that it was truly a divine calling, gave a dimension to their work that made even the most trivial poem seem somehow to participate in the universal human experience, passing beyond the limitations of the provincial.

Besides the esoteric sense of the term "Fugitive," there was also what might be called the emergent sense: that defined by the poems themselves. It is this sense that now gives fullest meaning to the world, in the light of more than half a century of accumulated poetry. In its emergent sense, the term "Fugitive" becomes one of the prime equivalents for "modern man." For, contrary, to their desire to recover an older, communal experience of men living together on the land they loved - call it the "Old South," the "Golden Age," the "Garden of Eden," what you will - the pull of modern experience forced them to express recurrent images of isolation and alienation. The Fugitives, like other modern artists, had their Existential moments of despair, and were brought to face loneliness as a permanent human condition. It is to be found in the earliest of their poems, as in the lines of Warren's "To a Face in a Crowd":

"we must meet

As weary nomads in this desert at last,

Borne in the lost procession of these feet."

It appears again in Davidson's "Sanctuary," and even more eloquently, in his late, fine tribute, "Lines Written for Allen Tate on his Sixtieth Anniversary," which speaks of

"us, deliberate exiles, whose dry rod

Blossoms athwart the Long Street's servile rage

And tells what pilgrimage greens the Tennessee sod."

The "weary nomads" and the "deliberate exiles" are other names for the Fugitives, who could not flee from the common fate of man in this century. Most convincing of all is Warren's "Ballad of Billie Potts," a story of outlaws in western Kentucky told to him as a child, which has essentially the same plot as Albert Camus' Le Malentendu (The Misunderstood), the strange Existential drama of a murder occurring in eastern Europe. It is unlikely that Warren's poem and Camus' play have a common source, but there is not mistaking the similarity of character and theme, for both are parables of the Prodigal Son in reverse: they show that when human identity becomes lost, man becomes a prey to man, and even parents may be brought by unforeseen circumstances to murder their own child.

To stress the Existential meaning of the name "Fugitive" is only to suggest that the poetry of the modern South, like the fiction of the modern South, has been as much an expression of the age we live in as the literature of any other region. What gives Southern writing its special perspective is the sense of the distance, in time and space, between the South as a last remnant of European feudal society, with a landed gentry and a peasantry still rooted to a single spot of earth, and the largely undifferentiated mass society of the modern industrialized metropolis, with its restless and haunted multitudes. Fleeing from a vanishing culture into a relatively cultureless world, the Southern writer has experienced a profounder sense of shock than many of his contemporaries - except for those expatriate Americans like Eliot and Pound, who made the long voyage from the New World to the Old, and who lived in a different kind of exile during their distinguished and controversial careers.

-William Pratt, excerpted from his essay entitled "In Pursuit of the Fugitives" introducing The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective. J.S. Sanders and Company, Nashville: 1991.

3D Art Portfolio

Digital Sculpture - 3D Max/Zbrush

Statement -

The process that I generally employ in my 3D projects is Technecromancy, which is a poetic way of describing the use of technology to bring history to life. Technology is about the future but it also offers humanity powerful new tools to amplify its reflective historic experience. Photographs, old paintings, sketches, and the dusty tomes accounting previous experience are not obsolete items. In my view, these older relics are the programs and specifications whereby we can reanimate the past and recombine it into a more dynamic present and future speculation. My thesis is that the energy of a culture depends on its ability to access its history imaginatively. By utilizing contemporary software developments, the past is no longer a dead yesterday but a living portal to another dimension.

Technecromancy - Using Technology to bring History to life

Character Development -

game character - 3d max - "Thelucian"

3D Game Character - "Aquarius"

Level Design -

3d Max Scene - racetrack through oak tree tunnel in 1911 Savannah

A recreation of the 1911 automobile races in Savannah, Georgia

The red Fiat and white Lozier vie for the lead

 Vehicles -

3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Mercer

3/4 view - Mercer

1911 Mercer - wireframe

1911 Mercer - solid

3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat

3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat

3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat wireframe

3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat solid

Trailer for Proposed "Race in Savannah" Game


Architecture

Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House

Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured

Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured 3/4 view

Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured Closeup Front

Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured Closeup Front Porch

Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - wireframe

Gilded Age Mansion - Interior - Wilson House Ballroom

Gilded Age Mansion - Interior - Wilson House Ballroom CU - Chandelier

Importing Levels into Unreal Tournament 2004

Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd
Infiltration of the Knights Templar Lodge

Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd
Infiltration of the Knights Templar Lodge

Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd
Uncle Sam's Amusement Park

Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd
Uncle Sam's Amusement Park

The Automaton Organism - Symbol of Avatar function and the bipolar operation of the US federal mechanism

The Automaton Organism - 3d Max / Photoshop / Zbrush

The Automaton Organism - 3d Max / Photoshop / Zbrush 3/4 view

The Automaton Organism - 3d Max / Photoshop / Zbrush - back view

Uncle Sam's Amusement commences

 Lip-synch Animation

The Automaton Organism - Animation sequence


Miscellaneous

Game Weapon - The Magnetic Attractor - coded to attract enemy weaponry out of opponent's hands and into one's personal arsenal

Maya model - Men of War

3d Max/ZBrush - The Super Eye

3d Max/ZBrush - The Super Eye variation

3D Max / Zbrush - Digital Rose

3d Max/ZBrush - Digital Rose variations

3d Max/ZBrush - Digital Rose variations

3d Max/ZBrush - Digital Rose variations

The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry

The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry variations

The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry variations

The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry variations

3d Max - The Caduceus Ride

sketch for Caduceus Ride within USA

on the Left Hand Path

Evola terms the Left-Hand Path as the "Vajrayana" ("Way of the Diamond" or "Way of the Thunderbolt"). I refrain from paraphrasing because the strength of his prose stands on its own:

...mankind living in this age[i.e. Kali-Yuga-Iron Age-Wolf Age], is strictly connected to the body and cannot prescind from it; therefore, the only way open is not that of pure detachment (as in early Buddhism and in the many varieties of yoga) but rather that of knowledge, awakening, and mastery over secret energies trapped in the body(3).

...during the last age elementary, infernal, and even abyssal forces are untrammeled.

The immediate task consists in facing and absorbing these forces, in taking the risk of "riding the tiger," to use a Chinese expression that may best describe this situation, or "to transform the poison into medicine"(4)...

...the goddesses of the bright and prevalently maternal kind, who preserved their pre-Aryan nature, have become pivotal in those popular and devotional religious movements paralleling Tantrism, which shared with Tantrism an intolerance for a stereotypical ritualism and for mere speculation. People turned to devotion and to cult ("bhakti" and "puja"), in order to achieve emotional experiences (rasa) with mystical overtones. The natural consequence of this was that the Goddess in her bright aspect became the favorite reference point of the masses, coming to hold almost the same status that the "Mother of God" enjoys in Christian devotion. It must be noticed that this orientation was not a new phenomenon, since one of its roots was Vaishnavism (the cult of Vishnu). What was new, however, almost having the value of a barometric index, was its development and diffusion outside the lower classes of Indian society, to which it had so far been confined, and its blossoming into the so-called Way of Devotion, Bhaktimarga, which had in Ramanuja its chief representative(6-7).

The properly Tantric goddesses, however, are the Shaktis of the Path of the Left Hand, mainly Kali and Durga. Under their aegis Tantrism becomes integrated with Shaivism, the cult of Shiva, while through the bright goddesses it encounters Vaishnavism and the Way of the Right Hand. It is claimed that even Shiva has no Vedic origins: in the Vedas one finds Rudra, who may be considered his equivalent, and who propitiated Shiva's reception in the Hindu pantheon. Rudra, the "Lord of Thunder," is a personification of the divinity in its destructive aspect, that of a "destructive transcendence"; therefore, in more practical terms he is the "god of death," the "slayer." Shaivism exalts Shiva, the embodiment of all the attributes of the supreme deity, as well as the creator portrayed in an awesome and highly symbolical icon, Nataraja, which is his dance representing the rhythm of both the creation and destruction of the worlds. In a Tantric context, Shiva, while preserving the features typical of pure transcendence, is usually associated with a terrifying Shakti, such as Kali and Durga, who personify his own unrestrained and untamable manifestation. When Hinduism canonized the doctrine of "trimurti" (i.e., the three aspects of the one supreme principle, personified in three divinities, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva), the meaning of the two ways, the Right Hand and Left Hand, became clear. The first element in the trimurti is Brahma, the creator god; the second is Vishnu, the god preserving creation and the cosmic order; and the third is Shiva, the destroyer (as a result of his transcendence acting on what is finite and conditioned). The Way of the Right Hand is under the aegis of the first two gods, or aspects of the divine, while the Path of the Left Hand is under the sign of the third God, Shiva(7)...

"Vira" is a term with the same Latin root "vir", which does not describe an ordinary man (homo), but rather an eminent man. The term denotes a manly and "heroic" nature ("vira" is sometimes used a substitute for "hero"), which is essentially determined by the rajas guna. Viras in turn have often been divided into many categories. According to the Kularnava-Tantra, there are right-hand viras (Dakshinachara) and left-hand viras (Vamachara). The latter are considered superior to the former, and the text describes them as warriors (kshatriyas), to emphasize the virtues of strength, boldness, and indifference toward danger(54).

There is a significant difference between the two Tantric paths, that of the right hand and that of the left hand (which are both under Shiva's aegis). In the former, the adept always experiences "someone above him," even at the highest level of realization. In the latter, "he becomes the ultimate Sovereign" (cakravartin = world ruler). This means that the duality between the integrated person and the dimension of transcendence, or between the human and God, has been overcome. All differentiations and subordinate relationships are rendered obsolete once the Shiva condition is achieved. Quite often, in the Buddhist Tantras, Buddha proclaims the viras' and kaulas' law (dharma) to be "beyond the Vedas" and free from the conditionings to which the pashus are subject. The kaulas are said to be extremely powerful both in granting favors and in striking down their enemies, as well as to be capable of enjoying every sensible object without becoming addicted to it. They act under the different disguises of men who comply with moral and social laws (shishta), of men who break those laws (brashta), and even of supernatural and incorporeal beings. Again, in the Buddhist Tantras, Buddha paradoxically upholds the relativity of every moral precept, the uselessness of worship, the insignificance of the five precepts of early Buddhism, and even of the triple homage (triratna) of Buddhist tradition (to the Buddha, to the law and to the monastic community), in terms so blunt that at monastic gatherings the bodhisattvas, those who are on their way toward enlightenment, faint, while the "tathagatas," the enlightened ones, remain unmoved. Hindu Tantras share a similar perspective: the siddha remains pure and unblemished even while performing actions the mere mention of which would automatically damn anybody else(55-6).

...we find constant mention of the invulnerability of those endowed with transcendent knowledge(56).

I find it necessary to emphasize the absolute nature of the ultimate goal, which somehow eludes most Westerners. The goal consists in transcending and in subordinating to oneself every form of existence, whether divine, human, subhuman, material, or spiritual(58)...The goal is to experience all of these things without being overwhelmed, to be transformed and to gain access to the Absolute. One of the fundamental principles of Left-Hand Tantrism consists in never becoming separated from the powers of "pravritti-marga," namely, the descending Shaktic phase of the manifestation. A kaula should rather assume those powers and bring them to the highest degree of intensity whereby they consume themselves. This is the Tantric teaching of Indrabhuti's "Jnanasiddhi," which should nevertheless be kept secret and communicated only to initiates, lest immeasureable evils should follow: "The yogin obtains liberation through the same actions that should keep in hell any other man for ages unending" (59)...

In the Gita the god Krishna incites Arjuna to fight on and to kill even those friends and relatives militating on the enemy's side, declaring that his actions would not generate karma and be considered sinful as long as they were performed in a pure, detached, impersonal way, that is, beyond the ideas of victory and defeat, joy and suffering, good and bad luck, I and Thou...The presupposition of these worrisome aspects of the Path of the Left Hand consists in a similar orientation toward transcendence, and in purity of action. We may say that purity also consists in an ascetic action permitting experiences, such as orgies and cruelty, that were forbidden in the strictest forms of penitential and mortifying asceticism. According to a fundamental Tantric principle, while in other philosophical systems yoga (in the general sense of "sadhana", the practice of leading to overcoming the human condition) and "bhoga" (sheer enjoyment; to be open to every mundane experience) are mutually exclusive, in the kaula's path they coexist. A siddha is one who has arrived at the end of his journey; thus he can do anything he wants and go through all kinds of experiences as long as he remains detached and free from his ego's desires (60-61).

Whenever a passion or an impulse manifests itself as a rising surge, one should neither react nor passively endure it, but should rather open up and actively identify with it, taking care to reserve some strength, so as not to be carried away, but to remain in control of the situation. This state is progressively intensified, bringing the roots to the surface. What is taking place is the union of Shiva, represented by the active siddha, with a shakti(64).

The peculiar characteristic of Tantric yoga lies in the valorization of the body(66)...

...to be pure, capable of proper discrimination, absolutely free from the inclinations typical of the pashus[those dominated by animal instincts], and capable of self-mastery regarding pleasure, pain, anger, and other passions(69).

-Julius Evola, excerpted from "The Yoga of Power:Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way" - Tr. by Guido Stucco. Inner Traditions International. Rochester, Vermont: 1992.

What it takes to be number ONE

Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all-the-time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game, and that's first place. I have finished twice in my time at Green Bay, and I don't ever want to finish second again. There is a second place bowl game, but it is a game for losers, played by losers. It is and always has been an American zeal to be first in anything we do, and to win, and to win, and to win.

Every time a football player goes to ply his trade he's got to play from the ground up - from the soles of his feet right up to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads. That's OK. You've got to be smart to be number one in any business. But more importantly, you've got to play with your heart, with every fiber of your body. If you're lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he's never going to come off the field second.

Running a football team is no different than running any other organization - an army, a political party or a business - the principles are the same. The object is to win, to beat the other guy. Maybe that sounds harsh or cruel. I don't think it is.

It is a reality of life that men are competitive and the most competitive games draw the most competitive men. That's why they are there - to compete. To know the rules and objectives when they get into the game. The object is to win fairly, squarely, by the rules - but to win.

And, in truth, I have never known a man worth his salt, who in the long run, didn't appreciate the grind, the discipline. There is something in good men that really yearns for discipline and the harsh reality of head to head combat.

I don't say these things because I believe in the "brute" nature of men or that man must be brutalized to be combative. I believe in God, and I believe in human decency. But I truly believe that any man's finest hour - his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear - is that moment when he has to work his heart out in a good cause and is exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

-Vince Lombardi

Visions of Order - 3

THE ATTACK UPON MEMORY

Between myth and status and memory there is a necessary connection. Clearly people cannot identify or appreciate status unless they can carry with them a memory of society's hierarchic structure and of the image in response to which it has framed itself. If men were to view one another as created anew each day, they would see themselves in original, not achieved or conferred relations. Every individual's desire is that he will be seen for what he is, and what he is depends upon some present knowledge of this past. The same principle holds for societies and nations. They are their history, and any detraction from the latter is a detraction from their status. It goes without saying that this history is not simply their spans of existence, but their careers in relation to the "mythic cover." Cultural life depends upon the remembrance of acknowledged values, and for this reason any sign of a prejudice against memory is a signal of danger.

Yet from one point of view it seems foolish to write anything directly about memory. No one appears to know in exact terms what memory is. Even the most searching of the psychologists today can(40) give us little more than behavioristic description and hypothetical constructs. Still we are faced with the fact that everyone believes there is such an entity as memory, and there are the reasons given above for insisting that memory plays a highly important role in cultural ordering. In another approach to the problem of what is happening to the synthesis of culture, I shall begin here by listing some things that indicate a decay of memory.

The slogan today is to forget and live in the future. Wherever we look in the "progressive" world we find encouragements not to remember. Increasingly the past is looked upon as a burden. "Forget it and turn to tomorrow" is the orientation of the times. People evince in their very manner a pride in letting go of what has happened and jumping at anything new. The individual conservators of the past exist no more or they are no longer listened to: the grandmother preserving the history and traditions of the family by the fireside, the veteran relating the story of his battles in the shaded courthouse square, even the public orator recalling the spirit of 1776 on commemorative days. There is no "time" to listen to them, and time is of the essence. Frederick Wilhelmsen has summed it up boldly and truly in saying, "history is no longer a category of the consciousness."

Amnesia as a goal is a social emergent of unique significance. I do not find any other period in which men have felt to an equal degree that the past either is uninteresting or is a reproach to them. When we realize the extent to which one's memory is oneself, we are made to wonder whether there is not some element of suicidal impulse in this mood, or at least an impulse of self-hatred. One of the obvious and easy ways to take leave of oneself is to forget, to cease to hold in consciousness what one has been. This is personal annihilation, for no man exists really except through that mysterious storehouse of his remembered acts and his formed personality. His very reality depends upon his carrying the past into the present through the power of memory. If he does not want identity, if he has actually come to hate himself, it is natural for him to try to get rid of memory's baggage. He will travel light. But it will be a deprived kind of traveling, cut down to immediate responses to immediate challenges. The element that makes his life a continuum will be missing and in the absence of this he cannot be a human being(41) capable of culture. To be human is to live extensively in two tenses, the past and the future, both of which require for their construction the mind and therefore the memory. We may not be able to say what memory is, but we can say something about its uses. It supplies material for the faculty of reason and it provides the necessary condition of conscience. This is equivalent to saying that it is essential to intelligence and to soul.

Let us state as accurately as we can conceive it the relationship between these atributes and memory.

Beginning with what has actually been observed, we find that no man has revealed high intelligence in any field of activity without a strong and usually an exceptional memory. I refer, of course, to the kind of intelligence we think of as distinctively human and not the quick and simple registration of the presence of an object of which animals are capable. Intelligence on the human level is an ability to perceive things for what they are and to grasp their relationships. Things in these relationships are often not physically co-present. This means that intelligence involves a considerable amount of causal reasoning, which is the linking of phenomena that occur as antecedents and consequents. William James has pointed out that if we are to think of one thing as occurring after another, we must think of them both together, and this requires that at least one of the items must be supplied by memory. If we think of striking a match, we must remember that matches are ignited by a process of friction. The mere seeing of a match does not apprise us of this unless we can recall such action or have it explained to us in words before we try the act of striking. Intelligence is this power to associate remembered potencies with things seen simply.

In the world of affairs it has been noted many times that men of extraordinary success have had extraordinary memories. Milton, Napoleon, Mozart, to cite a few examples, had tremendous capacity to retain in memory the subjects of their intellectual passion. And what may be of special significance, men of this kind have a way of remembering details which their inferiors consider too trifling to bother with. Probably that is another proof of the relationships between memory and intelligence, for it is the mark of intelligence to see the ramifications that are possible to the smallest detail. It is certainly true that memory is selective, but the selection proceeds according to lines of penetration into significance. By bringing together the past and the present, an encompassing memory gives one(42) a scope of action. The effective men of the world are not cheerful forgetters but painful rememberers. In general all intellectuality rests upon our power to associate things not present or only suggested by what is present. Thus the intellectual value of anything depends upon our ability to retrieve from memory.

In the more formal definition which psychologists frame, "memory" is "remembering." The intellectual nature of the process becomes clear when we realize that remembering involves learning, recall, retention, and recognition and that discovery of meaning is a help both in learning and recalling. "The wider awake the learner," Robert S. Woodworth has written, "the quicker will be his learning and the slower his forgetting."

Thus the part that consciousness has in our relationship with phenomena is largely a matter of memory. The recollection of uniform lines of cause and effect in the world, the recollection of who we are and of what we are committed to, are equipment for dealing with experience.


It is therefore impossible to imagine a high grade or effective intelligence without things supplied by the remembering process. We cannot put two and two together without some work of retention and recall. In the absence of "memory traces," however these may be described, no kind of intellectual activity could be carried on by the individual. It seems beyond question then that any attack upon memory, insofar as this metaphor expresses real facts, is an attack upon mind.

For a comparable set of reasons, memory is essential to soul. Soul may be defined, for the purposes of this exposition, as an integrative power binding the individual into an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual unity which is his highest self. I realize that some modern readers will be put off by this term. If they wish to read in its place "psyche" or "personality," these will serve as approximations of what I am dealing with, and the assertions which can be made with regard to them will express the point. If we grant that there is in the human being some such integrative unity, it seems inescapable that memory is essential to it. We have already noted that without memory the individual cannot preserve his conscious identity. Without this he cannot recall his needs of the past, remote and near, which make it obligatory for him to do certain things today. Without memory he would be unable to imporve his ethical being because he(43) would have no recollection of those thoughts and acts which left him less than satisfied with himself. He could have no conscience because conscience means conscious self-judgment. If there is one thing that is inseparable from soul, it is an awareness that "this is I doing this." At the heart of soul, to speak figuratively, is responsibility involves widened associations. Moral nature cannot be ordered except with reference to one's identity, which has its formation through history, and this fact is recognized in very practical ways. When an offender is put on probation, he is expected to show, in the probationary period, that he has learned from his misdeeds and that he is consciously framing his life so as not to "forget them" but to be guided away from them. When a convicted man is released from prison, society watches for some time to see whether he will behave himself, and thus prove that he has learned from his errors. In areas that do not involve wrongdoing it takes time to "establish a character." There is point in the saying that youth has no character because it has not had time for the kind of self-direction by which character is formed.

To approach the matter from another side, a fastidious memory is among the first things that we observe in people who impress us as having a soul. They are conscious of their past selves in ways that leave them defined. We feel that there is nothing loose or detached about them; everything they do is notified to the whole being because that being is integrated. That is why we feel in these cases that we are dealing with a person. Memory seems a necessary condition for those lives which have a kind of consistent eloquence in that they are expressive of a point of view and a moral passion. A religious or moral man's first reminder to himself on any critical occasion is to remember who he is. Plato makes the point that even (44) those who have a natural talent for philosophy cannot progress in it unless they have a good memory.

Attitudes like that of the present day toward memory are always referable to general overriding ideas. In this instance we can trace a parallel between the altered view of the world which accompanied seventeenth-century scientific achievement and the altered evaluation of the recollecting process. The effect was to change the concept of memory from that of an active faculty of a special being to that of a passive capacity of a being more and more identified with the physical world. The first great step in this change was the mechanist psychology which began with the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This philosopher attempted to dispose of the whole complex subject by declaring that memory is "decayed sense." At once this reduces memory to the status of sensation and makes it subject to a physiological wearing out. Hobbes was followed by John Locke, who saw something more than this in memory, but who nevertheless supported the physicalist conception of it. He admitted that "memory, in an intellectual creature, is necessary in next degree to perception," and that memory is often active, since the mind may turn "the eye of the soul upon some memory image." Nevertheless, his general conception of the mind generated a profoundly misleading idea which lasted until the intensive study given to psychology in our own day proved it fallacious. This was expressed in his famous statement that the mind is "white paper, devod of all characters." The sensations we get through expereince write upon this paper and are the source of the content of the mind. The ideas which make the deppest and most lasting impression are the ones accompanied by pleasure and pain. Other ideas "quickly fade and often vanish right out of the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves than shadows do flying over a field of corn." Locke carried the doctrine further by asserting that the constitution of the body affects this process, since in some persons the brain "retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand."

We must realize that a false analogy can be extremely misleading and can produce long-lasting error. People are interested and pleased by the point of correspondence they can perceive; not many will go beyond these to see where the correspondence ceases to find how many are the points of difference which emerge in a complete comparison. Such has been the consequence of Locke's figure of the mind as a tabula rasa and of memory as the endurance of things written on it. So ill-founded is this analogy that a contemporary psychologist has felt it necessary to write: "There is no true analogy to memory to be found in the inorganic realm." Although some present-day psychologists are willing to speak of "memory traces," they admit they have no knowledge as to how these affect the structure of the mind. Something is left there by the process of memory, but how and where we cannot say, and the mind is certainly not a headstone with its inscriptions weathering away with the passage of time.


Indeed, it is now established that forgetting is not due merely to the lapse of time. If forgetting were simply a process of mechanical weathering, the experiences of our youth would be uniformly dimmer in recollection than those of last year or of last week. We know, on the contrary, that certain of an individual's pictures, though many decades old, are as clear in the mind as some from the recent past. It is a common observation, furthermore, that people in old age tend to recover the memories of their youth, so that they can relate with more detail something that occurred in their distant childhood than something that occurred but yesterday.


Nor is it true that these memories of long persistence are always produced by strong sensations at the moment. Some of the most vivid memories we have are of certain things to which the name "epiphany" applies. These are objects of mind that seem miraculously endowed with clarity - things caught in a moment of illumination so that they stand forth vivid in form and nature. The image of a companion, of children at play, of a street scene, of a seasonal landscape, will now and then register with a peculiar force and distinctness, as if posed for portraiture, even though we have little personal interest in the subject and are not much agitated in the personal interest in the subject and are not much agitated in the senses. The scene suddenly arranges itself in some kind of authenticity, and we remember it in a way that cannot be explained through mechanical impression or through our need to remember it.


This suggests that memory has a way of life of its own apart from anything that can be accounted for in physiological psychology. To a great extent memory is under the direction of personality, and this probably explains its high degree of selectivity. People remember what they are oriented toward out of a personal and mysterious complex of needs. There is the kind of man who can spend (46) an entire day with another person without being able to recall the type or even the color of the clothing the other person was wearing. There are persons who have gone to work in the same building for years, but who could give one hardly the vaguest description of the facade of that building. They have "looked" at these things, but they have not become conscious of them in the way that is essential to remembering. A story is told of a certain distinguished professor of philosophy who had to appear in court following a minor traffic accident. One of the questions asked him by the opposing attorney was, "What is the make of the car you drive?" To the infinite merriment of the courtroom he was unable to remember.


I cite these examples to show that memory is not simply the product of repeated association, but of inclination and focus. This points toward the conclusion that memory and the life of the mind are one active process, and that this process is constructive. Impressions endure not simply from the original engraving but from their contribution to the outlook which the individual is forming, this fact explaining the retention in mind of "epiphanies." So memory, intelligence, personality, and soul all seem related, although in a way that may defy further analysis. What we feel justified in saying by way of summary is that memory is active, is selective, and is probably creative. It furnishes the things which we need if "need" is defined in a very broad way, so as to include matters affecting the personality and the spirit of man. This is not to say that memory is a reconstructing of the past to suit our convenience, as some historians have argued that we should reconstruct history. It may, however, mean penetrating more deeply into the significance of past events and in this way altering their status and changing the perspective of the individual.


Usually persons learn things when they set themselves to learn, and correspondingly they remember what they prepare themselves to remember, not when they merely throw themselves open to impressions. As for the opposite process of forgetting, Professor Woodworth believes that is due chiefly to two things: atrophy through disuse and interference. If our memories are not somehow ministrative to what we need to do and to the way in which we need to represent ourselves, or to our desire to integrate our view of existence, they may fade out. They very fact that the process of remembering may strengthen memory points again to the active and constructive employment by the mind of these "traces." In the second case (47) memory may be diminished if there is too much scattering of attention through interference or the competition of other things which break up one's concentration. It should not go unnoticed that recollection means "re-collection" or the gathering of things together. Sometimes we say that a person has or has not "recollected himself" in reference to the act of bringing his identity to consciousness. It is just this act of pulling together things which have an attractive nucleus of significance that produces units of identity and meaning. If the individual is too distracted to manage this, we often say that he is "beside himself" or that he is not in possession of his faculties. This is the acute stage of disorganization, but the mild state seems to occur whenever people are less able to concentrate their memories than their highest rational welfare requires.


Despite these actualities, we find today a large and growing cult of presentism, cherished both as an individual credo and as a social philosophy. Presentism, generally defined, is the belief that only existence in the present can give significance to a thing. The passage of time not only retires things from temporal existence but also deprives them of value and meaning. In this belief there is a small portion of truth, which is that the enactment of history renders simple conversion of what is past into the present impossible. But when the concept is applied to ideas, significances, and values, it is manifestly untrue, unless one regards these as simply relative to their times, which no intellectual and moral being can persist in doing. The ideas of past epochs are in some cases more limited than ours; in others they are less so; in any case this is a judgment for the imagination to make and not for the simple sense of historic time. Plato and Aristotle were not, of course, without limitations, but they have told us more about man and society than any two since their time who could be named; Shakespeare wrote before the Enlightenment, but his understanding of tragedy surpasses anything that has appeared since.


The identification of truth and contemporaneity rests upon a false assumption; the present actually has nothing to add to the verity of an idea. The more rigorously this thought is examined, the more justifiable it will seem. For when we come to analyze the real nature of time we are forced to see that the present does not really exist, or that, at the utmost concession, it has an infinitesimal existence. The man who pretends to exist in this alone would cut himself off from almost everything. There is a past and there is a future, but the (48) present is being translated into the past so rapidly that no one can actually say what is the present. If we say that everything should be for the present, we must quickly divorce ourselves from each past moment and at the same time not attend to those subjective feelings, born of past experience, which are our picture of the future. There can be no fulfillment through the mere present. In fulfillment we live in memory with its satisfaction over achievement and in pictures of the future. The richness of any moment or period comes through the interweaving of what has been with what may be. If every moment past is to be sloughed off like dead skin and a curtain is to be drawn upon future probabilities, which are also furnished by the mind, the possibilities of living and of enjoyment are reduced to virtually nothing. So without memory and the extrapolation which it makes possible man becomes a kind of waif, without a home to say he is from or to feel he is going to. Look as they will, the advocates of seeking everything in the present are without a theory. The best they can do is to juggle terms so as to make it appear that what a man wants he can have without assuming responsibility for the past.


In a way sermonizing against "presentism" appears pointless because, as should now be plain, no one actually lives in the present alone. Those who imagine that they do so are but the victims of a faulty analysis. It is possible, nonetheless, to underestimate the harm which can be done by a delusion. "Presentism" may be only a cult founded upon error, but the error can have long life and exert much influence. We should inquire next about what disposes people today to embrace the present with such relief.


A specific resentment arises from the fact that conscience and memory play the role of disciplinary officer. As was brought out previously, these remind us of what we are, what our commitments have been, what expectations we have aroused in others, and so on. It is memory that directs one along the path of obligation. License is checked, or at least made self-conscious by this monitory awareness. Therefore if we wish to be free in the unphilosophical sense of freedom, we must get rid of mind. Memories inhibit us and even spoil our pleasures. They keep in sight the significance of our lives, which influences and inhibits action. Under the impossible idea of unrestricted freedom, the cry is to bury the past and let the senses take care of the present. It is forgotten that "presence of mind" means "presence of memory." As Jung pointed out, denial of the past is (49) by no means the same thing as consciousness of the present. But making oneself discontinuous with the past sounds bold and enterprising and makes it appear that one is trusting all to momentary experience. The present is empirical, not conceptual, time.



A part of the temptation, then, is the current impulse in favor of general emancipation, which often consists of striking at restraints without considering what they preserve. In the absence of the identifications which are supplied by memory, the individual becomes Walt Whitman's "simple, separate person."" Whitman is notorious for wishing to cast away the baggage of the past; the divine moment in which he was sunning himself on the grass or riding happily in a crowded omnibus was sufficient to itself. His romantic expansiveness wished to be free of old lessons and present obligations. Although there is in this an attractive waywardness, it will hardly stand examination as social philosophy.



To arrive at this naturalistic state of society, we would have to discard those things designated by the term "mind." For this self-isolation and self-reduction of the individual involves a pulling away not only from such of the past as is denominated history, but also from that pattern of rules and restraints by which society is presently represented in our memory. We know through our power of recollection that certain attitudes exist; if we run counter to them, we meet forces which oppose us; if we avail ourselves of them, we accomplish more than we could by an isolated effort. Hence in the actual world those who have the widest consciousness of this complex of forces are best equipped for successful endeavor, and those who have little meet with checks and failures.



The "simple, separate person," however he may be celebrated in romantic lyrics, is not prepared for the world of action and liability. Both his simplicity and his separation are flauntings of mindlessness which do not permit human beings to live together on the basis of cultural contacts.



A second factor behind the cult of presentism is that it serves that curious fetish "adjustment." The term itself signifies adaptation to the physical world and reconcilement to the idea that man is only part of this. "Mind" has always carried connotations of the transcendental, not to say the supernatural; at least it has always been thought that through mind man cognizes the things that are beyond time and nature. As long as the existence of such an entity was granted, man could not be completely identified with matter. The (50) rhetoric of material progress tells us to put faith in material things, and mind cannot be reduced to matter. So memory, as the content of the mind, falls under disparagement. Every reader of current thinking knows that "merely mental" and "merely subjective" are in general use as derogatory phrases. Therefore what has to be supplied by the mind does not have the same substsantive standing as what is presented by the sense. The balance has been tilted so far in this direction that a hidden premise becomes established, and those creations which are products of mind are now treated as ephemeral. When they stand in the way of certain physical adjustments, they are likely to be regarded even as evidences of psychopathology. The trend of this thinking is to say that only those persons who are alert in the way that animals are can be considered adapted to living, and we have already seen the respects in which this narrows down the content of living.


I have mentioned the doubts that ought to occur to anyone who attempts to say, much less to do, something about an entity as hard to define as memory. One has the feeling of coping with a subject which may not even exist in the forms in which he has had to conceive it. Still, if the account which has been offered is reasonably true, we are faced with a social fact of great significance, which calls for some kind of countermeasure. If the present general attitude toward memory is harmful, if it does encourage the cultivation of mindlessness, the social critic should propose some countermeasure. Perhaps the best we can imagine, in a situation as difficult as this one, is a rhetoric of counterattack. If there is an assault upon memory, we can direct our effort against those forces which are attacking or undermining in the hope of changing the prevailing attitude toward those things which are inimical to the habit of recollection.


The most effective countermeasure would be to define more exactly the province of science. There would follow from this a change of the outlook which turns in a spirit of helplessness toward science as the arbiter of human life. Not only is physical science by its proper definition and its mode of operation irrelevant to the world of value and feeling, but it also by its very process emphasizes discontinuity. Science as a whole is constantly superannuating itself. But the superannuation of scientific fact is quite a different thing from the accumulation of wisdom. Science can largely forget its past and profit thereby; the individual, to repeat this point, must (51) remember his past in order to preserve his identity and give direction to his life. It is misleading to analogize life with scientific progress. Modern man lives in a world in which the fantastic is ever just around the corner owing to the accelerating technological revolution. He is less inclined to base his thinking on expectations that "miracles" that come with new physical discoveries. This leaves him less in command of his destiny than before because he becomes less well read in human nature, which is the ultimate determiner of what will be done with the findings of science. in brief he is growing inclined to look in the wrong direction for the knowledge of why things happen. Science in the area of human affairs speaks with a false rhetoric, and this step toward redefining the place of science limits the subjects about which it can convincingly argue.


At this point a new formulation of the difference between science and history would be helpful. Science is the study of what is presently true because uniformly true, of what is abstractly true because generally true. History on the other hand is the memory of all the past with all its uniquenesses, as they were expressed in the concrete matter which is creation. Science makes use of memory because we have seen the role of memory in intelligence, but scientific judgments are rational whereas historical judgments are intuitive. That is to say, to the extent that history offers lessons, these lessons appear intermixed with a great deal that is concrete and particular, and the latter have an influence upon the inferences that can be drawn. The insight of a Winston Churchill into the consequences of an historical development when compared with those of a person educated only in scientific rationalism is that of a sage compared with that of a simpleton. Science teaches through validity; history teaches through eloquence behind which lies the persuasiveness of unique historical fact. If science provides experiments, history provides instances, and this is why even folk memories are more prophetic of what will happen than the prognostications of those who have brought the scientific method into the study of social phenomena. The world depicted by science is a world we do not possess and do not even understand except through a difficult effort of conceptualization, but the world of history we possess in a specially intimate way.


This is our reason for saying that although science has its place, history contains science, and it is from the whole that we derive our truest ideas of what is humanly possible. It therefore needs impressing (52) upon the age that as science encroaches and memory is allowed to retreat, man's predictive power regarding the real forces in history becomes fluctuating and uncertain.


Some opposing center against the great modern force of journalism needs to be found. There is in the nature of great organs of publicity, or in the circumstances which they tend to bring about, something which causes them to cater increasingly to the sensate. The trend can be pointed out in a number of ways: first headlines become larger, then the language employed becomes jauntier and less responsible, next pictures begin to take the place of language, and finally substance itself is changed to appeal to appetites for the lurid, the prurient, and the sadistic. Thus the history of journalism has been a rather steady progress toward sensationalism. At best it seems that about one or two newspapers in a nation are able to resist the trend; the others may give in unwillingly, but they say that surrender is the price of survival. Even magazines once supported by a cultural elite have not escaped this fate. Whatever may be the complex of causes behind this fact of deterioration, it can hardly be denied that the new type of publicity is an encouragement to vivid perception and a discouragement to philosophical association of ideas. The typical modern newspaper is an example of ephemera in a sense in which even the old politically inspired journal was not. These considerations bring one, of course, in sight of the ancient problem of controlling at the source what can be published, a problem on which no one should pronounce without giving the most careful consideration to alternative consequences. It must serve the purpose here to say that modern publicity is a powerful incentive to short memories, which ought to be counteracted in some way. It is as if the reader of journalism were to say, "Let the page retain the perception for me, and give me a fresh perception tomorrow."


Again the need appears to speak up against the uncritical adulation of youth. It is anomalous that a civilization of long history and great complexity should defer to youth rather than to age. The virtues of youth are the virtues of freshness and vitality, but these are not the virtues that fit one to be the custodian of the culture that society has produced. Deferring to youth is another way of weakening continuity. Mark almost any young person, and you notice that he does not see very much, in the sense of understanding what is present to his vision. He perceives, but he does not interpret, and this is (53) because he is too lacking in those memory traces which lead to ideas and concepts. The memoryless part of mankind cannot be the teachers of culture; they are, however, ready learners of it if the real teachers show faith in the value of what they have.


On the positive side, we must re-create in some vivid way the value of historical consciousness. People must be brought to realize that the past has not dropped into nothingness. It is absolutely impossible that the past, because of the fact that it has happened, should be nothing. If it existed only in the form of physiological memory traces, these at least would be something. But far more likely is it that the past exists like the enacted scenes of a great drama, permanently recorded in some great memory and pointing up the significance of all that occurs in the "present."


To sum up, there is more truth in saying that the past is the only thing that exists than in saying that the past has no existence. Such theory as we learn from experience is the contribution of the past, and while this is not the only guide to conduct, it would be disbelief in life and creation to dismiss it as nothing. That is why memory is needed to keep us whole and consistent in opposition to that contrary force which is dissolution. Merely a new attitude toward the past as this functional picture should persuade people, even under the dispersive impulses of modernism, not to neglect the highly human faculty of conceptual memory.


-Richard Weaver