The Inversion of Ghibellinism

In the so-called sect of Bavaria's Illuminati we find a typical example of the overturning of tendencies that I have previously described. This can be seen in the change of meaning undergone by the term Enlightenment. Originally the term referred to suprarational, spiritual illumination; slowly but inexorably, it became synonymous with rationalism, with the theory of "natural light," and with antitradition. We may speak, in regard to it, of a counterfeited subversive use of the right belonging to the initiate alone. The initiate, if truly such, may regard himself to be above the contingent historical forms of a particular tradition; denounce its limitations (if he received the mandate to do so) and place himself above their authority; reject dogmas, because he possesses something higher, namely, a transcendent knowledge that he regards as the ultimate authority; and finally claim for himself the dignity of a free being, because he has freed himself from the bonds of the merely human, inferior nature. To this effect the "free ones" constitute a community of equals, which may be regarded as a true confraternity.

Therefore, if we materialize, secularize, and democratize these aspects of the initiatory right and translate them into individualistic terms, what we have are the fundamental principles of the modern subversive and revolutionary ideologies. The light of mere human reason replaces the illumination, giving rise to the havoc brought about by "free inquiry" and secular criticism. The supernatural is banned or confused with nature. Freedom and equality are illegitimately claimed by the individual who is "conscious of his dignity" (though he is not conscious of being enslaved to his empirical self) and who now arises against any form of established authority, vainly setting himself up as his own ultimate reason for being. I say "vainly" because in the inexorable unfolding of the various phases of modern decadence, individualism has been only a short-lived mirage and a misleading intoxication; the collective and irrational element in the age of the masses and of technology has rapidly overcome the emancipated "individual" who is without roots and without traditions.

166-7
-----

...the initiate who knocks down the Temple's columns and steps over the cross, being admitted, after this, to the Mystery of the ascending and descending stairs with seven steps, must swear revenge and ritually actualize this oath by striking with a dagger the Crown and the Tiara, which are the symbols of the traditional double power, namely, of the regal and pontifical authority. All of this properly conveys the meaning of what Freemasonry, as an occult force of global subversion, has precipitated in the modern world, from the preparation for the French Revolution and the establishment of the American democracy to the revolutions of 1848, World War I, the Turkish revolution, the Spanish revolution, and other analogous events. While in the cycle of the Grail the initiatory realization was conceived in such a way as to be connected with the goal of resurrecting the king, in the abovementioned ritual we have exactly the opposite, namely, the counterfeit of an initiation that is tied to the oath (sometimes expressed with the formula "Victory or Death!) of striking or overturning any authority from above.

In any event, the reason behind these consideratins is to indicate the point where the "legacy of the Grail" and of analogous initiatory traditions stops and where, with the exception of the survival of a few surviving names and symbols, we can no longer detect any legitimate filiation from them. In the specific case of modern Freemasonry the following factors would make it appear as a typical example of a pseudoinitiatory organization: its confused syncretism; the artificiality of most of its hierarchy's degrees (something that even a layman would notice); and the banality of the moralistic, social, rationalistic, and modern exegesis applied to various borrowed elements that have an authentic esoteric character. And yet, considering the "efficient direction" of that organization in reference to the previously mentioned elements and to its revolutionary activity, one cannot help feeling that he is confronting a force that, on the spiritual plane, acts against the spirit itself: a dark force of antitradition and counterinitiation. In that case it is possible that its rites are more harmful than one may think, and that those who partake of it, without realizing it, establish contact with this force, which cannot be grasped by ordinary consciousness.

171-2
------

In its essence, Ghibellinism has been nothing less than a form of the reappearance of the sacred and spiritual ideal of the authority befitting a leader of a traditional political organization. Thus it is exactly the opposite of everything that is "secular," and of everything that is political and governmental in the modern, degenerate sense of the word.

One may wonder what is the point of shedding light on this essence of Ghibellinism, the Grail's kingdom, and Templarism, other than to reestablish the truth before the previously mentioned misunderstandings and counterfeits. The answer to this question must remain undetermined. Already in the arena of ideas, the character of the dominating culture is such that most people could not even imagine what the issue at stake is. After all, only a small minority could understand that just as the ascetic-monastic orders played a fundamental role during the material and moral chaos that brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire, likewise an order following in the footsteps of Templarism would have a decisive role in a world such as the modern one, which displays forms of greater dissolution and inner collapse than the previous period. The Grail retains the meaning of a symbol in which the antithesis between "priest" and "warrior" is overcome, but also retains the modern equivalent of this antithesis, that is to say, materialized, telluric, and titanic, or better yet, Luciferian forms of the will to power on the one hand, and the lunar forms of the surviving devotional religion and of confused mystical and neospiritualist impulses toward the supernatural and what is not ordinary.

If we just consider the individual and some people, the symbol always retains an intrinsic value, which is indicative for a given type of inner formation. But to go from this to the notion of an order, of a modern Templarism, and to believe that even if it were to come to be, it would be able to exercise an influence directly and sensibly on the general historical forces that are dominant today - that is hasty. Even the Rosicrucians (the real Rosicrucians), back in the eighteenth century, regarded this attempt as vain. Moreover, even those who have received the "sword" must wait for the right time to wield it, the right moment being only that in which forces, the power of which is still unknown owing to an intrinsic determinism, will encounter a real limit and the cycle will end. The right moment will be that in which, even before the most extreme existential situations, a desperate defense instinct rising from the deepest recesses (I almost said, from the memoire de sangc) will eventually regalvanize and give strength to myths and ideas connected to the legacy of better times. I believe that before this happens, a possible Templarism may play only an inner defensive role, in relation to the task of protecting the symbolic, yet not merely symbolic, "solar stronghold."

This will clarify the ultimate meaning of a serious and committed study of the witnesses and of the motifs of the Templar saga and of higher Ghibellinism. To understand and to live by these motifs means to enter into a dimension of suprahistorical realities and, in this way, to gradually reach the certainty that the invisible and inviolable center, the king who must awake, and the avenging and restorating hero are not mere fancies of a dead and romantic past, but rather the truth of those who, today, alone may legitimately be said to be alive.

174-5

-Julius Evola. The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit. Inner
Traditions. Rochester, Vermont: 1997.

FOLLOWING THE TIGER

When I was weary of toiling

I put on a beggar's clothes,

Borrowed a lute of the tinker,

And garnished my cap with a rose,

Left all the lands behind me

Far as ever I could

And followed the track of the Tiger

Into the thick of the wood.

For the feet of the Tiger pass

Where no man ever has trod.

The lair of the Tiger is blessed.

Its place is the place of God.

The stars turned softly in heaven;

The moon was a horn of dew.

The grasses trembled in music

On paths that the wild things knew.

I walked in the ways of the Tiger, --

I, with a rose and a lute,

But I feared not the fangs of the Tiger

Nor shrank at the white owl's hoot.

For the feet of the Tiger pass

Where evil never has trod.

The ways of the Tiger are blessed.

His home is the home of God.

I heard a sweet bell in the forest

When faint leaves whispered of dark,

Followed, and found in the woodland

A chimney, a smoke, a spark.

And I thought: Is he at the fireside,

Tiger's master and mine,

Warming his feet at the coals,

Nodding over his wine?

For the feet of the Tiger rest

Where harm's foot never has trod.

He has gone in the walks of peace.

His looks are lifted to God.

I knocked, for the door was mute,

And who should be waiting there

But the long-lost Queen of the Faeries,

Braiding her golden hair.

The Faery smiled down from the window

And opened the casement bars.

She loosened her hair in the shadow

And shook out a million stars.

And I thought: Oh, the claws of the Tiger

Are sheathed, and the Peace of God

Rests on this house, and beauty

Walks where the Tiger has trod.

And then was the latchstring lifted.

There were the lovely three, --

God, and the Queen, and the Tiger,

And God's hand welcomed me.

The Tiger slept on the hearthstone.

The Faery gave me her ring.

My rose began to blossom;

My lute began to sing.

It sang how the ways of the Tiger

Led me to beauty and God,

To the door of the hut of the Faery

By paths men never had trod.

-Donald Davidson

Race In Savannah

From 1908 through 1911, Savannah, Georgia was the site of a series of international automobile races. By a fortunate play of circumstance, Frank Battey, president of the Savannah Automobile Club, was able to secure the privilege for the city after New York declared its unwillingness to host the events after multiple deaths and frustration due to heavily trafficked roads.

The races went by various names. There was the “International Light Car Race,” “Grand Prize Race of the Automobile Club of America,” “The Southern High-Powered Cup,” “The Vanderbilt Cup,” “The Savannah Challenge Cup,” “The Tiedeman Trophy,” “The Savannah Trophy Race,” and a couple of others. Awards were given in the form of gold or silver trophy cups worth anywhere from $2,000 - $5000.            

The automobile was barely ten years old and racing, as a sport, even younger. The cars were primitive and dangerous yet colorful and exotic and the drivers were wild men. France, Italy, Germany, and the United States all sent teams to compete. Savannah prepared itself accordingly.

             

             A track was created that looped through undeveloped portions on the south side of the city and dipped into parts of the historic district. The terrain must’ve been bizarre for people not familiar with the area. There were long stretches of track underneath oak tree tunnels with Spanish moss as well as stretches of palmetto trees, tall marsh grass, and tidal creeks. There were farms nearby selling fresh produce and also chickens, cattle, dogs, and other critters periodically crossing the road and causing wrecks. There were chain gangs cutting back the wilderness, clearing the track, and keeping it well-oiled; state militia armed with bayonets to maintain order; trains passing nearby carrying disbelieving visitors from Wall Street; buglers to warn drivers of approaching hairpin turns; flag-bearers to signal oncoming danger; medics to assist the injured; 30,000 spectators dressed in their best and worst and drinking whiskey at 50 cents a shot; and of course, there was the city of Savannah itself.

             

               My idea is to recreate Savannah during this period as a comprehensive environment for a vintage racecar game. The city was at an interesting turning point. It was an idyllic, easy-going, rural, coastal town that had largely been forgotten since the Civil War except in regards to cotton. Savannah was one of two places in the country quoting international cotton prices, the other being New York. Most people still used horses and carriages to get around. Electricity was brand new. The automobile was the symbol of the impending industrial age of the 20^th century. The mayor of nearby Thunderbolt(then Warsaw) actually made a public apology for having the audacity to purchase an automobile. But for the young, there was nothing so exciting as the thought of the new speeds that were possible behind the wheel of these mechanical chariots (top speed in 1911 – approx. 80 mph).

             

               I want to emphasize the borderline between the old and the new, the rural and the cosmopolitan, the human and the machine and I think that cars racing would be an ideal way to journey through this type of space and time. I also am not aware of a racing video game that has taken up vintage automobiles.

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.