Manifesto in Search of a Movement

Postmodernism is a train of horrors hurtling exponentially faster towards complete fragmentation and meaninglessness, the inevitable result of its underlying engine, the critical mind/beast that can devour any system or form, even its own. It’s a shame because it all started so nobly: with a goal to expand mans’ forms to match his progress.

The modernist pioneers stared at the unknown—a future lit by electric light, space changed by planes and automobiles, time stopped by photo- and phono-graphs, life and death transfigured by vaccines and weapons—and found their ancient tools—the feathered styluses and theories of the sublime—insufficient, so they brought to the arts the experimental methods that had worked so well in the sciences. They sought the variable instead of the fixed, the dynamic instead of the coherent, the unique instead of the absolute, the unconscious instead of the familiar, the primitive instead of the refined, the sexual instead of the romantic, the abstract instead of the metaphorical, the hard, ashen image instead of the golden-gauzed soap bubbles of pleasure.

It was a fundamentally irrational revolution, a move toward dissonance, disruption and intentional ugliness, in large measure because the traditional or classical world had not adequately prepared them for the horrors of the modern world: the apocalyptic levels of slaughter, the fragmented self, the loss of community, the control of the machines, the fact that all things in the new world came from money, which was created out of thin air by the very few who were inexplicably and silently given the privilege.

The Modernists sought a clean break with the past as a way of assimilating the heart’s alienation. This was ultimately about, as Pound put it, finding the true, authentic self by working through the various masks the psyche assumed, in order to fix the precise instant when the outward turns inward, before it moved out of reach forever.

Out of such whiffs of freedom are heretics later burned.

For now we’ve reached another crisis point, where the existing cultural paradigm, Postmodernism (affectionately known as Pomo) has become woefully inadequate to match the progress man has made in spiritual understanding—the expansion of knowledge about other religious traditions, the heightened energy grids and codes, the holographic universe and the implicate order, the mind of god coalescing through the cracks of AI and the world wide web, and the conjoining of modern physics with ancient wisdom in the concept of the quantum field where reality is created by thought. How can this notion of the infinite we are starting to experience today emerge within the current forms of art? Today’s art world—at least as its presented by all the universities, foundations, cultural institutions, reputable arts journals and the New York Times—not only holds fast to the adolescent athiesm of Nietzche, Marx, Freud, it seems stuck in the glib nihilism of the Post World War I Dada movement that had revolted once, in desperation and horror at the bloodthirsty logic of human affairs, with a stance that “all words are other people’s inventions” and thus the only good art is bad art, and vice versa. The current Pomo program (now the dominant institution of culture in our society) is one of ever-expanding novelty, art as an aesthetic object in and of itself, a self-conscious preoccupation with the processes of creation, deliberate discontinuity between artist and audience, diversity and tolerance to the point of suspended critical judgment, irony as the appropriate response to overwhelming skepticism about the reliability of human thoughts and feelings, and, in general, separation as far as the eye can see.

Outdated ideas are only dangerous if you don’t know they are ideas. What transforms post-modern society and its art from a pathetic nuisance into a threat to our spiritual evolution is the degree to which we don’t even know that the church we worship at is in fact a church. And the church we worship at—the religion of scientific materialism—took root in the same ground as the modern art movement. They are partners in the same crime, from Jackson Pollock’s Duco paint to the medium as message to gibberish justified as poetry because of patriarchal power structures decentering the self.

Materialism, percolated up from intentionally subverted alchemic teachings, is based on the following logic:

All we know of the world is what we humans can figure out
We can figure out how to make our lives longer and more comfortable
Therefore:
Making our lives longer and more comfortable is only thing that is real

(put more simply: there is no truth, so I don’t have to tell it)

The fatal flaw in this logic is readily apparent: things beyond human understanding simply don’t exist! This was not a problem as long as science (that purveyor of both the longer and more comfortable life as well as the cleaner death and dirtier life) conveniently ignored things like consciousness and inconsistent evidence and ancient knowledge, and one could freely believe that man developed by random genetic mutation from lower forms of life, that Earth held the only life in the entire universe, that each individual human life was ineluctably separate from all other lives and totally ceased at death (meaning, ipso facto, that since all human life would one day cease, it would not ever have really existed at all in any practical sense). Unfortunately for the religion of materialism, as for all religions, science has now disproven most of its myths: the universe is held together by electricity, not gravity; it is not mathematically possible for man to have developed by random mutation from lower forms of life in the time-span of human history; there is no discernible point of separation between anything on a physical, energetic or mental level—the actions of one component always affect the whole; the so-called material we order our lives around, the gadgets and comfortable chairs, are actually only vibrations in empty space just like the rest of the universe; and some of the accounts of ghosts, post-death experiences and reincarnation (not to mention angels and aliens) break through even the walls of the information technologies science has devised. Moreover, we have rediscovered ancient books from all parts of the earth that show, conclusively, that man’s mind creates reality, so that this so-called stinking hellhole of a modern world is not some inevitable consequence of random nature, but a more-or-less conscious choice.

Pomo is not equipped to answer the question why—its dogma is too rigid to conceive of reality as anything other than an agreed-upon myth, a collective hallucination. It would rather smirk with soul-sucking cynicism at the absurdity of life than reengage the human engines of thought and feeling to reflect that maybe life isn’t actually as absurd as humans try to make it out to be. At a deeper, darker level, Pomo exists to distract us from such thoughts. No society can function if the obvious truths about how it’s held together are uttered. Historically, artists, being wholly unassimilable to the social order, tend to utter these things loudly and often, which is why they tend to be impoverished or imprisoned to keep them from society’s ear. Pomo, applying the relentless logic of the age, has discovered another kind of institutionalization, in the very academies of learning that serve as the bulwarks to the society. Given the trappings of scholarly and monetary prestige (so perfectly appealing to the inferiority complex artists have), artists are made “professional liars” without even realizing it. They serve, in fact, as cogs in a vast propaganda fear machine for dislocating/exteriorizing the mind. The methods are simple:
• Assimilate equally all the detritus of the information age, without emotion or analysis, thereby presenting a façade of tolerance for all belief systems
• From this position, dismiss by irony any beliefs that are genuinely held, thereby
• Simulating inauthenticity as a permanent human condition, thereby
• Sabotaging the true human spirit,
• Denaturing the word from its primal power, and
• Imposing separation between man and man, man and God, I and thou

100 years ago, FT Marinelli, in the Futurist Manifesto, said “at last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind.”

Maybe it’s time to bring them back.

Here is my modest, and conservative, prescription.

Six Principles for the New Poetry:

1. One should strive for the sincerity of a five-year old child. Authenticity can only emerge from total trust; the muses, like dogs, smell fear. To dig the ironies is cool, but abusing the ironies destroys the silence.
2. The mind now can reconnect with the Universal Mind (tropes, facts, references, memories collective and singular), unlimited access, free for the asking, but one must never forget its only purpose is to lead one to the unknown, from whence the word, which creates all things, springs.
3. Science tells us that 99% of the Great Poets who have ever walked the Earth are alive today, and that the “common man” now has the knowledge, means and leisure once only available to kings. The Universities serve a salutary purpose as caretakers of the other 1%.
4. Sound is spirit, truth is human. Combining the two is poetry, the most sacred of tasks.
5. We’re all Jesus now. Does it matter at this point that we never understood his words when we’re walking in his shoes?
6. Form is what gives art life, and dogma is what kills it. As Guy Davenport says “every book is written on the back of another book.” Wouldn’t it better to be backed by, say Shelley or Whitman, instead of Maya Angelou or X-Men comics? Still, following forms to appease the ghosts of the masters (or stuffy know-it-alls) is like making a silent movie or writing a “classic rock” song in the age of hip-hip. You can’t cook unless you know when to use cast iron, Teflon or plastic, but the food won’t have magic unless the tools are extensions of your heart; what matters is whether the container can hold all the love you wish to share with the human spirit.