THE SALVATION OF THE WEST THROUGH A CIVILIZATIONAL ENACTMENT OF NECROMANCY, KATABASIS, AND CANON FORMATION
A PROPOSAL.
The West is, among other things, a single conversation beginning with Homer and stretching over three thousand years of reply, response, argumentation, etc.
The backbone here is epic poetry: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton and their modern rejoinders and completions: Wagner's Ring, which brings in fresh material from Northern sources and Pound, who composes an encyclopedic epitaph for the West in his magnificent Cantos. Eliot can be read as commentary on Pound. In fact, each of these works is not only a reply to the previous work, but continues themes and even characters. The relationship of Odin and Brunnhilde in Wagner comes directly from Zeus and Athena. Virgil responds to Homer by making the Romans the descendents of the vanquished Trojans. Dante is given the tour of Hell by Virgil himself, his poetic master. Present in all of these works is what Pound called the nekyia - the voyage to the Underworld. The term, nekyia, includes both the visit to the Underworld and the questioning of its inhabitants about the people's future. The final works of Western Man extant: Pound, Wagner, Eliot all forsee an abyss beyond which they cannot travel, even with their immense imaginations. Eliot names it the Waste Land, following European tales of the Fisher King, or Wounded King:
"In Arthurian legend the Fisher King, or the Wounded King, is the last in a long line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions of his story vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin and incapable of moving on his own. In the Fisher King legends, he becomes impotent and unable to perform his task himself, and he also becomes unable to father or support a next generation to carry on after his death. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. All he is able to do is fish in the river near his castle, Corbenic, and wait for someone who might be able to heal him. Healing involves the expectation of the use of magic. Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen can accomplish the feat."
Ovid should be in here as background and Arthuriana is mandatory, though available in several forms - whether as Wagner's Parsifal or John Boorman's Excalibur.
Of the second rank - connective tissue, if you will - are the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare. Sophocles' Theban Plays, Aeschylus' Oresteia, and Euripides' Bacchae.
Shakespeare can profitably be shaved down to about a dozen plays:
Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Merchant of Venice, Winter's Tale, and the Tempest.
The Platonic dialogues in the initiatic order indicated by Iamblichus are also highly recommended: First Alcibiades, Gorgias, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Phaedrus, Symposium, Philebus, Timaeus, Parmenides.
Harold Bloom, last surviving professor of literature: "In the end, the Western Canon consists of Plato and Shakespeare."
'Reading list' has a banal, bourgeois sound: a vain project of 'self-improvement'. This is not that. It is, as Pound says, a nekyia: a visit to the Underworld and and a questioning of the denizens there as to our future. It is our opportunity to behold the Western heart and mind and the experience of all our people. It is vision quest and apotropaion; a quest for gain, for life, for instruction by our own ancestors and our own ghosts as well as a warding off with the blood of our attention, feeding them in their graves.
This is the response and the introjection to the question of our Europeanness and to the question of our survival in this Waste Land.
Whom Does The Grail Serve?
It Serves The King.
The Jewes have a Sacred Book to tell them who we are. Now we do, too. Don't consult it if you intend to regard it as less sacred than that Domesday book of the desert rat who must gnaw and gnaw and gnaw lest his fangs grow through his head, killing him. There is no puzzle as to what it is to be a Jew.
The question of what it is to be a Man of the West is brand new. It began in the 20th century, in the Waste Land, after all his arts had failed him. Therefore it is to most important and representative works we turn for hope and wisdom regarding our own souls, our own future, our own life.
A PROPOSAL.
The West is, among other things, a single conversation beginning with Homer and stretching over three thousand years of reply, response, argumentation, etc.
The backbone here is epic poetry: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton and their modern rejoinders and completions: Wagner's Ring, which brings in fresh material from Northern sources and Pound, who composes an encyclopedic epitaph for the West in his magnificent Cantos. Eliot can be read as commentary on Pound. In fact, each of these works is not only a reply to the previous work, but continues themes and even characters. The relationship of Odin and Brunnhilde in Wagner comes directly from Zeus and Athena. Virgil responds to Homer by making the Romans the descendents of the vanquished Trojans. Dante is given the tour of Hell by Virgil himself, his poetic master. Present in all of these works is what Pound called the nekyia - the voyage to the Underworld. The term, nekyia, includes both the visit to the Underworld and the questioning of its inhabitants about the people's future. The final works of Western Man extant: Pound, Wagner, Eliot all forsee an abyss beyond which they cannot travel, even with their immense imaginations. Eliot names it the Waste Land, following European tales of the Fisher King, or Wounded King:
"In Arthurian legend the Fisher King, or the Wounded King, is the last in a long line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions of his story vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin and incapable of moving on his own. In the Fisher King legends, he becomes impotent and unable to perform his task himself, and he also becomes unable to father or support a next generation to carry on after his death. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. All he is able to do is fish in the river near his castle, Corbenic, and wait for someone who might be able to heal him. Healing involves the expectation of the use of magic. Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen can accomplish the feat."
Ovid should be in here as background and Arthuriana is mandatory, though available in several forms - whether as Wagner's Parsifal or John Boorman's Excalibur.
Of the second rank - connective tissue, if you will - are the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare. Sophocles' Theban Plays, Aeschylus' Oresteia, and Euripides' Bacchae.
Shakespeare can profitably be shaved down to about a dozen plays:
Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Merchant of Venice, Winter's Tale, and the Tempest.
The Platonic dialogues in the initiatic order indicated by Iamblichus are also highly recommended: First Alcibiades, Gorgias, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Phaedrus, Symposium, Philebus, Timaeus, Parmenides.
Harold Bloom, last surviving professor of literature: "In the end, the Western Canon consists of Plato and Shakespeare."
'Reading list' has a banal, bourgeois sound: a vain project of 'self-improvement'. This is not that. It is, as Pound says, a nekyia: a visit to the Underworld and and a questioning of the denizens there as to our future. It is our opportunity to behold the Western heart and mind and the experience of all our people. It is vision quest and apotropaion; a quest for gain, for life, for instruction by our own ancestors and our own ghosts as well as a warding off with the blood of our attention, feeding them in their graves.
This is the response and the introjection to the question of our Europeanness and to the question of our survival in this Waste Land.
Whom Does The Grail Serve?
It Serves The King.
The Jewes have a Sacred Book to tell them who we are. Now we do, too. Don't consult it if you intend to regard it as less sacred than that Domesday book of the desert rat who must gnaw and gnaw and gnaw lest his fangs grow through his head, killing him. There is no puzzle as to what it is to be a Jew.
The question of what it is to be a Man of the West is brand new. It began in the 20th century, in the Waste Land, after all his arts had failed him. Therefore it is to most important and representative works we turn for hope and wisdom regarding our own souls, our own future, our own life.
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