Douglas Mercer
November 17 2024
To be disillusioned is to understand reality. To be disillusioned is to see things as they really are, not as the illusionists want you to see it—Kevin Alfred Strom
As the trumpeter of the New Age his intent was purgative, to dispense with the phantoms and the idols of the mind.
In the Kreutzer Sonata Leo Tolstoy said a wise ruler would ban music, so narcotic and intoxicating was its powerful effect. Very famously Plato (the wise ruler) banned all art from his Utopia; for art is a reproduction of life and not life itself; and it encourages people to enter into various fantasy worlds and not life itself. We live in an age of idols and smash the idols is the watchword; Nietzsche said we were in the twilight of the idols and the dusk has continued apace; gamers go into a false world and speak of meat space, Japanese men marry holograms, in the movie Her the protagonist enters into a relationship with a voice, in the movie Heretic the protagonist creates a model of his home, angst ridden teens used to go into the basement to play dungeons and dragons but now there are second lives created in virtual reality, or there are live action role plays, artificial intelligence projects its images in space and time, everyone has an avatar, everyone has a story, everyone is looking at their screens, and their guilty pleasures, but these images and narratives and stories are just dolls or props, or prosthetic devices, dioramas and simulacra, models and as such escapist; art is artifice: a machine world; the reason Plato banned art was that he wanted the psyche to be whole and non-contradictory; if you are always entering into a fantasy world of stories and images then something is wrong with your reality; the fact is we can create our own reality but in the mind alone; no need for the screen or the projector, and no need for characters which are only distractions; and it’s well to remember that when Holderlin contemplated Oedipus crying out in his world shaking pain he found it ridiculous; that is he saw him as a sad man, who lacked something.
Occam’s razor is a ruthless rule which tells us to be rid of every unnecessary entity; that is banish all the ghosts from the machine; and the machine along with it. As twilight turns to night there are no old ones, no Sandman, no chimeras, no angel is terrifying, there are no demons wailing, hell is not breaking loose, there is no devil, Pandemonium is not a real place, there is no crystal ocean, no Orange Clouds, no crystal power, no crystal visions, the white knight is not talking backwards, we are not mirrors, there is no Looking Glass, there are no egg men, no walrus, and no carpenter, no one is raising the roof beams, there is no Technicolor Dream Coat, no poisoned apple, no son of man, no daisy chain, no wild things, no elves, no goblins, no glassy sea, we are not a glassy essence, there are no heavenly charmers, there is no Baal, no golden calf, no burning bush, no staff of life, no charms, there is no man in the High Castle, no spells, no Utopia, language is not alive, there are no norns, nor furies, no kabalistic space ships, god is not playing chess with the devil, nothing goes bump in the night, nothing crawls from a dark Scottish Lake, no Platonic Year, no Age Of Aquarius, no banana fish, no Wasteland, no fame wolf, no moira, character is not fate, there are no Lilliputians or wise horses, Chtlhulu is not calling, there is no Atlantis, no Ice World, no Hyperboreans, no cigar shaped ships, no hobbits, no monster is coming back, no zombies are coming back, there are no hunger games, no vampires, no archer, no Artemis, no void, no satori, no Fat Lady, no Nirvana, no Valhalla, heaven is not a place where nothing happens, the transportation is not here, no Empyrean, no Elysian fields, no Strawberry fields, no Eleusinian mysteries, no one went to the other side with her encyclopedia, no one played the vibration in the void, the world ends in neither fire nor ice, there is no Yahweh, they won’t put it down on the strip, there is no celestial city, no lake of fire, Minerva’s owl does not fly, no piper at the gates of dawn beckons us, nothing is rustling in the hedges, no sprinkling of the May queen, the music never died, no holy ghost, it is neither the nightingale nor the lark, there is no magic theater, no glass bead game, no karass, horses are not forces, there is no Rhine gold, nothing happened on Witch Mountain, no god from a machine, no one is on the road to Roswell, no Chronos, no Uranus, the statues will not come to life, no wrinkle in time, the burning wood does not come to Dunsinane, no one is phoning home, no King of Marigold, there is no stairway to heaven, no glass onion, the children put on nothing for a lark, there is no green light, no Mock Turtle, no Mad Hatter, no Rainman, it will not rain blood, there are no locusts at the end of time, no golem, no city on a hill, no Aleph, no knight tilting at windmills, no Gargantua, no master text, no Miller, no Vril, no emperor of ice cream, no one is driving around in vans solving mysteries, no panopticon, no precogs, no real bird will sing, no red handed man, two riders are not approaching, the wind does not begin to howl, no body snatchers, no replicants, no tambourine man, no ghost comes back from hell, no three weird sisters, Penelope never spun a web, no Trojan Horse, no kindly ones, no superman, no Captain America, and no sonnenmenshen, and no shapeshifters, and no aliens are living among us to help us fix our antiquated systems, these all being hobgoblins of small minds, or monsters scary or otherwise, horrible or sweet imaginings meant to frighten or entertain small children.
To mistreat the idols is to have the gilt come off on your hands they say; but good riddance; it’s the guilt we have overcome having washed ourselves clean of the blood with our blood; it’s not the symbols that matter, the symbols are only devices or points in the game that need to be manipulated; not the symbols but the timeless laws that they represent are what is real, but even the laws like the words will go away in the end. One does not play act one’s ideal but one means it, this is not a drill and not a rehearsal and it is going live. It’s just us folks (or those us paying attention that is); and it’s time we grow up and stop playing funny games. There is only us and the Creator and when we land on the other side of idolatry we will shove off. If you don’t understand I’d tell you to go ask Alice but that won’t work, she being just another chimera.
***
Notes:
Wahnfried was the name given by Richard Wagner to his villa in Bayreuth. The name is a German compound of Wahn (delusion, madness) and Friede (peace, freedom).
When times are bad the people need light entertainment. That’s why in 1944 we broadcast light comedies. But how bad can times be to for people to be bombarded with such idiotic nonsense? We are racing toward the abyss but we do not see the abyss because on television there is a cooking show.
