The Head of Orpheus
PREFACE
The West is defined by its artifice complex, a compulsion to represent and fix its identity in images, likenesses, statues and representations. But as the root suggests, images derive from magic and magike tekne, “the weaving of images,” art, leads to apparitions, ghosts, shadows and madness. Neither a person nor a culture can create or clarify an identity through representations; it only can lose itself in reflections, shadow worlds and enchanted bowers. Essaying the magic of the semi-divine Perseus, a cult of images winds up on an endless, circular shield of art, fleeing from the gorgons it would charm, the gorgons that are all the ambiguities in its soul [1].
The glorious imageries and art of the West is its effort to define itself; define and clarify because the West is uniquely split in its core: a hybrid culture born of Greco-Roman military and ideological imperialism, itself a compulsion to suppress and absorb other nations, especially that nation, Israel, whose integral and unified way of being is antithetical to the West’s drive to absorb, mix and con/fuse. But oil and water do not mix. A branch that attacks its roots is a branch that will wither and die; the audacious graft that is the West has been coming undone, spectacularly and aptly so since it is a culture of the spectacle for centuries, the pace quickening as the reflections multiply and approach the center of the cultural vortex.
The horrors of Nazism, of other Aryan and ‘theosophist’ movements, of the slow motion, well choreographed holocaust of the “peace process,” a diplomatic meta-fiction, are Orphic attempts to repudiate the gorgons of ambiguity in the heart of the West. In the dialectic of its self-negating essence it churns out a series of dualisms, degrading life to an image of its inner confusion, “the frog spawn of a blind man’s ditch.” The inability to be as “pure” an artifice as its fictions is part of its disdain for “all that man is, all mere complexities, the fury and the mire of human veins” [2]. Its confused nature, its compulsion to absorb, merge, change shape (including gender), for communion; its intolerance of difference – while proclaiming “difference” as an ideal, a pure image that in fact demands a generic homogeneity – has within it hatred, contempt and fear of simple, unmediated life. It cannot even see unmediated life for what it is but, at last in modern times, especially in the age of screens and distraction, sees it as “the unpurged images of day,” as a slovenly drunk that must be purged, cleansed by the mirror of art: “the smithies of the Emperor” will “break bitter furies of complexity, those images that yet fresh images beget.” So great is the compulsion for magic that the West sees all life in the self-generating mode of images, a “tormented sea” filled with “mire and blood” [3]. The weaving of representations is the realm of the witch; this no doubt is the hidden affinity of Macbeth, who “makes strange images of death” for the witches and their circling; Macbeth whose first words echo the witches evocation of the cult of art’s ambiguity: “fair is foul and foul is fair” [4]. The twisted toxic root within Lancelot, his bond with Guinevere cannot be uprooted without killing the quester and the quest: beguiling lies by imagery, even so perfect an “artifice of eternity” as the Grail Cup is a zero-sum game. The furies whose horror it would purify for power consume everything and everyone in a composite culture, freezing them in a vague and endless war of terror that in its invocations of “peace” equivocates its way “to the everlasting bonfire” [5].
Actaeon the great hunter saw his antitype, the virgin huntress and was transformed till “there is only one thing left him, his former mind.” Less swift than Perseus, unable to carry magic eternally but rather becoming an image himself, made protean by a goddess “he goes to his knees like a man praying, in mute appeal, having no arms to plead with,” unable to conjure or kill, to sculpt, sing or beguile [6]. In the end, all there remain only echoes of his name, echoes being a synonym and type of image, a type of the essential unreality of art, a projection of mind that seeking to constitute rather than live in the world at last has nothing but itself and its echoes or reflections. The triple goddess of moonlight, sign of imagination, the power he courts and into whose fountain he peers destroys him in the form of “his own thoughts… like raging hounds” hunt him down [7].
Similarly, Orpheus who sought to flee “that most fecund ditch of all…a proud woman not kindred of his soul” in the embrace of boys like “young flowers” is at last chased down by others who change quality of gender, the maenads. The beautiful, eloquent head, a most lovely artifice ultimately is mute; the monsters that pursue him also are changed [8]. The West had no way out of magic and representation, as the endless circle of the shield and of the dancing witches showed; but still it will not tolerate an alternative to the beauty of its fiction for that admission is the ultimate paralysis, the statue it strives to become, a Midas in love with Galatea, beloved of Cyclops and brought to dubious life by Aphrodite (Venus), embodiment of castrated male members. The echoes do not even end in death; in the end, shadows live everywhere and art for art’s sake means outfitting the ship of death… The culture embodied in the fiction of “King Arthur” has been straining to take the Jews down with them the more their mad project fails.
It is an apt irony that the term and faculty for the art-cult is derived by linguistic diffusion from Hebrew (imago-imaginis-imagene-imagine from magen {shield}) where the simple physical object and reference to the ineffable Creator who prohibits idol-making and worship becomes the gold and silver moonlit world of fiction. A culture of magic cannot abide history, its clarity, sanity and joy.
It is timely, if it is not too late to examine this compulsion to art for the West for centuries and at an accelerating pace has been and is coming undone; more, it is undoing itself for the disjunction at its core, the conquest by which it constituted itself cannot persist except under the dynamic irritant of growth and self-righteous expansion. It is true that these impulses continue in the globalist ‘compassion’ of the great powers, driving to create a heterogeneous state of generic personae but the fiction has become so threadbare, so extremely contrived and compulsive that the burgeoning artifice can be imposed only by force and terror, and perhaps not even thus. What has not changed and probably will not change until the final collapse is the compulsive drive to establish an imperial identity by artifice. This increases the incongruities, sense of alienation, however repressed and horror at its core and so the disintegration quickens. The head of Orpheus decays in ever more degrading song, merging with the maenads that dismembered it. Life increasingly is mediated; virtual reality makes the substance of disembodiment routine and pervasive for all ages. With the fatigue of the illusion, Perseus sags back into the pursuing gorgons and the vipers’ nest strikes from every screen. Kurtz and the wilderness are one; a protean chaos of signification defines education, news, law, politics and more. From small to great things, conquest is all that matters. Humanity reels back into the beast and in those places where it would not and might not, the masters of deceit, today’s grand artists that use pop ‘artists’ and their spectacles to sell the cult of the State, the almighty State seeks to uproot and deform any alternatives into an image of its own “tenebrous soul.”
It is a horror one must understand to escape. The lies of chivalry, its magic circles, witches and seduction must lose their appeal; rather, they must lose their appeal. The era of disenchantment is upon us; the toxic root is being torn from Lancelot and the valiant quester exposed as a Fury, sticky and sweet and unappeasable.
Looking at the shield from a distance born of this disenchantment, imbued by study of an alternative tradition let us examine the fascinations of corruption and like the narrator in the “Triumph of Life” stand back from the shadows, phantoms and the “cold bright car” that generates them for our enraptured entrapment. [support this work to grow this preface to a book; thank you]
1. Hesiod, The Shield of Herakles (c. 600 BCE), 216-37; all citations from Hesiod are from Hesiod, Richmond Lattimore translation (Michigan, 1973, 8th printing)
2. William Butler Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” (1927), 59; “Byzantium” (1930) 4-8
3. “Byzantium” 1, 33-40
4. Macbeth, 1.3.95-6; 1.3.37, 1.3.30-36; 1.1.3-4, 9-10, passim
5. ibid. 2.3.17-18
6. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Indiana 1959, 1972, Humphries translation) Book 3, 192-205, 235-48
7. Shelley, “Adonais” 278-79; the great imagist whose last work exposed image-making as delusion and killing disillusionment, as a self-negation of triumphal pageantry understood the hounds of Actaeon as his thoughts; that is, he understood the cult of art’s self-generating and ultimately self-consuming project.
8. Ovid, Metamorphoses Book 10: 60-110; 11: 1-85