Our times: a surreal pretense of normality, but behind the clumsily-set veils and mirrors, a vista of darkening-grey. The mid-wits of several generations cling to a recently-learned habit of “Better Living through Elite-Aided Denial,” even as horrible rumors, ones never refuted on the rare occassions they are even addressed, spread from embalmers, funeral directors, life insurance executives, and anonymous doctors.
The 2020s will be humanity’s grimmest decade since the 1940s. It will either be one of pained apology after pained apology, and of recriminating cry for reparation after recriminating cry, that is, of endless investigation of the Covid/Vax policy crimes responsible for probably several million deaths world-wide1 and of the widespread and radical corruption that made them possible, or, one in which our heart-hardened elites go all-in on the Denial and expand their present system of Zone-specific Totalitarianism2 into the remaining areas, at some point provoking real revolutions by the oppressed, probably ones of desperate chances that issue in outright despots in charge, who will then decide they must functionally gulag persons like myself, and likely you also, dear reader.
Nope, none of that is hyperbole, even if I’ve simplified things by not mentioning several of the other disasters besides the Covid/Vax one which are linked to the emerging pattern of Despotism-Acceptance.
Here’s our present reality:
Please, do not underestimate the degree of evil and democracy-betrayal entered into by those who refuse to let themselves hear the testimony of a witness like this Tawny Buettner—Denialist step by Denialist step, some of them innocuous little steps at first glance, such Refusers to Hear can become nothing less than your enemies, prepared to strip you of elementary liberties and equal citizenship status.
Here’s another picture, a lyrical one from the song “Can’t Go on This Way” likely written before the writer (Van Morrison) had yet digested the news that in addition to lockdowns, de facto cullings were on the way:
Can’t go out dancin’
can’t find no joy
can’t go on holidays
can’t stay abroad.
…Government keeps lyin’
everyone is just sad!
But the thing is, we are not designed to be sad!
I write this, after all, on a Utah fall morning, where the Wasatch Mountains shine beautiful and clear in a rain-cleansed sky. A couple of days ago, as a part of one of my substitute teaching gigs, I got to read a story about owls to first-graders and help them make owl-puppets from paper bags—I made sure we got in some class-practice hoo-hooing softly, as we imagined what it would be like to hear an owl on a cold winter night. Yes, we all had a grand time, which reminds me of a poem I love, the one with these lines:
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Granduer”
And a month ago, here at pomocon I presented one of my “quotation collection” pieces, “Festivity, A to Z,” this one on A Theory of Festivity, my favorite book by the Catholic German philosopher Josef Pieper. A couple of folks told me that it struck a chord with them, and seemed particularly helpful in these times.
Well, so despite the jarring change of tone it brings to what I’ve written above, here is the second installment of that post, picking up about page 40 of Pieper’s book.
AA Everyday things unexpectedly take on the freshness of Eden; the world, again in Goethe’s words, is “glorious as on the first of days.” The train of images is endless. But all of them convey the same meaning: that the fruit of the festival, for which alone it is really celebrated, is pure gift; it is the element of festivity that can never be “organized,” arranged and induced. …All we can do is prepare ourselves to receive the hoped-for-gift…
BB As Wilamonwitz tells us, one of the great Attic festivals, the Cronia, came about so that “men might taste for a single day the blessed life enjoyed in the Golden Age under Cronos.”
CC All worship is affirmation, not only of God but also of the world. Nietzsche, as we know, thought otherwise. When he hailed pagan worship as a “form of affirmation of life,” he was opposing it to Christianity, which he was indicting on that score as well. Along with so much else, the Church had “spoiled” festivals. Of course, there are facts which make such charges comprehensible—but no truer. …On the crucial point, at any rate, Nietzsche is perfectly right: festivals are doomed unless they are preceded by the pattern of ritual religious praise.
DD Inability to be festive, on the other hand, can be explained in such a way as to illuminate the core of the problem. It signifies “immurement” within the zone of the given present, “exposure to the tenors of history.”
A key quote, that, for thinking about my grim introduction to this piece!
EE The only festivals whose invisible core we can directly comprehend are the Christian holidays. At first sight there seem to be a multitude of them, but they reduce down to two: Sunday and Easter.
This follows Pieper’s suggesting that our scholarship in fact knows little about the interior character of the pagan festivals. I’m not sure how true that suggestion is—it seems a way to dodge what I would have thought would have been a duty for Pieper’s book: to compare what we can know of pre-Christian Greek and Roman festivity to that which replaced it. However, as the Gerald Else book on the origin of Greek tragedy I mentioned in my first festivity post indicates, a whole lot of erroneous modern supposition about the “pagan” can be derived from a few small errors concerning the fragmentary evidence our scholars have collected.
In any case, this passage is also Pieper’s way of taking the reader into ruminations on the meaning of the Christian festivals.
GG It was on the Seventh Day that the prodigious words were spoken that everything was “very good.”
HH During the great autumn festivals in Bengal I asked quite a few persons whether they could tell me the reason for their present festive joy. The answer of one orthodox Hindu ran: It is the joy of being a creature whom God has created out of joy. But this is the very thing, the “gift of being created,” which is celebrated on Sunday, says Thomas Aquinas. This beneficium creationis, he says, is the “first and foremost” of all divine gifts. Thus he portrays Sunday as the model of all festive celebration.
II Nevertheless, this “Lord’s day,” dies Dominica, is not a specifically Christian holiday, insofar as it fulfills the Old Testament Sabbath, the Seventh Day. What makes Sunday Christian is its relation to Christ, its celebration of God’s Incarnation, which reached its full fruit and revelation in the Resurrection of the Lord. The Christian Sunday is an emanation of Easter.
The next several quotes underline some of the basic characteristics of festivity, and the connection of these to the arts:
JJ Festival without singing, music, dancing, without visible forms of celebration, without any works of art, cannot be imagined.
KK Also, the effect of festivity, the stepping out of time and the refreshment that penetrates to the depths of the soul, reaches the celebrant in the form of a message couched in the language of arts.
LL The fact that the arts have their natural place within festivals indicates that they are not themselves the festivals.
MM As soon as festiveness itself becomes unachievable, the arts are inevitably left without a home; their inner necessity and even their credibility fade away.
NN Such service (art “within the festival and public worship”) is not merely serving ends; on the contrary, it is the highest and perhaps the only way for art to be completely itself and to arrive “autonomously” at its most essential goal: the praise of Creation.
OO “C’est l’amour qui chante”; only the lover sings; without love we cannot expect song. “Song” here of course stands not only for poetry and, of course, music, but lso for the utterances and works of all the fine arts taken together. Elegy, too is song. And insofar as tragedy, poésie noire, and satire, rightfully deserve the proud name of true works of art, they necessarily draw their vitality form consent to the true reality. For what else is mourned as disaster and misfortune, what is denounced as shameful, what is execrated, questioned, ridiculed, or else pictured as a terrible, threatening possibility—what, if not the decay, the destruction, and the effacement of that same true reality? Evidently, that true reality is really accepted and affirmed as the standard and the court of last appeal. The great work of art, at any rate, always remains within all these negations “the affirmation of affirmations that comprehends all assents within itself.” And therein lies its kinship with festivity.
For a different philosophical view of Song, see Nietzsche’s long quotation of Schopenhauer in the fifth section of The Birth of Tragedy, and his own theory of the Apollonian in the surrounding sections, including his dicussion of Folk Song.
PP Wherever assent to the world is expressly rejected, expressly and consistently (though this last is not easy), the root of both festivity and the arts is destroyed.
QQ Worse than clear negation, however, is mendacious affirmation. Worse than the silencing and stifling of festivity and the arts is sham practicing of them. And once again we may see that pseudo-art is related in a variety of ways to pseudo-festivity. The sham is inherent in the fact that the affirmation and assent compatible only with true reality is falsified into a smug yea-saying, whose basic element is a desire to fend off reality, so as not to be disturbed, at any price.
A big problem in our time. One particular version of it is the way today’s rock or pop artists put themselves on a 60s/70s/80s-autopilot mode, producing a kind of sham rock artistry, or smug opposition to “the Man.” It is sham not only in its unoriginality, but in its involving no reconsideration of who “the Man” has become in our day.
The quote also points to a deeper issue—the use of forced festivity for the sake of diversion, which in turn, leads us to wonder about diversionary festivity that is less obviously forced—see Pascal’s Pensees especially, but also, which I hope to talk about in another essay, Albert Murray’s theory of blues festivity in Stompin’ the Blues, which at times speaks of the superior diverting quality of blues music.
RR …the true existential poverty of man consists in his having lost the power to celebrate a festival festively.
SS Contemporary accounts of the festivals of the French Revolution reek of boredom, the infinite boredom of utter unreality, which makes the reading of them a startling experience.
TT …during festivals social differences should be abolished; social and political peace, real “fraternization,” should be considered the fruits, or even the preconditions, of festivals.
UU There can be no festivity when man, imagining himself self-sufficient, refuses to recognize that Goodness of things which goes far beyond any conceivable utility; it is the Goodness of reality taken as a whole which validates all particular goods…The only fitting way to respond to such gift is: by praise of God in ritual worship. In short, it is the withholding of public worship that makes festivity wither at the root.
VV …the modern equivalent of festivals is war; in this provocative sentence Roger Caillois answers the question of what nowadays takes the place in the life of society which once upon a time was filled by festivals.
WW Since the time of Nietzsche, who called himself “the destroyer par excellence” and who dreamed of a company of men who would be called “destroyers” ---for almost three generations, then the idea of “active nihilism,” of the “will to nothingness” and “pleasure even in destruction,” has been part of the modern attitude towards life.
XX Nevertheless, I repudiate the hypothesis of war as the modern equivalent of festivals. …Its greatest error lies in its implying that our present era is devoid of true festivals, and moreover must be so.
I heartily agree, but this seems a good place to mention what I think is an element missing in Pieper’s book, a broader investigation of the phenomena of people spontaneously celebrating a simple good, or a good-for-them event. The party quickly organized after a sports victory, or even after some mundane achievement by a company, seems neglected. Pieper gives us convincing pictures of how festivity becomes difficult in totalitarian societies, and really impossible for the agents of those regimes, but he does not linger enough on what we might call a) the largely-secular albeit fairly mediocre festival, nor upon b) the more impressive moments of secular partying, such as you see in the pages of an author like Murray. This is odd, because Pieper does hold that the total-absence-of-festivity theories that certain hyper-modern authors worry about, or even intend to run with, are at bottom impossible, as quotes XX and YY indicate.
YY In this same contemporary world of ours, there remains the indestructible (for otherwise human nature itself would have to be destroyed) gift innate in all men which impels them now and again to escape from the restricted sphere where they labor for their necessities and provide for their security—to escape not by mere forgetting, but by undeceived recollection of the greater, more real reality.
And he continues this quotation by showing that they do not merely escape this via festivity, but also through fine arts, erotic love, death-reflection, and philosophy:
Now as always, the workaday world can be transcended in poetry and the other arts. In the shattering emotion of love, beyond the delusions of sensuality, men continue to find entrance to the still point of the turning world. Now, as always, the experience of death as man’s destiny, if accepted with an open and unarmored heart, acquaints us with a dimension of existence which fosters a detachment from the immediate aims of practical life. Now as always, the philosophic mind will react with awe to the mystery of being revealed in a grain of matter or a human face.
ZZ And because the festive occasion pure and simple, the divine guarantee of the world and of human salvation, exists and remains true continuously, we may say that in essence one single festival is being celebrated—so that the distinction between holiday and workday appears to be quite erased.
Now I know someone will wonder how I can offer these quotes seriously, given what I wrote at the beginning of this piece, or will chide me for spoiling the tone of it with that opening.
I respond by asserting that one of the main reasons I can bear to immerse myself in the information about the vax-harms and other factors related to our societies’ present Denialist flirtations with despotism-adoption, and try in my small-time writer’s way to fight back, is that I know that deep-down in our nature there lives the dearest freshness. And so I also fight with my own self, to keep from forgetting what I know, amid (see DD) our dark “tenors of history” and the risk of becoming “immured” in them, even as one sounds the alarms about them.
With Peter Augustine Lawler and Walker Percy I know that those who might seek to reengineer the human out of existence will keep running up against this nature of ours, even in their own breasts, just as with Frodo and Samwise I can look up and see that even the under the smogs of Mordor, one from time to time catches glimpses of what is far above any temporal triumph of evil on earth, the starry heavens.
But in some odd way, which Pieper helps me understand better, this fundamental knowledge has in my case a deep connection with the good time, and the idea of it. Like Van Morrison, who poetically championed the plain goodness of the R ‘n’ B “Wild Time” way back in the day (1971), and who came out before any other name artist with songs denouncing the lockdowns, my very first reactions against the early March 2020 news that Bay Area counties would be closing bars and other places where the dancers and revellers might gather, were prompted by an intuitive sense that something important can happen in such places for us, carnal and pagan and hedonistic those venues and their typical events might mainly seem to be.
So against the darkening greyness, against feelings of blankness and powerlessness, against over-dwelling on fears, be they rational or not, of home-grown despots, civil wars, and hopeless revolts, against the nonsensical rules and digital scripts that herd us, against those who would leave the deep wounds inflicted by the past few years to fester on untended, against any and every sort of Pretend Return to Normality, and even against the horrors of the vax-harms, whose reality we must face and delve into, down to the foulest roots, we should pose the good time, and the festival’s ever-present celebration of God’s goodness and granduer.
I hope to say more in further posts, in this same vein of encouraging attempts at festive gathering, and of insiting upon, in all times and situations, what Pieper calls (YY) “undeceived recollection of the greater, more real reality.”
My guesstimate is that we’ve had around 200,000-400,000 mRNA-vax caused deaths in the U.S. so far. See this from Naomi Wolf for the key facts that go into my reasoning. But that is not the only number. Add in those who died from Covid but who likely would not have had they been given Ivermectin, various early-treatement protocols, and/or had they not been subjected to the near-murderous mandated treatment protocols—especially the use of Remdesivir—, and you’re probably at 3/4 of a million deaths caused by the same Family of Covid-policy Crimes. Add in those who died due to the delays of treatment/detection, or due to exascerbation of mental disease and addictions, both of these caused by the extended lockdowns, and you’re easily above one million Americans killed by the same Family of Covid-policy Crimes. Expand that out to world numbers, and you’ll see why “several million” is not a casual expression of my speech. Nor, I will stress, is the expression “so far.”
For what I mean by the “zone-specific” and thus “partial” totalitarianism being tried out in our modern democracies, see the latter half of my Carl’s Rock Songbook number on Morrissey’s “Bonfire of Teengagers,” which reflects on the creepy fact that for a whole year, he has been unable to get a single label to release his latest album. Or see how YouTube recently warned well-respected, moderated, and long pro-vax daily Covid-19 podcaster Dr. John Campbell, that he might be demonetizied or kicked-off due to his posting, their words: “content alleging that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognised by health authorities.” Witness his sad and ridiculous twisting of his language to mollify YT’s censors. Or see this recent discussion between Steve Kirsch and Dr. Paul Marik on how doctors, even ones who have won many previous accolades, are having their careers killed if they defy the official Covid-vax line. Or see Harvey Mansfield on the systematic exclusion of conservatives at Harvard and in most of academia. Just as I do not speak of “millions being killed” in a spirit of rhetorical heat, I do not use the word “totalitarian” lightly, even when I deploy it in my neologistic and counter-intuitive phrase “partial totalitarianism.” But is it not raw fact now that if you want a career in the music industry, in the media, in social-media podcasting, and on and on, there are now bans against dissent about vaccines, lenient immigration rules, trans-activism, and the PC line on Islam? That you cannot even be a medical doctor without cleaving to a very specific and (at this late date) very discredited line? This is getting way beyond the standard “professional politics” that people have always had to navigate, and its feel, its spirit, and its shameless refusal to budge or blink in the face of repeated refutations, very much reminds one of the character of USSR or GDR officialdom.
Definitely my favorite one:
"Worse than clear negation, however, is mendacious affirmation. Worse than the silencing and stifling of festivity and the arts is sham practicing of them. And once again we may see that pseudo-art is related in a variety of ways to pseudo-festivity. The sham is inherent in the fact that the affirmation and assent compatible only with true reality is falsified into a smug yea-saying, whose basic element is a desire to fend off reality, so as not to be disturbed, at any price. "
Wow, this is a brilliant essay and sorely needed in this current age of trouble upon trouble. Would that I had begun to read it earlier this night. It’s late and I couldn’t watch the video clip because my sweet sleeping husband lies beside me.
I’ve so much to say, but can’t get to all of it at this point. I have to get up earlier than usual tomorrow for a video call with a new client. I’m grateful for it, but also slightly annoyed (I know, that’s bad).
I’ll just say this: The part which mentions the seventh day, the Lord’s day, struck me because that 7th day is, in actuality, both the last day of the week and the first day of the week -- the 8th day, in a sense -- the Alpha and Omega. I’m saying it clumsily because I’m tired.
So glad to “meet” you! À demain !