Blog 4 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Trees Have Eyes

Yesterday, June 4, a sentence in the 2nd paragraph Blog 3), stated that: “Indeed, there is an element of religion in healthy fascism. Fascism [it] uses this religious feeling in creating a communal imagination, while repressing Pop individualism, and not allowing a surreal community.”

For some readers, the statement may seem like an outrage, what with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco not yet a hundred years gone.

Nevertheless, I have held this view for some time, provided that fascism comes sans violence and militarism, which, I believe, has in ancient times was done and accomplished.

I believe that the denial of fascism today is an urban conceit, because fascism (as a dictatorship) in a forest environment is inconceivable, even as a community with close bonds is a natural to it. It is urban conceit (call it unhappiness over the way things are) that gives birth to fascism, even as a democracy (re Parliamentary democracy) becomes a utopian dream. Unfortunately, poets cornered by urban conceits will oppose fascism by supporting extreme individualism as, both, an alternative and a human right.

The charisma that adheres to urban fascism is of course a religious invocation, which is a function of poetry, but, alas! in an environment of vulgar concrete, it will solicit violence to be believed human.

As Robert Graves writes about ‘old style’ poets and their loyalty to the White Goddess [Latvian Laima, goddess of fate, sister of Moonlight, Mēnesnihca]: “’Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonored. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery…; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.”

Describing his own leanings, Robert Graves continues: “Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush. I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contacts with urban civilization, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine….”

To such people as Graves identifies, fascism is the alternative to a democracy, which may exist only in a forest, but no longer is, because the forests are deforested.

Perhaps I have diverged from this blog’s main theme, that of Midsummer, New Year of Johns Eve 2012. On the other hand, I have sketched more thoroughly the background against which present-day Latvians enact their Holy day of Johns and why the Holy Day of Johns  ends up in binge drinking.

Under the Opes Skies All Day Long.

Another poet. Sophocles, who when forced to ‘rewrite’ his analysis of our “novus ordo sculorum” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novus_ordo_seclorum , then did indeed rewrite his critique of modern society by stuffing all of his writ into an overly simplistic riddle: “Who at the beginning of his life walks on four, in the middle of his life on two, but at the end of his life on three legs?” The answer: “Man”, however comes nowhere near the playwright’s intent, re http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ , which is to say, the correct answer to the riddle is “man, the masturbator and homosexual”.

Sophocle’s analysis, reaches into the ancient past of Egypt, one of the first places where man established an urban environment and a city. The playwright’s analysis—as I see it--is, briefly, as follows:

When the Queen of Thebes (in Greece) gave birth to a son, Oedipus, her husband, the King of Thebes, Laius, wished to test whether the newborn was believed by the gods fit for the role of future king. This ‘testing’ entailed leaving the infant exposed for one or several nights on the peak of Mt. Citheron. When Queen Iocaste realized what Laius was up to, she revolted. She was not about to risk sacrificing the life of her son—even if the test were to result in the infant’s survival, proof that he is fit to become the next king of Thebes.

When Queen Iocaste learned of the King’s intent, she yelled at the King: “You superstitious urban sob! You really think that the Egyptian god Atum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_creation_myths  created Thebes by masturbating? You think that you are done with me and want to masturbate into being, my son, as your successor?”

Crude as Iocaste’s words may be, it is no less true that virtualism is the consequence of masturbatory activity, and homosexuality is primarily born of the city.