The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  Those of us that make it through the coming cyclone must strive for those ideas that can be retrieved from the perpetual wellspring of true creativity, which flowed about our ancestral landscape as a river. Ideas and physical work that are not relativist or indefinable but natural, instinctual and the product of intense labour, and a devotion to strict and methodical æsthetic. They will be easier to see without the machinery of lies.

  The answer to the question of whether the West can be saved is this: yes, what is important can and will be. Spengler’s theorem is just that, a theory, and suffers from materialist nihilism — his brilliant assertion is its own kind of bondage, being overly negative in its material solidity, and sows hopelessness and demoralization. Once you identify a pattern and trend you introduce the possibility of changing or mitigating it. The overly pessimistic worldview is a symptom of the jilted loss of Christian faith, in the naive melancholy of losing the simplistic reward and punishment promises of the Abrahamic, but hope and faith are material realities with enormous causal effect in the real world.

  Civilization cannot be revived just as it was, but with great exertion it can be renewed with a whole different colour. Fear of letting it all go is only making it more tyrannical in its dotage. The youthful wind of thumos (θυμός) found in the guidance of an anti-materialist nobility, the guiding myth of the priestly solar warrior, will herald the return of the sleeping king. And even if the struggle is in the immediate sense hopeless, we must fight today for a reversal, and tomorrow if we are overwhelmed and persecuted, and the day after as we battle bitterly onward, for the sake of courage alone We must in every sense aid in the fueling of the funeral pyre, in forcing the modern world to self-reflect, and realise it has already died.

  Draw your swords and cut away at the rot. And though you cannot necessarily kill a bad idea once it takes hold, each idea has a life cycle of its own and will vanish when nature decrees, leaving a seed-bomb of new ideas. We might still hope to be spacefarers and colossus-makers, to be spiritually and materially prosperous, and be part of a self-improving culture again. But if you tend your inner spiritual garden, the light of this truth shines on you regardless of outside events. Homeric courage is the will to greet death on your own terms, classical theism dictates that what is eternal in us is the agency of reason which enables the action of husbanding reality, of tending and shaping the garden, of the cosmos witnessing its own light. We will not be physically free to regain our role as nature’s proprietors until the enormous bonfire is lit, and what we call ‘modernity’ becomes the fertile compost heap of the new growth. Even in ruination the beauty of tradition persists, and frankly there is very little worth preserving about the current incarnation of modernity. We seek a survivable apocalypse.

  The River

  “Water is the driving force of all nature.”

  – Leonardo DaVinci

  The metaphor of a primordial river of creativity came to me in a waking dream. I believe in portent and I can see the river in my mind when I speak of it, quite clearly. You reach down into those waters, which flow from the past into the future — like genes, or the orbit of the spheres — and you withdraw a creative idea, which is related to an upward-striving concept from an ancestor, and link it to a future idea for a descendant.

  Sick, unhealthy ideas come from somewhere else and have nothing to do with the river, which snakes in either direction into the past and the future. These bad ideas, which are manipulated and presented intentionally, with evil intent, are an illusion — a distraction from the lifegiving waters, which in their normal course nourish the black earth of creativity. The illusionary ideas are attacks from outside forces of chaos and entropy, as the cosmos wishes to test our mettle. Those outlying forces do not understand the true long game, the roots of our sensed loyalties. They do not feel the logos, the voice of the true momentum. They do not see the crystal-clear waters, the smooth rocks, or the bright green water plants beneath.

  We have not had a true new art style now for 50 or more years. The importance of poetry (the bards) and the purpose of music is lost. The nine muses have been left in the void, to float in the dark cosmic milk, abandoned. To even speak of them in a modern sense sounds hackneyed or superstitious, thus they do not come because they are never beckoned. But they still live.

  The river is a secret spiritual emanation that washed about the ancients like a raging deluge, unrestricted. Too much civilization has blinded us to nature. But I believe that this too is temporary. The moment you take up a lie, even out of politeness or kindness, you have failed and it will end badly. So it will be with the Modernists and the materialists.

  The truth will out.

  It may take years of unlearning what has been taught but with tools like the internet, some of us are slowly rubbing the sleep from our eyes. It is not an easy task, to seek this hidden primal wellspring. You must learn to reject social currents, to listen to the voice in the back of your head, the guiding instinct, and be confident that it speaks the truth. People that get caught up in the impression of things, those who’s behaviour becomes rigid as they play a part they feel is expected of them, that are false and ignore their inner voice, will be as those imprisoned in Plato’s cave, watching the shadows and missing the essence. Western man, quite creatively unique in this world, can draw true and improving ideas from his primordial vision that are not stagnant and indefinable but vital and evolving – and to the benefit of everyone.

  The true idea is not democratic — nothing but watered down illusion and weakness comes from shared or democratic counsel. Too many cooks spoil the broth, as the ancient European proverb goes. And proverbs are, of course, a tradition of essential wisdom. A true idea and a true art is the product of a solitary mind, an exuberance of personality, with intense devotion to an orderly æsthetic. The closer the result is to the singular vision, the purer and more eccentric the creativity. For better or for worse, such is the nature of excellence and God’s intent of our abilities. Working from within that which nature provides, not seeking to be outside nature but observing and idealizing.

  This is the prehistoric European ideal that started the inner world for us all, which remains to us the roots of our classical world-tree. The wall barring us from this river is the frightened bulk of our own people, who are the playthings of manipulative, jealous technocrats, their values swayed like random eddies with the overturned cart of post-enlightenment egalitarianism. They are an irrational army of the irascibly envious, too cowardly to abandon the false comfort of a materialist, convenience world. They are goaded by the anxiety of self-deceit to a puritan zeal for destroying the past and thereby the future. Their puppet masters do not want art, or ideas. They want a deracinated strip mall population of spiritless drones.

  But our tradition has not gone from us, it is merely hidden and one way or the other, under one guise or another, under the great duress of the waning of our current cycle, we shall break their shackles. Because truth is a cleaving sword of fire, blazing with righteousness, as cruel and true as Nature herself. There is no escaping change.

  The origin of the river and whether it has a starting point on the real timeline is a sacred mystery. It emanates from some Terra Septemtrionalis Incognita. That it flows from the past to the future is all I can say. In my imagination it emanates from a classical city-state of the psyche, such as Atlantis. I cannot say that it is eternal but it might be.

  The myths of Hyperborea and Ultima Thule say that people there lived to the age of 1,000 and enjoyed lives of complete happiness. The Hellenes believed Apollo himself was venerated among the Hyperboreans and wintered there. They were a race of giant supermen linked into the Cosmos through magical powers. They were said to have psychic and technological energies far exceeding ours but they later fell and were degenerated to lesser men. This legend, perhaps not to be taken literally, speaks to our downfall from a much higher form. Like tradition itself, it is a puzzle, a clockwork spell, set in motion not as literal history but as a w
arning parable to enable our survival and thriving. By setting an impossible transcendent goal, you aim for the impossible and land somewhere high. The story of Hyperborea was already an ancient myth to those who wrote our ancient myths. And myth, or storytelling, was the first art. The courage of the classic hero is the life lesson. That is the logos that shapes the world for the better.

  A man’s worth is and always will be in his ability to enact dominance and change upon the world, on his ferocity and his strength of eccentricity.

  Our ethical spirituality as Europeans demands rectitude, sacrifice and honour; the universe and God demand beauty and transcendence. We shall continue to undergo a difficult period and a destruction, just how much nobody can predict. I expect great loss. But I have faith that we will discover the new system, the new way, and an ancient humility before nature and an archaic revival free from sentimentalism, cowardice and materialism, that will not just rejuvenate art but science and exploration and the suffering natural world. It will be different to what came before but related, as always. It will obey the old aristocratic rules, the natural law. The hallmark of rejuvenation will be the return of the inner life, the mystical force of the hero. Respect for order and dignity will herald our vengeance and the river will burst its dam and wash away the narcissists, materialists, polluters, and liars until a new cyclical enemy emerges.

  And when the art of man and the beauty of nature are reconciled, the Earth will be wholly beautiful once more.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The Republic. Plato. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.

  The Iliad, translated by A. S. Kline, Published by Crispijn van de Passe, the Workshop of Bernard Picart and Hendrick Goltzius courtesy of the The Rijksmuseum.

  The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler, Ed. Arthur Helps, and Helmut Werner. Trans. Charles F. Atkinson. Preface Hughes, H. Stuart. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

  Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga (Italian: Rivolta contro il mondo moderno). Evola, Julius, Milan, Italy. Hoepli, 1934.

  Might is Right, Redbeard, Ragnar, Auditorium Press, United States, 1890.

  The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.

  The Enneads, Plotinus, Stephen MacKenna (Translator), John M. Dillon, Published June 27th 1991 by Penguin Classics.

  Vitruvius: The Ten Books On Architecture, Vitruvius Pollio; Morgan, Morris Hicky, 1859-1910.

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Penguin Classics, 1964.

  The Archaic Revival, Terrence McKenna, HarperCollins; 1st edition, 1992.

  Twilight of Painting, R.H. Ives Gammell, Parnassus Imprints June 1, 1990.

  Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley, 93 Publishing; First Edition edition, 1974.

  The Craftsman’s Handbook: “Il Libro dell’ Arte”, Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, translated by Jr. Daniel V. Thompson, Yale University Press, 1933.

  © 2018, Brendan Heard, All Rights Reserved.

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