21st Century Wire says…
It was Victor Hugo who once stated that the 19th century was polarized between Romanticism and Socialism.
Hugo, a voice for the individual, challenged the oppressive mechanisms of the ‘old order’ before theneo-eugenics movement had fully put its hands around civilization.
To a large extent, the truth seekers of today are the New Romantic Army, one poised for an intellectual battle as the ‘house of cards’ is falling in on the global elite.
Jon Rappoport provides deeper insight into the cage-rattling poets of today…
IMAGE: Painting by writer/artist Victor Hugo (Octopus with the initials V.H.)
It’s the poets who destroy the old order
Jon Rappoport
No More Fake News
“[Poetry] should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a Remembrance…” (John Keats)
“And then your life, the life you are telling me about, becomes a short story that had force only because it was viewed from a particular slant, your slant, which you found within the one language you speak…” (The Magician Awakes)
“The greatest sum is no sum at all. It isn’t the addition of facts or numbers. It’s the willingness, for a little while at first, to suspend judgment and consider there are mythic qualities in existence that come from us…myths greater than machines…and in order to give voice to the myths we need to go where poets go. We need to go there badly. For our own sake, we have to put that peculiar precision that splits a tiny particle into smaller and smaller pieces on the shelf for a little while…” (The Magician Awakes)
Call this an article of faith.
These days, people are rightly concerned about spying, snooping, tracking, hacking, profiling. The battle of privacy versus intrusion. The systems that look at other systems.
And at the same time, the people who are spying and tracking are trying to hide their own secrets. They’re doing double duty. Just off the top of your head, what would you think of a person who was doing everything he could to assemble the particulars of your life while he was concealing the details of his?
And suppose his wealth and access were, say, a few hundred billion times greater than yours?
What kind of language is involved in all this computer spying and counter-spying and protection? You don’t have to be an expert to see it’s the language of the machine. It’s certainly elegant in many respects, and it’s delineated in fine, very fine, and extra-fine shavings of detail. The Trojan Horse is now algorithmic.
The people who enter and work in that universe are committed to a meticulous process of move and counter-move. Programs above other programs. Look-ins which are processing the strategies of other look-ins.
I’m interested in all this because the past, present, and future of language is involved. A civilization, to a significant extent, rides on what happens to words—not as detached entities, but as the expression of what we invent ourselves to be.
“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
These aren’t minor matters. Imagine what victory in a war means when the survivors, on both sides, emerge with battered minds, bodies, and souls. The experience of war makes them see the future in different terms.
If freedom is placed in a modern context of privacy vs. no-privacy, the war is going to embroil us in a language of the machine. We’re going to touch that language, rub up against it in one way or another, use it, oppose some piece of it with another piece of it.
Children are going to grow up learning it and swimming in it and its effects.
In that way, the creeks and streams and rivers and oceans of machine interaction are going to power human thinking.
IMAGE: Expulsion of the Demons – an anonymous engraving from the 1600s.
(Did the neo-eugenics system of today get inspiration from past engravings like the one above?)
“…it is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there…” (William Carlos Williams)
Here’s a strange example. People will take a paragraph out of an author’s novel, extract every key word, and track down their possible references—and then try to reconstitute the paragraph as if it were lines of secret code. They’ll rebuild it by welding together those references.
Because mathematics consists of symbol-manipulation, and the symbols have very specific and tight meanings, there is a growing tendency to assume all language works this way.
But of course, it doesn’t.
Poetry doesn’t. So the poet, who was already on the far edge of credibility, is reintroduced as a symbol maker, a mathematician slipping a coded revolution into the matrix.
That might make an entertaining science fiction novel, but it has nothing to do with the energy or intent of a poem.
Poets may be unearthing hidden treasure, but the spoils of their war are everything mathematics isn’t. Every great poet destroys the old order. It’s for the reader to discover and see that, if he can…
Read more at Jon Rappoport’s blog
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