Continental-Conscious

"We struggle not in order to overcome purposelessness. We struggle because purposelessness is another name for lifelessness, and so, we are only alive insofar as we maintain in ourselves a state of ontological opposition. There is neither victory in this pursuit, nor life beyond it. It defines life. Conflict is the extent of the meaningful substance of life. Anyone whose particular interest doesn’t consume them entirely — a complete obsession, a question of life and death — might as well be pushing papers for all it matters. Why live at all if not voraciously, if not maniacally, desperately, if not on the grounds that there’s no other way? Shame is like a sheath on the sword of genius." -- A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World by Alexander J. Ford and Jack R. Parnell NOW AVAILABLE in paperback and ebook from PRAV Publishing: https://pravpublishing.com/product/slow-death/

On this day 103 years ago, an elite circle of Russian thinkers fleeing the carnage of revolution and civil war met in Sofia, Bulgaria, where they held a mini-conference on the meaning of culture. Their discussions culminated a few months later with the publication of Exodus to the East: The Affirmation of the Eurasians, a book regarded as the founding document of the Eurasian movement and the Eurasianist school of thought. Since 2020, PRAV Publishing has been working to make the Eurasianists accessible to the world in original English translation and with the commentary of leading Russian scholars. PRAV’s Foundations of Eurasianism series, recently spotlighted by the New York Review of Books, has already inaugurated 28 texts by 9 authors and is soon to enter its third volume. Foundations of Eurasianism - Volume I: https://pravpublishing.com/product/foundations-of-eurasianism-volume-i/ Foundations of Eurasianism - Volume II: https://pravpublishing.com/product/foundations-of-eurasianism-volume-ii/ Foundations of Eurasianism - Volume III: coming soon!

If the Logos of America is Pragmatism ("It works"), then America's Assignment with Destiny may, after all, be its role in a phoenix rebirth of myth. As H.T. Hansen writes in his forward to Julius Evola's Mystery of the Grail, "[I]f, as Jung says, reality is that which is effective, then myths are also reality." Thinkers like Aleksei Losev have independently argued myth's status as the truest arbiter of reality on the human scale. For Evola, myth is the supreme signifier of truth. Science and history are valuable only insofar as they carry a mythic content (in contradiction to the modern idea that the study of myth is only justified by the historical data it may hold). This is that to which Evola refers as the "traditional method." With respect to art, mere aesthesis and fantasy does not rise to the status of art as a "gay science" - a drunken communion with the gods. In his opening to The Mystery of the Grail, Evola writes, "[E]ven in cases in which spontaneous, poetic, or fantastic compositions appear to be in the forefront, such elements nonetheless have the value of a contingent covering or vehicle of expression, at which only a superficial reader may stop. Some authors intended simply to engage in artistic compositions and were indeed successful at that so much so that their productions are enjoyed by those who know about and care for the aesthetic perspective only. This does not mean that these people, in their 'artistic productions' and in their spontaneity, have not also done something else; they have either preserved and transmitted or activated a higher content, which a trained eye will always be able to recognize. Some authors would undoubtedly be shocked if they were clearly shown that this is indeed what has happened in their works." What Evola here describes could finally explain the obsession contemporary esotericists have with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. It reinstates the reality of myth in literature. It resurrects the corpse of "literature" and reminds it of its true face: myth. This is precisely the same conception of "literary art" which Yuri Mamleev calls "Metaphysical Realism." It is a literature easily mistaken for surrealism, which itself is a form of sacred writing that his been doused in the waters of the Lethe. Out of the apogee of forgetfulness comes the stark gaze of "aletheia," Metaphysical Realism, myth. The westernmost lands suddenly become the easternmost. America is an unlikely, unwarranted cradle for the rebirth of myth because all that matters here is that "it works." This is the land of "effective reality" which transcends the humus of the technocapital corpse. Mamleev arrived to our shores as a herald of this fact. His New York "Ithaca" was his exile. He was the crier in our wilderness. Only by studying the Mamleevan corpus can we begin to discern the contours of the "rough beast," to pick out the kinetic gyre of his "slouching." Then, perhaps, we will find out which of our Bethlehems are slated to be his birthplace.

Good old Askr Svarte quips (from a surprise book coming soon)

"Developing strength, health, and thereby an emergent or incidental quality in one’s own body is, in essence, a ritual that one observes. This is the precise meaning of orthopraxy, or, correct practice. Moreover, as Socrates hints in the matter of fettle, there is the cultivation as well of a component of self-discipline, which is entirely beyond the purview of the natural sciences and their technologies. These qualities cannot be handed over in a lesson on the board. They cannot be transferred in the form of doctrinal awareness alone. Being told the path to strength does not make one strong. There is no mechanical or chemical process that can imbue the slovenly mind with discipline. Neither words nor technology can impart these qualities on a person. Only through ritual are they attained. The metaphysical rituals — or praxis, as we have said — that yield those fruits are inflicted upon oneself, by oneself, and each generation must re- earn, re-till and re-harvest the field of the self by their own willing expenditure." -- Alexander J. Ford and Jack R. Parnell, A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World NOW AVAILABLE from PRAV Publishing in paperback and ebook https://pravpublishing.com/product/slow-death/

Having spent half of my life in dissidence, relentless struggle, and fidelity to something beyond my(lesser)self, at some times wanting peace but all the while knowing the ancient truth that „Polemos is the father of all…that has made some humans free” (Heraclitus), I have come to think that posing the following two questions is more than enough to overcome any negative feelings (the most common among dissidents being, e.g., loneliness, exhaustion, depression, infighting, Weltschmerz, depreciated self-confidence, etc.): (1) When your soul was asked by the Fates in Hades which life it wanted to live next (cf. the myth told at the end of Plato’s Republic), why did it choose this one? (The very same question can be posed alternatively: Why did the Divine let you be born to find yourself in such a question-worthy life-situation?) (2) When others, even the closest, don’t understand who you are or what you’re doing, what does this say about your own (mis)understandings, your own way of living, your own manifestation(s)? If you ever come to pose these questions, you might realize that the responses are in essence your responsibility — to yourself, to the ones you love, to friends and enemies, to the world, to the Gods. The question(s) and response(s) are “the conversation that we are” (Hölderlin). Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Don’t look back.

"Look around. Look outside. We in the West have spent now two hundred thirty years deliberately making a world without a soul. Calculating it. Painstakingly sifting out everything that won’t value in gold on the scales. And our prize is that we wake up every morning beaten down and obliterated from the inside-out by this godforsaken landscape of synthetic objects and economically-sized birdcages, and garish, impermanent frivolities, crushed as we are by cities designed for automobiles, not for humans, hurried along on sweltering and ever-widening conveyor belts toward disgusting and lifeless piles of building material which swallow us up and spit us back out — and yet all of it fits nicely in a spreadsheet. All of it produces good returns for someone. It’s economical. We call it “home.” We grew up here, and our parents grew up here. Our children are born here. Against this backdrop we say, on the way to the therapist, how horrible it must have been to spend a day under the court of the Great Khan. What pill could I have even taken for my headache? The West longs for an artist of total and ancient severity to exorcise our so-called institutions of ‘art,’ to liberate them from the throngs of paying customers who fatten them, now to the point of bursting. But more than a sculptor, or a portrait painter, the West is desperate for someone to patron those individuals. For her aristocrats — and beyond that, for a place of such oppressive dignity as to cry out to be inhabited by that work. Where is the city of stone and symbol in which machinery is relegated to the underbelly and to the outskirts; where is her body, the polis, where are her architects? And further still, who among us could even train them up? If there are any living individuals of this sort, they will scarcely be found constructing anything. One would do well to look for them under someone’s heel. Most of them will not even know themselves. In the library, perhaps, or at the drafting table after hours, learning from the works of teachers long-dead for no good reason. Tormented by the fact that their ends appear to be entirely selfish. Teaching themselves things not taught in the schools, and dreaming things hardly permissible in the industry, things which are not acceptable to the slave-drivers of that industry. There are perhaps a handful of such architects alive today, who are known to some degree, but nevermind. The cultures of antiquity which form the Western canon do so because those cultures allowed their sages to educate their artists, and their artists then to dictate terms to their engineers and financiers. For our part, we contribute nothing, because we have allowed our engineers to consume our sages and to educate our artists themselves, and then, we hand them over to the terms dictated by our financiers." excerpt from A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World by Alexander J. Ford and Jack R. Parnell NOW AVAILABLE in paperback and ebook from PRAV Publishing: https://pravpublishing.com/product/slow-death/