We face the crisis of colonization by technics. Scientism is the great faith of the Sword. Gnosticism trades transcendence for immanence. It thinks to build Utopia. It also thinks that it knows the outcome of history, but history opens endlessly into the future, which offers no guarantee, and history therefore has no graspable totality or eidos. “The problem of the eidos in history,” Voegelin writes, “arises only when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized,” or drawn down into this world. Furthermore, “The meaning of history,” which the ideologies purport to embody, “is an illusion; and this illusionary eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith [the eschaton] as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience.” At its highest modern pitch, Gnostic rebellion appears as “the active mysticism of a state of perfection, to be achieved through a revolutionary transfiguration of the nature of man, as in Marxism.” In a world — the actual world — that a healthily attuned subject can only apprehend as uncertain in its temporal unfolding, the Gnostic avoids anxiety by foisting on his own mind “a certainty about the meaning of history.” https://gatesofvienna.net/2020/06/eric-voegelin-on-gnostic-modernity/
Wendell Berry
To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart. The world
is a holy vision, had we clarity
to see it—a clarity that men
depend on men to make.
—Wendell Berry
Aimee Cesaire
All The Way from Akkad from Elam from Sumer
Master of the three paths, you have before you a man who has walked a lot. Master of the three paths, you have before you a man who has walked on his hands on his feet on his belly on his backside.
All the way from Elam. From Akkad. From Sumer.
Master of the three paths, you have before you a man who has carried a lot. And truly my friends I have carried I have carried all the way from Elam, from Akkad, from Sumer.
I have carried the commandant’s body. I have carried the commandant’s railroad. I have carried the commandant’s locomotive, the commandant’s cotton. I have carried on my nappy head that gets along just fine without a little cushion God, the machine, the road—the commandant’s God. Master of the three paths I have carried under the sun, I have carried in the mist I have carried over the ember shards of legionary ants. I have carried the parasol I have carried the explosives I have carried the carcan and as on the shores of the Nile you see in the soft mud the just foot of the ibis I have left everywhere on the banks on the mountains on the shores the gri-gri of my carcan feet.
All the way from Akkad. From Elam. From Sumer.
Master of the three paths, Master of the three channels, may it please you for once—the first time since Akkad since Elam since Sumer—my muzzle apparently more tanned than the calluses on my feet but in reality softer than the crow’s scrupulous beak and as if draped supernaturally in bitter folds provided by my borrowed gray skin (a livery men force onto me every winter)—that I may advance through the dead leaves with my little sorcerer steps
toward where the inexhaustible injunction of men thrown to the knotted sneers of the hurricane threatens triumphantly. All the way from Elam from Akkad from Sumer.