“Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of Fire.”
-Gustav Mahler
Atlas Overthrown
Atlas, the burden-bearer, the world-holder, is not what he seems. Atlas does not represent a heroic burden-bearing of the weight of the world’s concerns, like some pagan Christ figure. Nor does he represent a noble aristocratic order of Platonic guardian-rulers who must, in some confabulated inversion, proliferate the Promethean instincts on behalf of common people. Atlas represents an ossified order. He represents Man’s burden of carrying the “entropic down-winding” of the world as that which is overthrown. A deterministic, rationalist structure that is no longer creative and a scientific materialism that has calcified into a kind of superstitious bureaucracy. Atlas’ burden reminds us of the inevitable cyclicality of Promethean achievements which have been captured by Epimethean popularization, whereby they drift into a “standing reserve” and are collateralized and mortgaged, but no longer refreshed or revitalized.
The order of Atlas in our world must be overcome and torn down. This is the sovereign duty of the Promethean soul. It must be achieved by reinfusing science and technology with myth, with imagination, and with the dangerous, world-altering power of Prometheus in both deeply meaningful aesthetic and symbolic ways as well as radical acts of creative destruction. Each of these Promethean locomotives imbue the substrate of the world with a sense of Dasein, of the being of oneself through acts of world-discovery and self-sculpting.
The West calls for a new “mythotechnological” regime to re-enchant and revitalize humanity, where humanity regains agency not just through data and reason, not through regurgitation of the static forms of bygone ages, but through the power of symbols, archetypes, and a renewed metaphysics.
But there is also much warfare in Prometheus. Fatalistic Olympus and the exhausted order of Atlas conspire to keep Man from heroic acts. The Colossus of Prometheus will look forward over the horizon, into the future, as a self-contained and self-originating locomotive of “mythopoetic” and “mythotechnological” imagination. As the radical, intransigent will which fights for these resources within Man. He fights for life itself and does not apologize for the violence he does on behalf of Man. He leads Man forward over the horizon. He does not gaze upward with teary, childlike eyes seeking Zeus’ acknowledgement that he stole fire, secretly hoping Zeus will bless him by recognizing his feat.
In this life, the sky is empty. The incredible reality of Man’s power is known by this whirling sky, empty of gods. But the horizon is full of promise.
Prometheus, the Soul of the West
Prometheus represents the fundamental power one recognizes when he looks up at the sky and finds it empty, empty of gods, and knows the full existential weight and responsibility falls on his shoulders. When there is no sky to look up to, it is within us that the universe must be born. The stark, vivid immediacy to find oneself alone in the cosmos is of incredible, brilliant freedom. He sees himself as living within the future. And he knows it falls to him to imprint on this lonely world a sense of meaning. This is the true heart of American Manifest Destiny. It is our job to make this spirit come to life in stone and bronze and futuristic metals. To call it forward out of the hearts of every onlooker.
It is a call to reject consensus mediocrity because consensus mediocrity conspires with the tyrant.
It is in this sense that Prometheus as Titan of the West and of Artists is taken out of the mythological fairy tale and dramatized as a new figure, within a new kind of contemporary mythology or folklore. He is the totem of our age, of the new Golden Age. A new Republic, a new West, a new Civilization.
Set against this forward-moving, creative locomotion, classicism is not much more than plagiarism, calling backwardly on the past in what Heidegger called a kind of “standing reserve.” Classical art, like all great works from the past, were not produced so that we could become classicists. Those artists gave us beauty in sculpture and music and architecture so that we could be more ourselves today, in the now. Customary forms reinforce the illusion that there is a higher authority taking care of everything, that there is a plan, a pre-established meaning, an already-provided purpose by someone from the outside to which we only need subscribe (a state, a church, an ideology, a guru, school or tradition, etc.). Prometheus represents the end of any excuse which Man had on this lonely earth spinning in the dark. What we create must not evoke bromides nor the notion that we can outsource anything about our lives.
In order to evoke this sense of power and human reality, we must not lull the viewer to sleep in the idea that they already understand what the work is meant to convey, because the work is a simplistic reference to what the eye is already so accustomed to seeing (i.e. the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus). Instead, our duty is to make this deep, tremendous meaning be vitalized as visceral and experiential in stark departure from childhood fairy tales and visual forms which the eye would readily expect, made to lull and anaesthetize us instead.
Prometheus speaks to us that being alone, misunderstood, existing “a-priori” to others in an almost separate plane, and of course being feared, hated and targeted, is the price of his overcoming. He is the titan of self-distinctiveness and self-differentiation.
Mighty works of our Age must in some sense scare men because they expose us as those who live inside commonly held suppositions. A truly powerful soul/mind which with militant Promethean integrity creates its own values and abandons bromides and ready-made “truths” strikes fear into collective mediocrity.
He is as dangerous to Washington DC as he is to Beijing or Davos. But he is also dangerous to our former selves, the selves we are transcending when we summon the will which great art must invoke. The Promethean mind is a mind which terrifies because it does not bend. His path is lonely, tough, but absolutely transformative and necessary. And thereby, great art must be novel, not soporific.
In the case of Prometheus, being racked to the mountainside with nothing but the empty winds and torture, sees all the collective mediocrities wiped away. Prometheus confronts us; he terrifies us with the reality of our true nature and the impossible freedom which great artworks represent in encapsulated form. He looks to the future rather than up at the gods exclaiming his forward-moving, natural will to power of Man’s locomotion alone, rather than in defiance of Zeus. He is the non-contingent, the unmoved mover. Prometheus tells Hermes “I care nothing for Zeus,” – he will not renege on the forward moving flywheel of Man’s agency. He will not look up for permission or even bother to act indignant or defiant to a world he has long bypassed. When onlookers see great works (as the Colossus) for what they truly are, they will never think in the same way again. The power will resonate within them with something inarticulable and unforgettable. The realization of the Promethean soul causes a rupture in who we know ourselves to be. It is not in peace, stability or order which a human being transforms, it is in pain and discomfort. Man’s suffering is not part of a divine plan which will justify anything in the end. We are alone. The Almighty will not come to save your soul. There is no ready-made meaning. Great art is not here to placate us. It is here to call and inspire and invoke in us the taking of new aesthetic and new spiritual territory, and to cultivate those lands with earnest cherishing. It says to us: “So.. Now… you are the creator.”
We are pushed into the abyss of radical freedom. This is it – that at this abyss, the ancient wildness of Man and the incredible song of beauty and warfare he must compose to meet these existential terrors with nobility – at this horizon of radical freedom there is the great power of Man. His birthright which he must claim. We cannot follow commandments. We create values. We do not “obey,” we surpass ourselves. There is no more absolution, no salvation. The full weight is on our shoulders. This ignites a great sense of power. The birth of brutal autonomy. Either you build yourself, either the West builds itself, or it sinks. This is the true American Dream. This is the true American Ideal. This is true American Power. This is what American Colossus must be also.
We author a new mythos. Powerful artistry in our age and this Colossus heralds the emergence of a new way of being. A new form of Man – one who does not live by the herd, who does not need approval or permission. A being who creates his own beauty and meaning, and his own morality, who lives above conventions and follows only his own will, his own mythopoetic vision, and creates according to his own mythotechnological ethos.
The Solitary West
The world will not come to save the West. Once the automated future is secured by a manufacturing system that mocks individual sovereignty, republican values, natural rights, etc., the race is run and humanity reverts to slavery again.
Humanity never had any slow, pleasant evolution. He only had rupture and radical transformation. Rupture is the required, nonlinear fashion of unexpected, explosive change that generates the surplus which provisions the culture and economy in the face of depreciation and entropy-ridden, Epimethean collective mediocrity. Creative destruction is the only path remaining to a civilization teetering on extinction. The West remains the West only through creative destruction. This Promethean reality must be expressed in our great art works and come to life in new schools and traditions.
Prometheus’ exemplifies a mind which is unbreakable. It is unbreakable because he is the being who overcomes everything which binds ordinary man, and indeed which binds the petty caricatures of the gods. Guilt, obedience, herd morality, need for acceptance, reliance on others for what is to be liked and preferred, the asking for permission to exist. He is motivated by a deep core of beauty and love for what he creates, including Mankind who are his children. He creates his own laws on behalf of this meaning and beauty and lives by them with unbreakable integrity even if living against the entire world.
He does not adapt to the world, he imposes meaning onto the world. He does not ask “Is this allowed?” he asks “Is this worthy of me?”
Once we make the transformation from the first question into the second, the cascade of Man’s power begins to unravel and ignite. This is the original alchemical agent of Man’s heroic nature.
The higher he rises, the more he disturbs. The construction of oneself within the archetype of Prometheus is the most brutal one can face. And great art work must imbue this into us instinctively by the very fact of itself, as evidence of this already taking place within the artist himself. It requires of us to destroy everything that is not ours, not authored by ourselves, everything imposed on us by a rubric which rewards obedience and vilifies authenticity. And it requires of us that we imprint with our own poetic or technological vision the artistry and machinery geared to form greater, more abiding meaning onto the world. It means we are in the desert, we are stranded on the mountaintop. No one will rally for us or applaud us. We will endure the silence.
Prometheus and Civilization
To rebuild our civilization we must abandon the idea it will be achieved through comfort, cheap motivation, social media, counterfeiting into the endless unpaid credit for retirement welfare of the lifelong unproductive, etc. We must jettison the bigotry which calls us to ask the empty sky for life to be easier, and instead ask ourselves to be stronger, more original, more motivated by the vital primacy of our own living beings. It calls us to change our relationship with suffering – instead of avoiding it and denaturing ourselves, it calls us to recognize that it helps us to forge indomitable spirit. When we see ourselves as creator, not as servant, the way we think, act and feel transform completely. This spirit calls us to kill parts of ourselves which still beg for approval.
Unlike the ancient countries, Americans invented our country. We survived by reinventing it. The fundamental principle of our country as the front running nation of the West is innovation and the recognition of obsolescence. While most peoples flee from chaos, the West has in its DNA the capacity to walk within it. While most peoples beg for normality through superstitions and statism, the West creates greatness. Likewise, the duty of the artist is to call us to reevaluate what we think about strength and power through great aesthetic depth and splendor.
Indeed, America is not a thing but a process. But it is not an Apollonian process of standing back and regarding abstraction from afar. It is never a plaintive hope to be carried passively on the standing reserve of an outside provider. It is a Dionysian process of overcoming and ordeal and a dialectic war on reality to imprint Man’s vision on the world. America is not a depredated “new Rome” oppressed by a Jupiter full of slaves period America is an ongoing promethean apotheosis of triumph over the hind brain urge to plagiarize and mortgage.
Culturally it is the same: we must kill parts of our culture which are not worthy of a destiny of economic and technological preeminence – because slavery is the cost of failure. If we cannot take radical, principled stances, we are not worthy of freedom. And when we begin to become strong again, we will need to come armed with an ideology which prizes solitude and exceptionalism over agreeable, collective mediocrity. The new aesthetic of the West is sparking and coursing with the electricity of these tenants.
The West was once known for its abundant, overflowing scientific, aesthetic and economic progress. But the rate of progress has collapsed. Artists in the new aesthetic are called to embody the re-ignition of our cultural power. And the understanding of how we achieve it emanates from this interior, vital reality discovered when we see the sky is empty, the existential responsibilities fall on us alone in a realm of great freedom, and that we must individually imprint meaning onto the canvas of the cosmos. It emanates when we behold grand, powerful works of unapologetic artistic beauty and originality.
Gleaming Prometheus in bronze and flared natural gas will exemplify this.
