Pictures of our Promethean Future:
The Dark Knight, Pt I
Clamoring bells and soaring birds came to the city in the Midsummer Festival. Boulevards of trees and moss-grown walls funneled the great people to the harborside to watch the lighting of the Great Flame rising into the twilight. Each year the Colossus, which had stood since before the time of the great grandfathers, was adorned with garlands. The elegant temple at its feet with a spine of glass and bronze sheltered the primordial forge, whose coals were perennially burning, calling the peoples to long guard the sacred flame in their breasts.
The elders joined the youths in long processions in robes of mauve and gray. They smiled on the children, hair festooned with laurels as they carried within the weighty and archaic secrets, still budding in their hearts. On this day, the craft were grounded and the were machines silenced, and an ancient quiet settled over the city just beneath the happy celebration. Master workmen and merry women with babies slung on their chests stood on grassy hillsides above the water, and shook the hands of the neighbors, earnest in recognition of the originating powers of the other.
The fields on the crests of the hillsides to the East, encircling the city and her Bay, were rimmed with golden light piercing through the harbor entrance. And beyond, the peaks stood above the miles of vineyards and farm valleys, the laboratories and the great academies.
All about the eaves of the houses was the great joyous clanging of bells and the celebration of courage.
All about the eaves of the houses was the great joyous clanging of bells and the celebration of courage that hung like wreathes on the doorways. It was not the joy built upon successful slaughter of the enemy, that fearful and trivial feeling. It was quiet, slow-moving and inevitable. An unbounded and generous contentment in communion with the finest and most noble in the souls of all men everywhere. This is what swelled the hearts of the people of the city.
Under an olive tree in a quiet plaza, a youth with an instrument, fingernails sliding up and down the steel in a song as old as the elegant, improvising mind which carried it. And the people would stand to listen and admire as they made their happy path down to the procession through archways and avenues, past vines and pomegranate trees.
On the lips and the minds of all who celebrated at Midsummer, that upright artistry of living, that rugged discipline, taught to all the people from the very earliest ages. That noble culture which carried forward the confident ideal in every act, then to witness like an archaic moment of satori, the incredible future unfold in vivid, beautiful immediacy as they themselves had fashioned it to do. And the victory they celebrated was that victory of all the triumphant genealogies cascading through time.
As the flags snapped in the clean sea air, the sunlight like white gold arced across a deep blue sky. The arcana and inmost secrets of the cosmos swelled in the world-summer of the noble culture carried within each strong and composed heart. And where each one practiced with their momentary acts a religion of fire-bringing, sanctified in the unity of primordial principle and creative will. Surging forward and snapping to the vivid elegant moment like so many sun-drenched ensigns.
Long gone were the days of clergy. Each man and woman were ordained as powerful law-keepers of the race. The ideal-keepers of the race. There were no kings either, and so no collectives nor slaves. Yet this was not because there were no betters and no lesser. There certainly were. Though the proud people of the honored city would not sully their character with vestigial simian comparison-making, that constricted and petty mimicry from ancestral times. Indeed, many schools for children of early youth were named for that great geneticist who had discovered and edited the coding for unconsidered followership. His statue stood over many friezes and plaza pillars across the lands. It was thus that the laws of the great people were seldom and few.
It was thus that the laws of the great people were seldom and few.
It had long been denigrated and shamed, first among the people of the mountains and the prairies, then downward to the people of the coast, that perverse elevation of despair, that praising of curdled envy. And just beyond the memory of the great grandfathers, the sophisticates and hucksters who shilled that only evil was interesting, only material was real, and only takings were gain, were driven from the lands, then driven from the genes. It was thought a few might remain, hiding on islands for the war to end.
No. The great people were not simple at all. Not dulcet farmers or strange pagans. They made no rituals to regression. Their sophistication would go unregistered by someone in our time. Their violence rare, brief, terrifying and decisive. And yet, they were joyful as one in our time might think naïve or bland. Sober-faced discrimination of what is necessary was an emanation point of what was joyful. The undergirded nobility and power of the people would scarcely be recognizable to a time traveler.
Leading up to the days of the festival, the train station and the air stations were covered with newcomers. Slender bodies and light luggage filled the lofty cavernous buildings built to honor and rhyme with the elegance of the visitors which the city welcomed. The honey-colored stone of the exteriors were adorned with banners announcing great achievements and new inventions, and almost nowhere could an advertisement be seen. Hanging from the columns and in the shining hair of the youths the wild flowers brought in from the hillsides, as fragrant as the profundity of the science of the great people.
And a silence quelled over the city toward the evening hour. There, pushing off the pier with its honey-colored columns spiraling up from the green waters on the shore, the honorable mayor, clad in black as though he moved through the void and the darkness, stood forward on the prow of the regal barge bearing the torch across the Bay. The wind lifting up the white caps of the swell and blowing the last whisps of fog through the crisp blue sky. The trumpets signaled his approach to the island, imperious, melancholy and piercing.
The trumpets signaled his approach to the island, imperious, melancholy and piercing.
Rising above the fog, above the harbor and its glistening flags, into the evening twilight beset with summer garlands, the bronze clad specter of the Dark Knight, shards of silver shimmering from the waters onto his shoulders and his jaw and his brow, stood above the waves in its 100th year.
And the barge drew near. The honorable mayor alighted and set his foot down on the stones of the isle, fashioned out of the brickwork of some prior edifice long forgotten. Ascending the stairs he touched his flame at the foot of the Great Figurehead.
With a tremendous bellows that sounded across the harbor, the great bonfire flame above in its triumphant hand exploded with heat and majesty. The cheers from the shore could be heard across the chopping swell.
In the eyes of the great monument lived a golden life in sun-soaked fields of victory. Standing quietly on the hillsides, in robes of mauve and gray, the sages, the warriors, and the engineers all could recall the days, those long eternities of struggle, when the sinews of the Freedoms and those precious sparks of glory were hauled like sail sheets from their chests.
The dark bronze paladin standing unadorned but for his primordial, vital form, spoke unto them with the gravity of the tides. In their hearts they heard the Dark Knight speak, as though it were the voice from the sanctums of their own hearts, the unshakable faith in the abundance of all that is sublime and magnificent.
In their hearts they heard the Dark Knight speak…
It spoke, the soul of the Dark Knight that lived within the hearts of the many who looked on from the shore. It spoke onward from the incredible composure of nature, its perennially aristocratic architecture, its hidden systematic magnificence.
It spoke from the unshakable belief in his own sacredness, its own power, its own nature rivalrous with the divine. It spoke as a hero who lived his life within a quiet chamber of a glorious optimism, bringing warm skies into the dark specter of uncertainty.
Hearing back across arcs of time, the drumbeat of the lineages of whirling genius, cascading, thundering up into an uncanny union with the silent power of that very moment. Of skyscrapers built and atomic engines ignited. Of great symphonies echoing, of nations constructed and bled for, of diseases killed, genes edited and money systems emancipated.
There on the hillside, the sages, the warriors and the engineers spoke in their hearts the prosecution of human relentlessness, self-overcoming, and the will to destroy into a code of ideal-making and self-assertion. Of individuation and increasing elegant complexity. It spoke the great incantations of beauty, running on ahead into the twilight. The time-hewn credo of the Dark Knight, the destroyer of fate, spoke heavily: “Man Also Rises.”
Man Also Rises
The Midsummer Festival was carried forward from an ancestral celebration of Independence. It carried on into the golden evening. And there was one who stood further apart even from the happy, gilded people. One within whom rested the power to take control of that machinery of creation. The one who had set out that dawn and walked alone through the empty morning streets, through the honey-colored gates and past the darkness of the fields. The place he walked towards was a place even less imaginable to us than the Bay of Man’s Triumph. Up redwood gullies first stirring with birds, and across the hillsides, dark green in the moonlight glancing down from the clouds.
And for what were the people, in their robes of mauve and gray, so proud to stand? It’s easy to be persuaded something terrible will happen, and to shrink back into one’s shell. The celebrations of the festival were still a rain dance, he thought. Even from those pomegranate-lined boulevards, there was one who would go on to where the forge of will, standing on its own, could be valorized all the more. For this one, he knew that to stand for an ideal, he must still be a renegade. And thus he must go alone. Go unadorned with gadgets and machines, garlands and shaded plazas, walk away from wizards of invention as a whole Man, a singularity, an archaic furnace of the great technosphere that was his own. Man, across the axis of time, the densest of all planetary objects, it was this star map he held in his breast as he walked into the dawn. Those sacred powers of vision making, of ideal-ization, the astrophysical quantum element of individuation guiding time itself. And there on the hillside, he calibrated the quiet chamber for the covert signal intelligence of the Dark Knight, king of time.
…an archaic furnace of the great technosphere that was his own.
His memory coursed across his sinews and his genes. His ancient forebearers, in the snow and the black pines, each of their noble acts infused into him and his biochemic soul. The long epochs, deprioritizing, downregulating the impulse to copy and to follow, the impulse for aping, they were a forge of the dark cladding, rivet by rivet, of ancient metallurgical armor against the enemies of the ideal.
And there on the hillside beyond the Bay, as dawn’s rose fingers touched the sky, the one who had walked into the darkness sat on that hillside and had fashioned himself into the dark paladin. Facing into the open sea and the piercing shards of new yellow sun, mighty stratospheric clouds rising aloft into the warm light, the hero sat as the tall green grasses leaned away from the wafting air. The tides crashed on the rocky beaches below. The spirit of the forerunner, the forge lighter, the sacred furnace of the race, welled within him.
He felt in his hillside meditation that dark armor around the flame, the inferno, just as the heavy surface of the Figurehead which stood in the Bay. That bronze Promethean encasement holding the ignited antimatter for the movement into negative space. Its rarity, its virtue, its courage. His force, the force which pushed relentlessly into the void. He moved toward the unknowability of the future, a copilot ratcheting the sextant and imprinting his vision upon the charts. He emanated the “thusness” from the vortices of great human energy. Before him, all the cosmos inert but for his consciousness and will. He wielded those co-creationary elements, those conjugations, that glue which concatenates static matter into beauty and artifact.
He descended down into the epochs behind. He saw his dear forebearers residing in the dark cave. Barely a flicker of tremendous human power yet to have realized. A sadness willed within the hero, for there, in the dripping cold, the defeated saw that there was great darkness just beyond the flickering light, and they proclaimed: “Behold, Man is small and weak!”
He saw within them, those dwellers of the dripping caves, the mechanism of the self-fulfilling prophecy. That he who proclaimed Man was small and weak also sought to grasp him in an iron fist. To claim he knew all of reality. To grasp and choke-out perturbation and conflict in a tyranny of the certain. He watched them bind to an alliance with the blackness of the cave. And he watched the withering and failure of the creative spirit within them.
There in the cave with his fellows, he felt that vacuum left by the common supposition, the underdeveloped heuristic and the bigotry. The coalescing around the “facts,” the “realisms,” with which his fellows armed themselves to occlude yet other facts and realisms. Like between curved glassy mirrors, those convenient knowabilities of the world reflected within one another.
But there was one among them, whose voice was like the tidal gravity of the Dark Knight said, in the covert and high-torque machinery of his heart, “Behold the great gifts the heroes have fashioned. Let us move ahead into those shadows and build our resplendent ideals into them.” Like profound jewels, the negative spaces and the shadows also reflected within one another.
The hero traveled from the cave, and he traveled in long arcs of time. And he watched as the one whose voice was the voice of the Dark Paladin, be-shrouded, moved among his fellows, in the aromas and the racket of the marketplace of old villages, in the huddled congregations of high stone churches, in the stale offices of corporations.
In all the peace of the green hillside and rocky dawn-light cliffs, he felt the draw to conflict. The draw to struggle. And from there, all the possibilities of incandescent achievement and production and beauty. He felt the call to searing sparks of conflagration for the sake of higher, ennobling, transforming evolution. He felt the call to touch the glowing heat of incandescent metal being forged into new forms. He heard the voice, in a composed and aristocratic responsibility, call to bypass his self. To overcome his self. To rise above the notion of the one life for the sake of a teaming and noble joy of those who came after him, such as that noble joy which filled the hearts of the men and women of the Bay of Triumph.
And so, on that day of the Midsummer Festival, to honor the freedom and the Manifest Destiny of the Forge Lighter, the hero sat alone in an even greater ritual, to stoke the whirling flame spiraling into the dark. And his meditations continued…
To Be Continued…