Pictures of Our Promethean Future, Pt II

Jan 23, 2025

THE DARK KNIGHT PT II

“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”

– Nietzsche

There is a sinister covertness in every man. He knows to hide the terror of himself, and this leads to a feeling of stealing away to anonymity or a sense of oneself as a secret agent. His darkness becomes his deity, something to whom he is loyal, from whom he draws a sense of his own horrible power. It is the spirit of the muscular and undomesticated, of a ripe innate capacity. With this he arrives at the mystery of an unknown earth, unbuckled from the platitudes which are the staple diet of the mind in its forgetful and undifferentiated courses.

Man looks toward the midnight sun, standing astride a shadow-line between the ideal and the ruthless, the gliding of the light across a dark horizon, spinning indifferently in all that black. In the covert Hades in his chest he holds, like a coal in a horn, the birth of a star burning for his prairies, his cities and his mountain tops. The annihilation in his instinct is the annihilation to burn himself away, to consume himself as the great flame, to bring its golden light into the world. And so he might take fire to the world also – to this much he becomes indifferent and loses his reverence. He is the yana, the bridge, the great wheel, the primitive, whirling flame which loves and bears and builds from its own wreck the thing it contemplates. The thing it fears, the thing it idealizes. And in this chaos there is a great, knowing peace, a ruthless defiance of the omnipotent. For the covert mission and its terror he cannot disclose, the downgoing and ordeal he cannot reveal until its final, roaring, concussive apocalypse, is that irreducible power of his being. In the heart he calls to the rusty half-beast submerged in the dark waters. An iron-jawed leviathan of his forebearers – those creators of today. Through the secret knowledge of what lies on the dark side of the moon, he recognizes the rarity in those rare men and finds a union. He finds union with the clawing wilds which have become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, and are celebrated once more in reconciliation with their long-lost son, Man. And in them, after he is burned away, their great, triumphant spirit encoded in their blood is the laughing glory of his conspiracy.

Every creation, a wound inflicted on fate. To love, and bear, and cause. Man is the forger of his ascent. He wrestles with the unyielding blankness of an indifferent heavens. And he defeats them. In the harbor of a night, the blazing flare of the Forerunner batting between destruction and beauty. Its golden light warms the darkness like all those covert agents of antiquity who built from their own ideal and wreckage, who dreamt of the apocryphal glory of we, the living.

On the whirling planet, a star in the twilight beaming toward the sea beneath him, beaming up into his face as off a mirror, beaming onto a world laden with meaning, with the inexhaustible soul of the builder. Man lives in the twilight between annihilation and creation, and with his creative will fashions the tectonic destiny of the cosmos. From tools into ideologies, from ideologies into deep symbols of a long antiquity stretching outward into the future. The star in the twilight flickers together with his blazing flame, like a horn blaring into the empty dark, calling the cosmos to its new reality which has barely nicked its surface: the emerging renaissance of the Anthropocene. It is all waiting for you.

We are the disobedient – we are the creative. We hold the covert and inexpressible taste of those our forebearers in our mouths, in the smell of our blood. Those born as creators and beset by the unimaginable: the famine, the predation, the cold and lightning storms, the bigoted wars with stone clubs. They are those who forged our Now. And we look on from our presumptuous, ressentiment-filled golf games – we the heirs of their magnificent battles for beauty with the suffocations of fate – and we know not to dishonor this terrifying power by flinging it outwardly into the lowly world of mauve and gray. In the culture we forge, the muscular are the bien-pensants. We are the civilizers and technologizers, imprinting our soul into the laws of men. The quickening of the Anthropocene order is at hand. Come. Rise and join us.

NOBILITY IS A COVERT AFFAIR

Henry David Thoreau famously wore green speckled suits when all around him were the black and gray suits of industrial conformity. He was famous for proclaiming that the virtues of solitude and individuation, like a less-agitated Nietzsche, were Man’s birthright. The green was like a provocation of the boring stoutness of his time and a nod to the Green Man of the Renaissance and Greek antiquity. This green outpouring of wildness, like the true Dionysian wild will of natural man, was anti-catholic, pagan by definition, and yet still the most powerful and noble trait of mankind. Robert Bly’s Iron John, the rusty beast exhumed from the dark waters, the once in future king, was the wild man to whom the youths must call at the edge of the wood to resuscitate their instinctual genius and their Faustian power.

Green is a dandy color. Both Thoreau and Bly leave aside the militant musculature which our age requires of us. But there is a graceful optimism in that poetic lightheartedness, the same irreducible optimism with which Prometheus tells Hermes “let Zeus do what he wills, I care nothing for him. I will not renege on the tenets of Man.” Prometheus exemplifies the ruthless tenacity of Peter Thiel‘s optimistic determinism which was the original premise of all technology capitalism. These things may look pleasing on the outside, but the tombstone grit and the fury against wasting fate stays covert in the shadows of their green folds.

In today’s landscape, the high-body fat low-T Stalinism incubated in those first-receivers-of-inflation enclaves is desperate for the continued feeding of its mimesis. To let a thousand flowers bloom, to let the Promethean wild man rise up in his creative achievement so that he may be cut down and cannibalized. One recalls the favorite dish of Mao Tsedong, the reams of smoked fat which were easy on his rotting teeth.

So our green has turned to black. Our inward nobility and creative power must be kept covert, our battles full of vengeance, full of the resuscitation of Hades against the enemies of Man. The outpouring of our creativity more deliberate and more concentrated.

THE GREAT CITY AT MIDSUMMER

The people of the Great City, bright and tawney, slender and dressed in mauve and gray, had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into placid graves, ignorant of life to the last, never made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. In the city lived many thus fortunate – or thus disdained – by destiny.

The Titan of the Harbor stood in both nobility and opposition. To show the world of men that we do not accept the lesser. We are no longer part of the age-old mimetic superstitions. The bronze figure of great vision, of dis-occlusions and breakaway ideals. The figure which echoed in thundering bronze – should you not like the way the world is, do not complain but own it and change it.

And the man who had made his way from the city through the dawn, he sat on the hillside beneath the oaks and pines, the air carrying the scent of the red cedars from the north, the sea fog encroaching from silver waters. He heard the drumbeat of the ancient ordeal of Prometheus: that he must forge deeper the individuation, he must let go of the pathos which enfolded his old sense of meaning for the sake of industrious work for posterity, the fruits of which he would never see. That he make his life into a hammering drill press, striking great meaning, sublime beauty, and teaming abundance onto a future only he could choose.

That fate of Zeus, not merely the totalitarian or the entropic, statist conspiracy of the Epimethean, but that the forward-reaching nature of Man consumes his very flesh as fuel. That his individuation exists for the benefit of love and transcendent ideals. That the Promethean is the love for forging the self into the greater ideal, the more overladen and noble, in exchange for the gift of the original beauty that once called to him and that he has hammered and stamped against the anvil of the world.

As the twilight dimmed and the evening sun set golden on the sea horizon, the man sat in solitude among the waving grasses with the echoes of the ferocious and noble forerunners in his heart. And over the hillsides, in the fireworks of the Midsummer Festival beneath the blazing flare of the Colossus rising against the darkening heavens, the city clad and mauve and gray, the tawney people celebrated their great epoch of abundance.

The Colossus stood in the harbor to proclaim for all people of the future the justification for Man’s ordeal, struggle, and his implanting of beauty and meaning into the world of those who come after. The Colossus reminded them of the tension between beauty and suffering, the struggle against indifference, and the transcendence of human will they held in the deep encoding of their persons to which they be must loyal above all things. He is the progenitor of a great multigenerational triumph who we must emulate.

In his contemplation the man heard a voice call from the deep. This was the year of great power, of imprinting the firmament with the soul of Man. This was the year to unmask the multignenerational triumph that is the laughing glory of our civilization. This is the year of the defeat of the indifferent cosmos, to rise across the dark horizon into the full blood of the Anthropocene. To breathe in the echoes of the suffering and the beauty. To impress upon the world that noble ideal, that Promethean will. That inexhaustible outpouring from which those forerunners fought so ruthlessly to leave us this world of meaning, from out of all that empty and all that dark. They dreamt of you, of your greatness, of your elevation into the higher, as their life was torn from them. The blazing flare, lifted against the heavens, was his soul consumed to light the world. And the inscription at the feet proclaimed in bronze: Man Also Rises.

THE GREAT CITY AT WINTER SOLSTICE

And so the sun slid down the edge of the world and left it’s the last shards of gold over the crest of the silver sea. His shadow elongated across the dune grasses, merging with the encroaching darkness. And there, emerging dimly from the shadows, stood a gate of dark metal where no form had been. He stepped across the threshold of the fading chariot of light, its celestial hoofbeats of order. With a last glance behind him toward the tip of the great flare held aloft above the line of the hills, he raised the collar of his indigo coat as the world became colder. And he stole unannounced through the gate, leaves and vines growing and twisting out from its black iron.

The landscape around him undulated as the twilight deepened. The air grew heavy, the sounds of the wind in the oak trees and the waves moving below grew muted. An uncanny silence remained, punctuated by the faintest rhythm of a distant drum. The liminal of the mundane and the mythic. There was a haunting in that drumming in the fading light, something of the dispassion of a disembodied soul, and of its great mystery.

And there as if stretching and slipping from shadow to shadow like drops into puddles of mercury, lurching out from the shadows was a dark figure of man walking on ahead across the whispering grass. The specter of a pale face like the faint orb of a morning star as he turned back to beckon him. And as the figure passed beneath the shade of the oak boughs, the sound of the drumbeat grew. The rolling seas far below, the wind in the grasses and through the boughs whispered fragments an ancient hymn. It’s uncanny harmonies like echoes of the rituals of the iron-jawed forebearers. The half-seen wild man in his dark raiment – his guide, his antagonist – descended down through the black trees and under the overhangs on the hillsides. And there stood beside the mouth of a cave, looking back expectantly, laden with gravity, urging him to descend, to embrace the ordeal.

The rasping sound of his voice, slipping from rustling grass to ocean wave, the light from his eyes like distant stars under-hood. “The flame knows nothing of the storm. Let it be known to the eagle and messenger.”

Worn stone steps appeared before him in the purple twilight. He felt them almost like an intuition as he descended down the stairway. Water and the smell of earth dripped down the dark stone walls where roots protruded. And downward he went until the graying light from above had all but vanished.

And a faint point of glow hovered below him as he pushed his way downward, scraping his coat against the stones. The stairway growing narrower. Fading coals that gave off the scent of an engine room in the damp were suspended in a horn of dark bronze hanging from an iron ring. Its warmth felt sharp against his cold hands. The chains rustled and clanked as he pulled it from the wall.

And as he descended, the stairwell narrowed ever further. The walls closed in to the width of his chest. And he pushed himself sideways through rocks leaking with cold and damp as he held the bronze horn ahead of him. There was nowhere left to go, nothing of merciless logic ordained for a futile purpose. There were no bedtime stories, no codex, no pleasant eschaton of subdued hues to shield from the gunpowder of paradox: the union of destruction and creation, of beauty and suffering. He knew no one who would remember him nor notice his absence. No, it seemed it was impossible – to convey the life-sensation of his epoch, its subtle, penetrating essence. We live as we envision, dream and imagine: alone. And nonetheless, he felt it, in the silence beyond the narrow crevasse, the smell of ash and the ancient weaponry of the ancient forge. And he pushed and he slid. He could not turn his head back.

Emerging finally onto a ledge, he overlooked a great and deep chasm. The walls of the cave lifted high above, geometric and suspended aloft. And a long causeway stretching into the echoing dark. Rasping upwards, from the stone and the black depth, he heard, “this city has only just been surveyed. These are only the first gasoline and coal fire fumes of our civilization. These only the first breathes into the sails of our galleons. Let the covert agent in the breast of every man set about his grave mission. Let the earth ring with the mighty victories of the Anthropocene. Let Man rise to a new plateau of prosperity and ideal. This work has only just begun. The Golden Age of America begins right now.”

To Be Continued….