Another Dark Age

Blake Viola 2/1/14

Our society, what it clings to and aspires to, is the super-ordinary, the utterly painfully hyper-human.  By this I do not mean super-human or a state transcending what is human, I mean utterly basely ordinarily human.  The funny thing is with all of our physical advancements and our technologies and our spectacles, especially within popular culture and in the performance realm of the arts, all has the illusion of pushing the senses to the point of something that is beyond what is ordinary and what we are.  People have even argued that celebrity culture is the new hero cult.  But I would argue what makes it so shocking and so spectacular to the viewers is that it is hyper-ordinary, almost impossibly ordinary, so ordinary it is grotesque, and purely mere entertainment.  As though the ideal forms of Neoplatonism were stretched to the degree of only comprising the absolute ordinary pleasures and experiences of human entertainment and mundane unessential qualities of daily life.  The Middle Ages, despite its cruelty and barbarity and mass ignorance, at least had an aspiration throughout its societies towards these essential states and experiences of beyond, to the Absolute.   All throughout history human beings have had these aspirations in all societies, all the way until the modern age.  Despite our perceived “humaneness” and our sensitivities and our “civility” and our belief that we have “repaired” our old ways by severing our violent roots and our ignorance and have become “enlightened”, we have robbed ourselves of our essential qualities of living, of our true humanity, to go beyond what we are, to live in what we are made of and born of.  We have turned our backs on ourselves and on the world and have aspired to an impotence of living purely for entertainment and material gain and pleasure.  I say we are not so wise, we are diseased and fickle, powerless and utterly cowardly, aspiring only to the life of decadent physical enjoyment turning away from that which is our essential raison d'être, that true quality which makes us human.  This crisis has lead many fringe groups of people in the west to attempt in filling this void, in bringing back this aspiration for the beyond.  There have been a few successes, though mostly individuals, but generally what this has lead to is mass lies, confusion, corruption, pacification, filtration, desecration and disempowerment of the Absolute.  What is needed is a mass disciplined revolution on a grand inner scale.  Human beings have shown they are incapable of living in freedom (such a thing as true freedom cannot and will not exist), so we must succeed in delivering a spiritual blow so painful and powerful, that its shockwaves will last generations to come.  The means of the delivery must be in the realm of the arts.  By art I refuse to include the present day filth of what we today would attribute as artistic expression within the realms of the art world, especially in America (there are a few exceptions as always, but not nearly enough to conclude that in general the present day art world in America should not be completely and utterly wiped off the face of the earth).  By the realm of art I mean to say any expression which traditionally has been used throughout the world as a means to access the divine, the Absolute, be it sound, visual imagery, poetry, performance, dance, even slaughter.  And as art that is not separated as it is in our western modern world, but as an essential component of our lives, as essential as breath, created not for the sake of exhibitions but for the sake of living, and NOT in a way we would call “utilitarian”, but in an inner way that deals with essential inner states, states of warfare or of becoming and death, exorcisms and catharsis, or works made specifically for the dead or the invisible world rather than the living, etc (as it has been with many of the traditions of so-called “primitive” cultures today).  We are living in another Dark Age, it is time for renewal.