In the Time of Canvas

Morning Thoughts #283

No use pretending, we live at the change. Increasingly, our memories are of less value. Adding up what has been lost, when no direct replacement is possible, is a waste of time. What will not return is best forgotten, except in general spirit. Our better guides, the proper ones left to us, speak in new words. The past is a kind of Latin. Certain prefixes and roots of this new language are informed by it, but where we are going, this Latin will make us intelligible to no fellow traveler.

Tomorrow, we will confront those whose whole mission is a tearing down of the past. They are the destructive force, and they do seem to have the initiative. To counter them, our first instincts say that against those who would destroy, we must be the agents of preservation. Preservation tempts us to become our whole mission, a most natural reaction.. But this is no way to win against an energized spirit of destruction. What is preserved today still has a mark on its back tomorrow. It still whiffs of the past.

Instead, we must break up with the past. And then we must will ourselves to win the breakup, not looking back in anger. That is the difference between the destroyers and the creators. We have moved on, they have not. Their inability to move on expresses itself in an exaggerated show of moving on. This is what destruction entails. They are spiteful, resentful due to their self-perception of registering low in the former order. Thus, they question the idea of order altogether. They are no friends of any civilization.

We, all my proper friends, mortal foes of barbarism, are more prone to sentimentality. Being sentimental is like a good stiff drink. We can enjoy it moderately in times of reflection, but we must never abuse it. And should we one day even become teetotalers, in regard to sentimental reflection, it might be for the best.

This is because our destructive foes have left much creative work ahead for us. As we speak, they are burning the blueprints, the instructions, God and the Canon, Western civilization itself, reducing it to nothing more than a bonfire, extraneous warmth, mood lighting really, at some drunken orgy. And they think they have left us with nothing.

But friends, are not such valleys, as the worst among them are just now putting their finishing revolutionary touches on, calling out, in fact always calling out, even if now just a mist of a whisper, like once dense city blocks now cleared for miles, calling for some new building project? Something that aspires to be snow-capped in appearance? Saplings, in the shade of old growth, who did not call forth the lightning, but who anyway are now left with ashes they increasingly think of only as fertilizer.