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WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF WHITBOURN
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What's New OR: 'Yo, ladies ... What's happenin ? Whatever Next ? [ Downs Lord Triptych / The Two Confessions / Amy-Faith & the Stronghold] | Batch the Ninth ****** From 'What We Are and Where We Are' by Gai Eaton, in 'Studies in Comparative Religion', Vol. 8, No. 3 (Summer 1974). In denying or forgetting his viceregal identity—his divine ancestry —man loses a dimension of his being, but through this amputation he gains an illusion of self-sufficiency and of freedom from responsibility, a little king who no longer recognizes that his castle is held in fief and that he has an account to render. This deceptive freedom has made possible the development of contemporary science and technology and has led to the unprecedented exploitation of the natural world (both animate and inanimate). It has enabled modern man to commit monstrous crimes against his fellows and against his environment (therefore ultimately against himself) without any awareness of guilt so long as he has been acting as massman, as a member of an organized multitude "doing his duty". Yet this has in no way freed him from an obsessive sense of guilt in his personal life, as an individual acting alone, indeed there has never been a greater fear of taking risks than there is among the bourgeoisie of our time. ****** Man is committed at birth to two journeys. The first he cannot escape, for this is the journey of action and experience as he travels down the stream of his own lifetime and creates—a man of his period, localized in time and space—a story which is an expression, in this particular mode, of his ultimate identity. The second journey, which can—at least in a certain sense—be avoided, is upstream, using time and locality only as starting points, leading beyond their zone. This is the journey described in countless myths and legends, the arduous, perilous way towards the centre of being, the passage from the ephemeral and illusory towards the eternally real. It was to provide a landscape for this journey that the monster Chaos was slain and an ordered world raised from the waters, and it was to provide a negotiable way through this landscape that the prophets laboured, Christ died and Muhammed led the people of the City into battle in the Arabian wastes. ****** What is required of us is an act of discrimination between gold and straw, between sacred and profane; required of us precisely because it is our nature to be capable of this act. And, in a world encumbered with distractions, such discrimination becomes increasingly necessary. The further the world moves from its source and is stripped—or appears to be stripped—of supernatural meaning, the more necessary it becomes to concentrate our attention upon essentials, and for beings who are here so short a time, whose powers decay just as they are learning to use them and who die long before they are ready to go, there cannot be many essentials. In our context very little matters, but that little matters enormously. ****** Given the peculiar conditions of our time, there is a need for disillusionment. Illusions are sticky things and hold a man in their web, content when he should be discontented, happy to be where he is and unaware that any further journeying is required of him. In other periods, in "protected" environments, a certain optimism, a certain tendency to see the best in everything and to ignore the worm in the apple, did no harm at all; but in our case, hemmed in by so many illusions and led astray by phantoms, a recognition that the profane world as such is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing" may be the beginning of wisdom and recall certain men to their responsibility for re-consecrating a desecrated environment. ****** All that has been said of viceregal power and of that shabby King of the Castle who tends the crumbling walls while the waves eat them away; and all that has been said about responsibility as a dimension of our lives which cannot be measured against the standards which this world provides pre-supposes a doctrine of man’s nature in terms of which his everyday personality is no more than the tip of an iceberg. It assumes his rootedness in a central place that is untouched by the winds and the tides we know and implies that the castle over which he rules is important only for the patterns which it briefly embodies in sand. Meanwhile the supposed masters of this world, the leaders who have fought their way to the top of the human pile (and must fight without respite to stay on top), are too enmeshed in the processes now at work to look up for a moment from their eighteen-hour-day labours and see where they are going. Responding as best they can to crisis following upon crisis, and faced with logistic and administrative problems which are becoming increasingly unmanageable, they cannot afford to cultivate the lover's eye or the vision of the God-centred man. They are competent, but far from superhuman; and, gripped and mastered by the necessities of the moment and by the momentum of the world's descending course, they pull their carts as blinkered horses, seeing nothing but the road immediately in front of them. To stop now—even to pause for breath—would bring the turning wheels to a grinding halt. To attempt, even in small ways, to reverse the process and interfere with its gathering momentum would be to destroy the modern world as we know it. ****** At the very basis of the contemporary gospel of tolerance lies the conviction that our earthly life is all that matters and that the peaceful ordering of human society therefore takes precedence over every other consideration. The priests who fixed their gaze beyond the temporal realm are gone. So are the knights, the warriors, who valued glory and honour above life itself. Only the bourgeoisie and the proletariat remain, and for them the piggery and the trough are the only reality there is. Social values become the only recognized values and a man's worth is assessed increasingly in terms of his usefulness to the community in which he happens to live, regardless of whether that community has any intrinsic value in terms of our ultimate end, our raison d'être. ******
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