I could for most of my life not call myself a conservative because of the conflation of wealth and morality. Now I cannot call myself liberal for the blind will to destroy everything.
I will differ to my friend Mark Bisone: I immediately spot William Hunter Duncan standing before a birch-yule besom altar and waxing mythopoetic on archetypes. Hunter is one of those exotic creatures you expect to only find in a sci-fi flick or Australia. In addition to being a patriotic, conservative neo-pagan philosopher, he is also a novelist, horticulturalist, magician and all-around DIY guy. Hand, meet glove
The pain of nostalgia; the realization, too late, that we were taught to conflate consumerism with spirituality. The mall was indeed a temple; one reached ethereal heights on the back of the dollar. Olympus.
The extremely strange men of 19th Century America; violent, feral geniuses in waistcoats. For every Forrest or Grant or Sherman there was also a Spooner or Bierce or Twain. Has the mold been broken?
This is a masterwork! Any one of these threads, by itself, would have been a top-notch post, but the way you weave them all together into a story about the underlying zeitgeist of our age is next-level genius!
That's very kind. In the end, I wanted to tell a story about how we are haunted by history, promises, and might-have-been worlds, but most of all, by the loss of our full selves at the hands of an inhuman and dehumanizing system. Shyamalan twist- we're the ghosts, disembodied and decontextualized, haunting a world stuck in repeat. Forrest was capable of both greater evil and greater good than us because in a very real way he was more alive than us, more fully realized as a human. I really wanted to drive that home in the end, the beige flabbiness of the undifferentiated mob contrasted with the unmoving solidity of the statue. It's not really his thoughtcrimes they hate, and they obviously have no care for any actual crimes. It's the awful reminder his presence in their midst conveys, that they could never be him, that their world won't allow it. They envy him as the living envy the dead, as Achilles would have preferred to be a vagabond laborer than the king of Hades.
"Shyamalan twist- we're the ghosts, disembodied and decontextualized, haunting a world stuck in repeat."
This theme is something that I've been mulling over of late, and now I keep encountering it everywhere, it seems. Maybe I'm just starting to notice it more, but it does seem to be something that has been articulated more frequently and more explicitly, by more people, with each passing decade, and I get the sense we're approaching some kind of tipping point. Like a critical number of us are realizing that our world is not what it purports to be, and that the spirit behind those appearances is up to something that is very much not in our best interest. Not sure what that means, but something profound seems to be happening.
Sep 22, 2023·edited Sep 22, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno
Thank you for the (hi)story, will re-read for sure.
Not being american, the "mall-culture" phenomenon as in the humungous malls that seems to be or have been ubiquitous for decades, is alien to me - indeed, it is only through pop-cultural osmosis I have any idea of it.
The closest thing here is what you call superstores, and while they have some cultural impact, it's nothing like the malls seems to have or have had in the US. This below is the most prominent, perhaps even the very definition of superstore here:
Personally, you'd have to hold me at gunpoint to get into such a place.
Edit: Especially liked the Deus est Machina, it's an idea that I too have been pondering for a couple of decades now; our present era is very much a re-run of the 1880s-1930s one in many ways. Modernism, futurism and science/rational thought as a set of dogmatic beliefs with liturgy and clergy in attendance.
That’s pretty interesting. In America, we know Sweden by way of IKEA, which is like a small mall except it’s just one big single retailer and there are arrows telling you where to buy things next. I guess you could call it a socialist mall. It’s still kind of endearing though, and I still use their bookcases
Socialist mall made me laugh, because I'm old enough to compare it to the actual socialist states of Eastern Europe.
Modernist, certainly, since that was /the/ idea-school of Kamprad's youth. However, I am fully aware that euroepans of all sorts and US americans define "socialism" differently.
Ingvar Kamprad was quite the character, he never relinquished control of his company - any aspect of it - to marketers or accountants or economists, and he made it a point to always look over every single item, every good that was suggested by designers; this included naming and marketing of the various goods as well.
As we sometimes say about such people here: "He had thirty hours on his watch".
I think the personal relationship the owner had with his company made all the difference. IKEA manages to execute modernism in a way that embraces humanity. The products have a warmth to them that I think generally eludes the style as a whole. I think that as we make our way back to a more organic society one avenue of approach will be the appropriation and individualization of modernist spaces and objects as reflections of personal and cultural meaning.
The simplicity of modernist design lends itself to creating a solid, sturdy base but since it's essentially anti-aesthetic it cannot convey other forms of beauty than the possible such a stark lack of essence might convey; a piece of lichen-spotted slate, cracked from water seepage and freezing, hold far more beauty than any modernist/futurist work, no matter if it a skyscraper or a sculpture be.
The reason being the sarabande of order and structure appearing as random chaos to the human mind, inherent to all nature.
One might say, the modernist creation is akin to everything that gos into a clay amphora, except the actual amphora: potter's wheel, bowls of water, tools and glazes and the oven for burning - all necessary for human art and artifice, yet none of them spoken of as the actual art itself.
A final point about Kamprad, because I've logging to get back to: when he started, he was up against the fact that most all furniture was hand-made by master craftsmen, and often made so good it was inherited, only needing minor repairs down the generations.
He had to combine industrial mass-production with quality and accessability/affordability (not unlike Henry Ford in that aspect).
I have a solid birch folding table from IKEA that’s as good as anything from a higher-end store- real wood, not pressboard, still just as good as it was when I bought it in 2005.
Thinking metaesthetically (if that’s not a word yet I call it!) I believe that modernism has to be our starting point, since we’re so disconnected, as a whole, from traditional forms. Yes, there are those with the money and time to pursue the handmade and antique, but I mean what is practical for most people. I think that capital T Tradition will have to emerge from modernist forms the way the dandelion emerged from the crack in the sidewalk in my work. Think of the ways those clean lines and spare forms can be fitted out with customizations that are reflective of both individual personality and cultural expressions. It’s one of the things I like about the Vaporwave style, that fusion of the classical with the near-past: a bust of Alexander alongside a CD-ROM, framed with a late-80s color palette. We could go further and do more.
Yeah, where I grew up (Germany) it was the inner old city that was our mall in a sense. Much of it has been gobbled up by the machine too, but not as bad. The advantage is that medieval inner cities are beautiful in themselves and don't depend on specific purposes. Rather, purposes build themselves around them. Still, many deserted shops.
Brilliant. Three parallel narratives that all work towards the same point. We need more fiction like this. You need to write more fiction. Also, I can guess whose statue was being torn down. Excellent stuff.
After reading this, I find it difficult, even intimidating, to put into words how it made me feel. The sad nostalgia of the mall and it's demise, had me feeling the way I do whenever I listen to Bruce Springsteen's 'My Home Town'.
Then there is the beautiful pairing of the stories and having them come full circle to where we are today. It takes courage today to write about the Civil war with any sort of romanticism, or empathy to the men of that time, because they were just men of their time. Men of a time of great upheaval and change. Violent change. To write about Forrest, where he started, who he became, and who he was at the end, all to be lost to vilification in our time, not because of who he was or what he did, but because of his time and the side of history he was born into.
I've been digesting this piece for a day now and find it absolutely poetic and beautiful -- heart-rending and deeply insightful. This is a vision of concrete opposition to all we see around us yet it is written not as a political tract but from a place of deep humanity and high sensibility. Unlike the opposition, It acknowledges the perverse and pinched humanity of the screeching liberal class, while offering a principled opposition to its vision.
It bookends the modern era, from the Civil War to the end result of the industrial and financial machine it birthed that has spawned a polluted and benighted existence, offering spiritual succor and some kind of resolution.
I could for most of my life not call myself a conservative because of the conflation of wealth and morality. Now I cannot call myself liberal for the blind will to destroy everything.
I will differ to my friend Mark Bisone: I immediately spot William Hunter Duncan standing before a birch-yule besom altar and waxing mythopoetic on archetypes. Hunter is one of those exotic creatures you expect to only find in a sci-fi flick or Australia. In addition to being a patriotic, conservative neo-pagan philosopher, he is also a novelist, horticulturalist, magician and all-around DIY guy. Hand, meet glove
https://markbisone.substack.com/p/deimos-station-report-61523
M. John Harrison meets Cormac McCarthy.
The pain of nostalgia; the realization, too late, that we were taught to conflate consumerism with spirituality. The mall was indeed a temple; one reached ethereal heights on the back of the dollar. Olympus.
The extremely strange men of 19th Century America; violent, feral geniuses in waistcoats. For every Forrest or Grant or Sherman there was also a Spooner or Bierce or Twain. Has the mold been broken?
I would say they created the mold in the 19th century, Mold 1.0 at least, the one we’ve been poured into ever since.
This is a masterwork! Any one of these threads, by itself, would have been a top-notch post, but the way you weave them all together into a story about the underlying zeitgeist of our age is next-level genius!
That's very kind. In the end, I wanted to tell a story about how we are haunted by history, promises, and might-have-been worlds, but most of all, by the loss of our full selves at the hands of an inhuman and dehumanizing system. Shyamalan twist- we're the ghosts, disembodied and decontextualized, haunting a world stuck in repeat. Forrest was capable of both greater evil and greater good than us because in a very real way he was more alive than us, more fully realized as a human. I really wanted to drive that home in the end, the beige flabbiness of the undifferentiated mob contrasted with the unmoving solidity of the statue. It's not really his thoughtcrimes they hate, and they obviously have no care for any actual crimes. It's the awful reminder his presence in their midst conveys, that they could never be him, that their world won't allow it. They envy him as the living envy the dead, as Achilles would have preferred to be a vagabond laborer than the king of Hades.
"Shyamalan twist- we're the ghosts, disembodied and decontextualized, haunting a world stuck in repeat."
This theme is something that I've been mulling over of late, and now I keep encountering it everywhere, it seems. Maybe I'm just starting to notice it more, but it does seem to be something that has been articulated more frequently and more explicitly, by more people, with each passing decade, and I get the sense we're approaching some kind of tipping point. Like a critical number of us are realizing that our world is not what it purports to be, and that the spirit behind those appearances is up to something that is very much not in our best interest. Not sure what that means, but something profound seems to be happening.
Hence the Yeats.
Thank you for the (hi)story, will re-read for sure.
Not being american, the "mall-culture" phenomenon as in the humungous malls that seems to be or have been ubiquitous for decades, is alien to me - indeed, it is only through pop-cultural osmosis I have any idea of it.
The closest thing here is what you call superstores, and while they have some cultural impact, it's nothing like the malls seems to have or have had in the US. This below is the most prominent, perhaps even the very definition of superstore here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gek%C3%A5s
Personally, you'd have to hold me at gunpoint to get into such a place.
Edit: Especially liked the Deus est Machina, it's an idea that I too have been pondering for a couple of decades now; our present era is very much a re-run of the 1880s-1930s one in many ways. Modernism, futurism and science/rational thought as a set of dogmatic beliefs with liturgy and clergy in attendance.
That’s pretty interesting. In America, we know Sweden by way of IKEA, which is like a small mall except it’s just one big single retailer and there are arrows telling you where to buy things next. I guess you could call it a socialist mall. It’s still kind of endearing though, and I still use their bookcases
Ha ha. I have a room full of floor to ceiling IKEA ‘Billy’ bookcases for my library of forbidden books
Great writing by the way 👍
Socialist mall made me laugh, because I'm old enough to compare it to the actual socialist states of Eastern Europe.
Modernist, certainly, since that was /the/ idea-school of Kamprad's youth. However, I am fully aware that euroepans of all sorts and US americans define "socialism" differently.
Ingvar Kamprad was quite the character, he never relinquished control of his company - any aspect of it - to marketers or accountants or economists, and he made it a point to always look over every single item, every good that was suggested by designers; this included naming and marketing of the various goods as well.
As we sometimes say about such people here: "He had thirty hours on his watch".
I think the personal relationship the owner had with his company made all the difference. IKEA manages to execute modernism in a way that embraces humanity. The products have a warmth to them that I think generally eludes the style as a whole. I think that as we make our way back to a more organic society one avenue of approach will be the appropriation and individualization of modernist spaces and objects as reflections of personal and cultural meaning.
Absolutely so, with emphasis!
The simplicity of modernist design lends itself to creating a solid, sturdy base but since it's essentially anti-aesthetic it cannot convey other forms of beauty than the possible such a stark lack of essence might convey; a piece of lichen-spotted slate, cracked from water seepage and freezing, hold far more beauty than any modernist/futurist work, no matter if it a skyscraper or a sculpture be.
The reason being the sarabande of order and structure appearing as random chaos to the human mind, inherent to all nature.
One might say, the modernist creation is akin to everything that gos into a clay amphora, except the actual amphora: potter's wheel, bowls of water, tools and glazes and the oven for burning - all necessary for human art and artifice, yet none of them spoken of as the actual art itself.
A final point about Kamprad, because I've logging to get back to: when he started, he was up against the fact that most all furniture was hand-made by master craftsmen, and often made so good it was inherited, only needing minor repairs down the generations.
He had to combine industrial mass-production with quality and accessability/affordability (not unlike Henry Ford in that aspect).
I have a solid birch folding table from IKEA that’s as good as anything from a higher-end store- real wood, not pressboard, still just as good as it was when I bought it in 2005.
Thinking metaesthetically (if that’s not a word yet I call it!) I believe that modernism has to be our starting point, since we’re so disconnected, as a whole, from traditional forms. Yes, there are those with the money and time to pursue the handmade and antique, but I mean what is practical for most people. I think that capital T Tradition will have to emerge from modernist forms the way the dandelion emerged from the crack in the sidewalk in my work. Think of the ways those clean lines and spare forms can be fitted out with customizations that are reflective of both individual personality and cultural expressions. It’s one of the things I like about the Vaporwave style, that fusion of the classical with the near-past: a bust of Alexander alongside a CD-ROM, framed with a late-80s color palette. We could go further and do more.
Yeah, where I grew up (Germany) it was the inner old city that was our mall in a sense. Much of it has been gobbled up by the machine too, but not as bad. The advantage is that medieval inner cities are beautiful in themselves and don't depend on specific purposes. Rather, purposes build themselves around them. Still, many deserted shops.
Europe, I think, has more of a love of permanence than America. Our great gift to the world is our dynamism. It is also our great curse.
I had to reread this…what a phenomenal work. Thank you!
Thank you very kindly. I enjoy your work as well.
Brilliant. Three parallel narratives that all work towards the same point. We need more fiction like this. You need to write more fiction. Also, I can guess whose statue was being torn down. Excellent stuff.
Thank you. I hope to write more along these lines in the future.
Bravo Mr Librarían. Bravo.
After reading this, I find it difficult, even intimidating, to put into words how it made me feel. The sad nostalgia of the mall and it's demise, had me feeling the way I do whenever I listen to Bruce Springsteen's 'My Home Town'.
Then there is the beautiful pairing of the stories and having them come full circle to where we are today. It takes courage today to write about the Civil war with any sort of romanticism, or empathy to the men of that time, because they were just men of their time. Men of a time of great upheaval and change. Violent change. To write about Forrest, where he started, who he became, and who he was at the end, all to be lost to vilification in our time, not because of who he was or what he did, but because of his time and the side of history he was born into.
Now it feels there is great change upon us.
I still need to read this in full, but 6 days ago I posted a note, '2024 the year of Yeats?' Along with 'The Secong Coming.'
The line, The best lack conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, strikes at the heart of most our problems today.
Oh wow. Just realized you wrote this last September and it was just restacked. Nice work, again.
I've been digesting this piece for a day now and find it absolutely poetic and beautiful -- heart-rending and deeply insightful. This is a vision of concrete opposition to all we see around us yet it is written not as a political tract but from a place of deep humanity and high sensibility. Unlike the opposition, It acknowledges the perverse and pinched humanity of the screeching liberal class, while offering a principled opposition to its vision.
It bookends the modern era, from the Civil War to the end result of the industrial and financial machine it birthed that has spawned a polluted and benighted existence, offering spiritual succor and some kind of resolution.
Thank you very much for that. I think the highest honor I can receive is for my work to be subject to insightful analysis born of a close reading.
Only the loving gaze can produce such writing. Bravo.