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The Maze – Part 2 Neil Vodavzny Having conscientiously done preliminary research for this part of The Maze on craftwork, I have to say that both Derek Whitehead and David Hamilton have a tendency to abstraction. Doubtless this goes with the territory, but it isn’t easy to sell such things except to the converted, it can be admitted. Some practical examples help to it make palatable, so I’ll attempt to weave those into the discussion. Whitehead delves into the interrelation in Greek art of techne, praxis (production), and poiesis (world-founding). The work of art brings into being through a type of facility of production something imbued with the tension of spontaneity Both the artist’s vision and the activity of production combine in the world-founding. It might not be recognized so much nowadays, but the aim of art is not expression. Up to the late Renaissance, it was more to do with apprenticeship, learning a trade then, after long years of strenuous graft, finally practising the craft and discipline of art-making. Whitehead doesn’t mention it, but in order to bring something forth into the world, you need the resources, which could be wood, stone, bronze, or even reeds. Each of these resources has inherent properties, and one way to look at this is to say that without a knowledge of the properties of materials, poiesis can’t be expressed. Praxis is actually almost the vital ingredient or, at least, an artisan produces handicrafts which can be sublime. Hamilton mentions the Lindisfarne Gospels: there is a way in which artisan-work can easily approach or rival a work of art. The contrary condition of an artist expressing their “will” without any knowledge of craft has no inherent value (the will to create moolah, to sell to Zuperberg?) This effectively describes the condition of conceptual art which has no concrete sense of being. There are some exceptions: Yoko Ono’s River Bed (Guggenheim retrospective) places natural resources (seashore stones) in a meandering shape with a sort of mellow energy, pleasing to the eye in its lack of direction. Maybe she was thinking of Japanese tea gardens? Grace Slick’s memoir “Somebody To Love?” has a nice section in Chapter 3 detailing early 50s San Fran’s human scale outdoor pleasantries:
A further observation is that Japanese art had a profound influence - probably including on pre-Raphaelites – in the sense of spontaneity, facility and decorative colour, as opposed to hackneyed realism. Yoko, wit-willow of the counter-culture, in her River Bed installation shows an awareness of the world of found objects and their interrelations that is light years beyond any of Hirst’s hackneyed concept pieces. She has both praxis and poiesis, while he has moolah (and is honest enough to have said as much, give him credit). Going back to the Renaissance, art without craft would have been unthinkable. If you don’t get an apprentice to prime your canvas, what are you going to paint on – an unprimed canvas? Nowadays, you buy such products, but the intense dedication to every process involved in picture-making, that the pre-Raphaelites sought to recapture, is but a forgotten dream. To quote from Robert E Howard’s poem Cimmeria, “The axe and flint-top spear are but a dream”. The magic facility of world-founding is as present in axe-heads as it is in works of the high Renaissance. Every material has an inherent dynamism – a grain, a fault-line – and the artist has to know the material to be enabled to “let it be”, as Whitehead says. Know the world in order to create another. We need to be aware the world is there to have any hope of poiesis. The world supplies the resources out of which a new world is founded. To give an example: imagine a Tudor house standing in a clearing. Now imagine it surrounded by a wood, ie the very material out of which is carved the tell-tale half-timbered daubing. The second image is an authentic world, one which Grace Slick would instantly recognize.
She then proceeds to devote the next chapter to a 1798/1998 comparison (so rock-chick as to be almost untrue):
Staring at the cloudless universe opened the child’s mind’s eye to worlds beyond, past, present, future ... All these things – mountains, forests – are resources for the psyche ... the universe we rarely see. What we do see is a multiverse – the hermetic sea of products with which our chief relationship is money and convenience. Creative energy is rarely seen, or seen solely in the past (the genius of Venice etc.) What that should tell us is that in order to found a world, natural resources are critical – no dialectic tension can exist without the means of production (no offence to Karl). Ecology then becomes a psychic resource – no question. Ethnicity is also tied-into the resource-base, via such iconic structures as the Malay house. If praxis is the essential component of world-founding, it legitimises a retro-future, craft-oriented scenario, where such global ethnic resources should play a large part. Exactly how traditional and how futuristic the scenario is a matter for conjecture or, to be precise, for PART 3. Comments:3
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 18:05 | # A commenter on the Youtube page for this video notes the truth that:
And so we find our way back to the astonishing creativity which flows in and from our kind in the existential moment. Another example of somewhat sub-philosophical ambition from a SanFran band was It’s a Beautiful Day’s White Bird from 1971. Long, live version here: 4
Posted by Leon Haller on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 03:27 | # In between admiring our navels, someone just might possibly note that the Western lands are being invaded, colonized and absorbed by the Third World, and that once lost (ie, become “majority-minority”) there will be virtually no possibility of reclaiming them. The NWO trick, thus far stunningly successful, is to anesthetize us to our dispossession, while diluting the indigenous populations as much as possible. Then, if/when we finally awaken our people, they will be too few to be able to mount any consequential political action at all. Check out the Republican Party in California (which has been quite ‘solid’ for several decades), and see your own political futures. Even when we accomplished a few measures of note, their effects were either derailed by higher levels of government, or muted by continuing mass immigration. Less nationalist talking, more nationalist action. If talking is all we can do, then at least it should be about strategies and tactics and resisting particular legislative outrages. Most of all, what nationalists throughout the world really need to be doing is forming local social bonds and networks, meeting each other in real life, developing friendships, professional networks for mutual support and recommendation, etc. Right now, too many nationalists feel and indeed are in fact extremely isolated. I look at myself. Yes, I have some nationalist (and more average conservative) friends in LA (none in grad school), but most WNs I know are scattered throughout the USA. Sure, we can keep in touch via email, but a bunch of isolates emailing each other, or even more isolated random internet commenters, cannot cohere into a meaningful movement for real change. What is desperately needed is some sort of international WN organization, a political/social group with chapters wherever there are whites. This is Phase 1 of the Great White Ingathering - an internal, psychological awakening and ‘secession’ from existing arrangements. Phase 2 will consist in formal, physical ingathering, as WNs from across the world migrate to a place we can transform into a true homeland. I call this “White Zion”, but call it what you want. We either Awaken, Separate and Secede, or we die. 5
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 10:16 | # Using a Jewish name for your life-raft is pretty insulting, Leon. Why not find something that thrills the European heart, and isn’t associated with the mental weakness of Christian Zionism? 6
Posted by Leon Haller on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 12:29 | # As I’ve stated before, “White Zion” deliberately reminds the listener of Israel, a formerly diasporic people who dreamt of a homeland for centuries, and actually won theirs. The “Old Yishuv” (if memory serves - the old pre-Zionist Jewish remnant in Palestine) was much smaller than the surrounding Muslim communities. Vast numbers of Jews, beginning in the 19th century, and coming to a head after WW2, made their way to the Holy Land, however, and after some war-induced ethnic cleansing, achieved the goal of a Jewish demographic majority, and soon thereafter a formal Jewish state. How significantly different is that from what I propose? Also, “Zion” has a long connotation as a “safe harbor/place of refuge”. Is that not the essence of what I propose? Lastly, Zion serves to remind the WP listener that the Jews do have a Jewish state, and to cause him to ask that if they can have a state of their own, why can’t we? Whites are easily brainwashed when it comes to what they perceive to be ‘universal’ matters, but we are also a race (at least in our Nordic aspects) who have a keen sense of egalitarian fairness, and thus intensely dislike hypocrites. We need to conjure in white minds the idea that we want what the Jews have, no more, but certainly no less. 7
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 12:59 | # Well, why not trade up to the example of the first English settlers forging a land in the wilderness (geographical not political, but anyway!) and fighting and defeating the Red Man? Take white Americans into their own mighty past. Who the hell is inspired by Jewish activity? You would have to exclude Jews anyway. 8
Posted by Thorn on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:01 | # There ya have it again, Leon. GW’s comment is yet more proof you are the most misunderstood chap here at MR. Given the fact that GW has a very keen intellect makes it all the more puzzling. At any rate, I can relate to the level of frustration you must be feeling especially as it relates to the lack of progress pro-white activists are making. Most of the time it seems it’s almost a hopeless cause. Regrettably, I’m coming to the conclusion those whom identify as “conservatives”—or “conservative” Christians—here in the KWA are just as impervious to race realist propaganda as their left-liberal counterparts; in some cases even more so. Conservitards, it seems, are solely informed by Republican talking points dispensed by right leaning liberals such as Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee—and that’s about as deep as their understanding the issues goes. Idiocracy indeed! Unfortunately, at this point in time, whites are either race-realists or they’re not—there is very little ground in between left for conversions. If there was, wouldn’t 15 years of internet outreach have accrued more than the meager numbers it did? 9
Posted by Morgoth on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:16 | # Just on the subject of pop music, what do you lot make of this Leonard Cohen song? “The Future” Give me back my broken night Things are going to slide, slide in all directions You don’t know me from the wind Things are going to slide ... There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Give me back the Berlin wall Things are going to slide ... When they said REPENT REPENT ... 10
Posted by Gudmund on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 15:05 | #
I couldn’t agree more with you on this one, GW. If you are going to resort to mythos for inspiration, you might as well resort to one that the target audience could potentially relate to. And I imagine the more Germanic Americans (in the expansive sense of the word Germanic, not the narrow Deutsch one) would find this inspiring. Especially since it, in some ways, is a struggle of that sort, allowing for some license. Mestizos from south of the border might well be thought of as Indians for all practical purposes. The only trip-up here has to do with the issue of White American identity as such. To wit, urban White Americans have no unity and descend from 100 different regional populations in Europe. This is a serious barrier. And then there’s the socioeconomic and political poles to think about on top of that. On the other hand, in the rural areas this kind of thing is probably not too far from happening right now. Rural people have the most to lose from the globalist-utopian vision and there are already manifold signs of populism coming from those places. But the fact remains, unifying White Americans in the Babel-like morass of the modern cosmopolis is going to be an uphill battle. PS There is already a White Zion, it’s called Utah. Anyone doubting that this is so, pay it a visit. Sure it’s ruled by a weird pseudo-Christian cult, but if racial purity is that important to you that oughtn’t matter. 11
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 28 Mar 2014 15:43 | # Morgoth, I’d say those lyrics are a pretty clear reading of the future of our race. We are not wrong. 12
Posted by Thorn on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 01:40 | #
Obviously he’s speaking of someone who has now been condemned to Hell. Someone who’s reaping his eternal just rewards for living a life as an unGodly man. The rest is Cohen’s verse, IMO, is meant to prosecute Christendom’s back sliding apostolic morally debased progeny as being the proximate cause of the entire human race’s Apocalyptic end. 13
Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 11:27 | #
For some reason you’re missing my point. Whites are dying out in part for reasons of ignorance (ie, many have been so brainwashed they don’t realize how crappy life will be under majority-nonwhiteness), but most - at least most conservatives, the common blokes who recognize sound finance, desire safe streets, and want to live in law-based civil societies with individual liberties - are acquiescing in the left-liberal ‘destructionist’ regime of the multicult because they think resistance is either dangerous or immoral. The first concern is very real, and only getting worse as time passes. The second, however, is our wedge. We need to bring commonsense traditional ethics to bear on subjects like ‘white guilt’ or ‘justice for the collective past’, immigration, and the right of historic societies to defend their own cultural primacy and ways of living against the cultural preferences of the non-indigenous. In other words, we need to defeat the ‘racism is wrong’ meme, or at least the meme which conflates racial preservation with (real) racism. The point wrt White Zion is not that we admire Jews or Israel, but that we demand equal ethnonational privileges for our racial group (or the various historic ethnies which comprise it). I do not, of course, insist that WPs publicize the particular term “White Zion”. I’m more concerned with propagating the concept behind the term, namely, that because WP attracts a particular psychological type, which the past two decades of internet outreach have proven (contrary to my own youthful expectations that whites would racially awaken if only exposed to countervailing racialist viewpoints) is only a minority of our race, and in light of modern advances in communications and transportation, only those white societies which are self-consciously white will endure far into the future. Those which are merely white as an accident of evolution and history will not survive the increasingly globalist future - just as Western Jewry is disappearing through intermarriage and the general slipping away from religion (the difference here is that Jews do have a very fecund Orthodox ethnoculture, which has made demographic competition into virtually a religious duty, with the result that the Jewish population of Israel is, contrary to reports stressing rabid Arab fertility, actually expanding, as is the Orthodox presence in the US; whites, to my knowledge, have no comparable established, ideologized movement dedicated to expanding natality: possible small-scale exceptions are the US-based Christian fundamentalist Quiverfull movement, and contemporary French Catholicism, which, though a decidedly minority pursuit in decadent Gaul, is nevertheless moving morally and culturally and racially rightward, emphasizing the production of Christian children as a counterweight to the hyper-fecundity of the Muslim settler-colonialists in France, the latter disgustingly subsidized in their dysgenic breeding habits by the hardworking former group). There is no way, GW, that you will be able to win back England except through force, or war followed by a long period of authoritarian anti-multicult deprogramming. Most whites don’t care about their race or nation per se. They are neither culturally antagonistic nor patriotic, but merely uninterested and apathetic. Such repositories of racism as still exist (and perhaps some new ones aborning) are less the result of seeing the beloved old threatened with disappearance, but rather, of unpleasant interactions with ‘diversity’. If blacks and Muslims weren’t so behaviorally unpleasant, but merely culturally alien, I doubt most whites would object to their presence, even if that presence constituted an extreme threat to “Englishness”, or to the continuity of other European cultures. Anyway, you will see that I am correct. I hope I am wrong. I hope there will be a mighty European racial awakening. I hope there will be Ukraine-style street protests across Europe, led by racial rightists, joined by millions of angry white commoners, dedicated to overthrowing the multicult, and implementing repatriation. I hope I will be able to march in American antiwar/anti-interventionist protests against an US involvement in internal European affairs. I hope Europe drives its settler-invaders into the seas. But I don’t think it will. Do you know why the US lost in Vietnam, really? Poor tactics, ineffective propaganda, lack of support on the homefront - all played a role. But really it was because citizen-conscripts had become ‘individualized’. The patriotic rallying for collective goods of just two decades earlier was completely missing. Postwar-raised Americans saw unlimited possibilities for themselves as individuals. Why risk this new historical phenomenon - mass-individual ambition - why sacrifice your dreams - to fight for The Man? Modern man is irredeemably selfish (it is no accident that so much of America’s military consists of either nonwhites with few or no other career options, or disproportionately Christian rural whites (‘sons of the soil’), who still think in terms of collective duty and sacrifice). How do you motivate such self-interested, mostly non-religious beings to make serious sacrifices, especially for such abstractions as nation or race (and this assumes that such men are racially awakened)? Just like Americans and Canadians, “Middle Europeans”, the indigenous, are likely to just keep on muddling through their lives. Only if forced by extreme persecution will they begin to organize en masse and fight back. And by then sheer invader numbers may have made further resistance futile. The future will be defined by ever greater “product specialization”, tailored to proliferating market niches. The same is true of political entities. The future will see the creation of microcommunities mirroring online communities. One of those communities will consist of whites who really, really want to live segregated lives with other whites. There will be enough such whites to form a successful country. But probably not too many more than one. 14
Posted by Thorn on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 16:09 | # Post-Christian Britain isn’t just slouching towards Gomorrah, it’s galloping towards it. 15
Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 20:07 | # GW, I hope you consider my comment #13. There is a lot in it worth pondering. Post a comment:
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Of Note MR Central & News— CENTRAL— An Ancient Race In The Myths Of Time by James Bowery on Wednesday, 21 August 2024 15:26. (View) Slaying The Dragon by James Bowery on Monday, 05 August 2024 15:32. (View) The legacy of Southport by Guessedworker on Friday, 02 August 2024 07:34. (View) Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan … defend or desert by Guessedworker on Sunday, 14 April 2024 10:34. (View) — NEWS — Farage only goes down on one knee. by Guessedworker on Saturday, 29 June 2024 06:55. (View) Computer say no by Guessedworker on Thursday, 09 May 2024 15:17. (View) |
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 26 Mar 2014 09:14 | #
nice