I kept an extensive journal of philosophical thoughts in my 20s. I'll start sharing where my mind was 32 years ago, let me know if you're interested!

STARTS HERE:

The good artist must always be ahead of his time; if he is not, then he must at least be the synthesizer of his time.  The oft-quoted phrase “the human condition”, or the ultimate rela­tionship between man and his ideals, is the most fertile ground for the artist at large.  The post-romantic ideal of the artist in opposition to his time has become an elephant's grave­yard; artists tend to oppose ideals, oppose man, (or both, which is society), but if he cannot provide a direction, if he is only the repudiation of direction, the linear nature of the bourgeois finds itself in a pointlessly geometric pattern, without sense, finding solace only in materialism.  Material­ism is society's blind retaliation against its guilt, and like all guilt it is tinged with hatred, hatred for the quasi-artists who reject all standards, and thus provide no direction.

For the artist to provide direction he must at once be nimble and lethargic.  The bourgeois has no concept of his movements; the world turns this way and that and he adapts without effort, without question, the perfect weathervane, the barometer of fad.  The artist must feel the buffeting of the world's direction; every turn is a weight against his soul; for the quasi-artist the irritation is one of being disturbed; the true artist is stirred to being an accomplice or revolutionary.  Previously such choices were possible; now we have only a sick squalling against motion or a plundering of the past, an archae­ology of direction without reference.  The great themes of life have been lost, or are being recycled, which is to say they were never found.  The lethargy of the artist is his sensitivity to undercurrents; his nimbleness is to taste the digestion in the recipe.  To lumber daily is the bourgeois, (and this has great value in saving society from too-great verbosity, or decadence); to fall forward to the conclusion of a direction is the nimble­ness of the artist.  In lethargy we find Romanticism, the heavi­ness of the innards, the strange weight of introspection, the expressionless pauses designed for those already in the know; in nimbleness we find the contradictions of opposites freed from the direction of synthesis, the chaos of roving perspective and a montage of images that strike but do not touch; involvement versus reaction, neither providing understanding.

The failure of the artist to come to terms with commerce, with capitalism, is the last legacy of the platonic Christ.  The failure of philosophy to derive the world-as-ought from the world-that-is, and the resulting art of idealistic rejection or mindless embrace, stems from the repugnance of both art and philosophy to reason.  Reason for the artist has devolved to the cause and effect of the plot (and precious little of that); as a result we have predictability in both theme and content.  As for the avant-guard, or those who still believe art has a purpose, the rejection of plot has perforce meant the rejection of values, of direction, and so we have the “alternative”, the enshrinement of indirection which is modernism.  Old values versus no values.  We have run the gamut of the irrational, in nature, in the feminine, in God, in the emotions; we have constantly tried to affirm the value of the incomprehensible.  This is still con­sidered daring, insofar as it rejects the “base” sensuality of the bourgeois.  Look at them, the modernists say, they do not know what life is, their happiness is an illusion (which is the spite of finding relief without art); artists know that materialism's power to provide comfort has displaced their monopoly of consolation, that the direction of consumerism and promotions has rendered the repudiating artist a marginal crea­ture, and lo and behold they recycle hackneyed Christianity, squeezing their overachievers through the eyes of heaven, giving them drugs and jail terms while their women mourn their solitude.

And the women!  It is no secret that actresses cry out for good roles unplundered from past art.  What do we have to give them?  The demystification of the feminine, the secularization of Ms. Mary has stripped the last bastion of masculine pomp from the empty shells of averted art.  They are equal!, cry the artists, so where are the mysteries for us to explore?  But the frontiers have closed, Freud and Marx have discredited the descent to truth, Jung has labeled myths as such, science has taken the terror from the unknown.  No longer can we point at the invisible and cry “see this and know!” -- the ruse is up, and the artists who believed such mummery are long gone.  Popular myths are old; in a changing world they have been left behind.  The bourgeois have an endless appetite for pretentious self-abuse, it's true, but such prodding in the face of capitalism is dawning on many as a profound waste of time and money.  Look how we are alienated, cry the artists, without thought to the role they have played in creating (or rather not creating) such a void.  Art can no longer claim to be a synthesis of opposites -- it has worked its egali­tarian muscles to the utmost to produce the flabbiness it now decries -- and without opposites there can be no pretense at outrage, no screams for understanding, no criticism of the bourgeois for missing the point that artists have refused to make.

But does this mean the end of art?  Certainly not.  What it does mean is the end of pretense, the end of false dichotomies, the end of God versus man, mind versus heart, bourgeois versus proletariat, man versus woman.  In the face of freedom men have chosen money -- there is no point condemning that unless one is prepared to condemn man himself (and original sin is far from original any more).  Men have chosen the artist's nemesis, and that has given them the freedom to snub the artist.  If art wants to rescue itself from banality, it must begin to accept the choices the world has made.  Materialism without reference, yes, fight it by all means.  But to attack it on the grounds of what it has already rejected is to misunder­stand its true purpose, which is an amoral (not immoral) desire to achieve happiness in this world.  If man unchained is man at the market, then the artist must seek to understand the drives of that choice.  It is no use wailing about the commercialization of art -- commercialization is only trivial because artists have not affirmed (and so directed) the world of bourgeois desires.  Oh, they are quite willing to use the products of secular ingenuity, the practicality of film, say, but they utterly reject the values that made it possible, leaving the power of the medium in the hands of advertisers and shoddy priests.  If artists want to be taken seriously, if they want to guide a world that finds them predictable or useless, they have to attack the roots of the guilt they have sown, they have to affirm the value of the choices of freedom, or they are condemned to go whining into obscurity condemning man, condemning freedom, condemning everything except the choices they made that made it so.  However, in order to avoid this pathetic winding-down, artists have to become philosophers themselves, and stop using the recycled trash of men ten generations dead and rejected by everything that overcame them.

2:10am February 17, 1992

Art as a world in itself is a peculiarly modern concept, born of the distancing from both god and earth, the state of mind of an infant cut from infinite legs and regarding its own naval as it endlessly falls.  The poem especially has fallen from grace with the world -- as Aristotle says, what is clearest to us is easiest in nature; poetry is the hardest form of communication, an argument from imagery, a sensual philosophy that requires deep knowledge of the organization of the mind and the world it inhabits.  In essence, the poet attempts to construct the impres­sions of the mind in life in a few lines -- he skims life above the waters, catching only the highest waves (in the case of an optimist), or below them, catching only the deepest troughs (in the case of a pessimist).  But it is the impact of air on water that provides the power of a poem -- in the before-mentioned difference between lethargy and nimbleness, the lethargic artist is he who inhabits the fathoms below sight; it is the pressure of his motion through unbroken water that provides his numbing depth -- the nimble artist records the buffeting of winds, a buffeting only achieved by his dizzying spins and dives.  The true artist inhabits the waves, streamlining the impact of mind and reality.

A poem is part of reality -- even if that is granted only insofar as it is recorded.  A poem is language, and language is shorthand perception.  Being derived from reality, it is common to all who posses senses, and the choice of images is thus necessarily a confession of primary importance (a poem is about something -- at the same time it is not about everything else).  Such a choice is derived either from a hierarchy of values or a rejection of all values.  A poet who sets out to write about nothing places that nothing as his highest value; what he really says is that values cannot be organized, that the most important fact is that there is nothing of importance.  This kind of anti-conceptual art is at the root of art-for-art's-sake, which is a patent lie masked as a misconception.  Art is never arbitrary; the artist choose what he writes about and the manner in which he expresses it, and art-for-art's-sake is a metaphor for art as a repudi­ation of art, just a behaviorism is a repudiation of psychology and mysticism a repudiation of philosophy.  The artist has a drive to create, he creates in order to convince, yet convincing requires an argument based on the relationship of value to non-value.  This is the essence, says the artist at the moment of creation, all else is secondary (or at best illusory).  When the artist posits illusion as the essence, he becomes an advertiser, the substituter of impression for affirmation.  Since modern philosophy has failed to provide the artist with criteria for judgment (and since artists tend at best to be communicators rather than innova­tors), art has dissolved into the rejection of importance, just as philos­ophy has dissolved into the rejection of values.  What Taylor calls the “horizons of significance” (which is reworking of the concept of objectiv­ity) have fallen away from art; it fails to communicate values to the general population who cannot live without them.  The symbol for this is the “suffering artist”, the “garret artist”, the man who rejects the values of his society without providing an alternative.  Artists were once revered as the priests of essence; their faculty for language (lamentably absent in most philosophers) was respected for providing the instant ends of choice -- much as the emotions do -- but now artists are rightly derided as a self-obsessed clique.  The constant artistic clamour for state funding stems from this confusion of values -- to demand that artists earn their living is to demand that artists organize their values in order to communicate essence.  But artists want to be “free” of all that -- because they are unprovided with criteria they demand a suspension of the cause and effect of production and consump­tion in order to be free to pursue their inevitab­ly-unrelated art.  Put them to work, and they will understand the values they must provide the general population whose respect they need to recapture.  Labour is value; to grasp this we must understand the humour of an accountant who demands state funding to crunch numbers.  Surely not, we say, since his vocation has value in and of itself.  Such it must be for art.  Until artists learn to trade meaning for value, they will remain little more than parasites.

But what of the poet, most complex and simple of man's communicators?  The poet is paradox; most essential in many ways, he provides both the means to action in specific situations and a plethora of rules generalized by their applicability and nullified by their contradictions.  Yet the paths he now provides few would pay for.  The contemporary poet is a far cry from Milton and Shakespeare; a beatnik assortment of skeletal misconceptions topped with myopic bitterness and spiritual irascibility, he is nine parts preten­sion to one part confusion -- and the confusion is his only saving grace.  Confusion is man's essence, he glowers over his cappuccino, puffing his overfiltered cigarettes and blinking in the light -- I don't know the answers but at least I have to courage to have given up looking (fortunate­ly for him, however, the coffee shop owner has not).  This is the most pitiful shadow of an artist, one is ashamed to call him artist; he is a default of decadence, this anti-being who masquerades in shoddy berets and recycled Sartre, fiercely underlining things that don't matter, scribbling to stave off the inevitable fact that he is only scribbling.  The oldest curse of mankind, the desire for the unearned, the after­image of Eden, leads these fools to believe that art is writing, that poetry is a shape on the page, that anyone who tries is worthy of it, they are like clumsy carvers who hack rancid meat and call themselves surgeons, believing that insecurity and somber clothing lend grace to incomprehensibility.  This is the legacy of Romanticism, the grubby corner bequeathed to poetry by the mystics of the innards.  If Branden is right, if emotions are instant evaluations of past thoughts and impressions, then the specter of unoriginality is Romanticism's only enduring legacy.  Man is interesting to the degree in which he thinks originally, not in how well he has digested the past.  Introspective poetry is the confession of the impotence of a life unlived, unexamined, inconclusive.  We are fed impressions by the world we live in; the psychic vomiting of preceded data is nothing more than a cry for singularity in the face of conformity -- and who is more conformist than the rejecter?  The road less traveled is more choked the more it is valued.  The true Romantic must reject Romanticism, he must discover essence unaided -- and certainty unhampered by inherited confusion.

The clue to man's essence must never be severed from his survival.  Our friend in the cafe damns the conditions which give him the leisure to damn; his freedom depends on the degree to which he himself is rejected by those who provide it.  The conditions which give rise to leisure, to the ornaments of survival, are open for any artist to discover; lamenting their presence reveals only self-hatred and a desire to escape the vice of cause and effect.  If artists are to be listened to, they must talk in the language which gives them scope to speak.  All art, all beauty, all truth is dependent on man's survival; man's survival and his ability to value depends on his reason.  Art proceeds from the same essence as survival -- it is dependent upon an excess of survival, it is what gives aim to life after a good meal is secured; it is also what makes a good meal worth securing.  Art, in other words, is a moral force; it extrapo­lates the requirements of survival beyond mere satisfaction to the active pursuit of beauty and truth.  It must never contra­dict that essential satisfaction, else it turns itself into a lie, into a force against life.  The Romantics fought the lie they lived, the life of the unearned; to continue that fight past its victory is to ensure its return, to abandon truth to life­style.  The power of commercialism arises from man’s need to define pleasure in the absence of art.  The world has changed; the artist who clings to ancient fights dooms himself to the periph­ery, and the world he lives in to shallow acquisitiveness and the demands of beauty free from value.  The artist must become the priest of the real, as far as the inexactness of the metaphor can take him.

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There have been two political streams in Western thought; the politic of power and the politic of right.  The politic of power manifests itself as collectivism in politics, mysticism in philosophy and positivism in law.  The politics of power is essentially a conservative force; it requires veneration of tradition and invisibility in order to maintain existing power structures, to preserve, fundamentally, the perpetuation of the unearned.  It requires that man be defined as an end to others.  The politics of right requires veneration of the individual and reason, the perpetuation of the earned.  It requires the defini­tion of man as an end in himself.  There is little need to wonder at the decline of the great civilizations; the only wonder is that they ascended at all.  The story runs that Cato the Elder, on visiting Carthage, was so incensed at the energy and vivacity of that teeming merchant city, that he began proclaim­ing at the end of every speech: “Carthage must be destroyed!”.  There was little military threat from Carthage -- what Cato understood was that its existence manifested a profound threat to the politics of power in ancient Rome.  Trade precludes stagnation -- a simple glance at the appearance and disappearance of Fortune 500 com­panies in the twentieth century is enough to illustrate this.  Trade requires the constant proof of superiority, it attacks entrenchment and blindly rewards competence alone.  It is pro­foundly asexual, unracist, and in its purest form discriminates against none.  The only way that mediocrity can survive in trade is by application of the politics of power, by state grants, quotas, tariffs etc.  As the power of the state grows, the politics of power begin to displace the politics of right, for the state realizes that fluxes in the marketplace undermine its own oligarchical ambitions, not by association, but by implica­tion.  The control of trade always precedes the control of rights for two reasons; firstly, it shifts business to the submissive mercy of arbitrary legislation, and secondly it causes distor­tions in the market that require further controls.  For instance, high taxes within Canada shift purchases to the States, prompting cries for a “crackdown” on cross-border shopping.  However, the originator of such legislation is the substitution of democratic aesthetics for objective morals.  This company is becoming “too big”, they must be trust-busted, that person is becoming “too rich”, they must be taxed further, those foreigners are “too success­ful”, they must be barred from trading with us.  Any significant deviation from the democratic mean, be it rich or poor, successful or unsuccessful, creates anxiety in the general population, for it undermines the both ill-defined concept of the equality of man and the political egalitarianism perceived to be at the root of universal suffrage.  In the nineteenth century, a powerful argument against universal suffrage was that if each man's vote was equal, the poor would vote to take the property of the rich, overwhelming them by sheer numbers (a fear prompted by a genuinely aristo­cratic concern that the able would eventually question the perpetuation of the unearned).  The twentieth century has proved the wisdom of this fear; the shame of it has been that the poor have plundered indiscriminately, taking from the productive as nimbly as the parasitical.  A democracy uncer­tainly founded on the politics of right quickly dissolves into the politics of power, fragmenting into pressure groups and a civilized state of civil war, each faction tearing at the wealth it perceives as common without regard to the conditions that produced that wealth, vultures ignorant of basic biology and their position in the hierarchy of reality.  The presence of a well-laid table, moreover, tends to pull the jackals obsessed with eating to the feast.  Power does not corrupt; rather, the existence of power draws corruption to its heights.  Stalin was not a good man before winning control; he won control because he was evil -- in fact, he was interested in the fight only because he was evil.  Posit instead a system where leadership is a chore with few rewards, where the politics of right preclude the feast of power -- what man will be drawn to it?  A man who -- gasp! -- sincerely wishes to do the right thing?  Politics is the art of destruction; it should be the laziest art.  Energetic politics means energetic demolition; it is no accident that LBJ followed JFK, and in turn was followed by Nixon.

The truth of history, how little depends on rational under­standing and how much on conviction, was never learned by the advocates of reason.  Dry reason, detached observation and wry comments have never won the hearts and souls of men.  This is the clue to the dejection and bitterness of the genius -- he speaks in a language only he can understand; he knows the truth and then bastardizes it with technicalities.  The technicalities are important, but they only speak to intellectuals, or the parasites of genius.  The American term “highbrow” serves to illustrate the con­tempt of the common man for those who aristocratize truth through specializ­ation.  Nietzsche knew this in his soul -- Zarathustra is the record of a man trying to squeeze rational observations into a biblical presentation.  The most profound book, he said, yes -- but pro­found in the language of the unprofound, in the language of conviction trivialized by repeti­tion.  Christianity is anti-life, he said -- all right, granted, but then why proclaim a rational ideal in the style of Eastern mysticism?  Nietzsche's unfortunate addiction to Buddhism stems from his belief that it proclaimed a life-force in a form access­ible to the masses, and so he attempted to cloak his rational purposes in mysticism.  (The other-worldliness of Ayn Rand is a similar misapplication.)  Torn in the contradiction of every moral philosopher who accepts Christian ethics a priori, Nietzsche refused to see that the ethics he advocated stemmed from the same irrationality as Christianity, the application of invisible reality (in his case, the will) to the question of virtue -- it is the same for Rand; her invisible reality was reason, and so more complex.  Spiritual mysticism is by no means qualitative­ly differ­ent from secular mysticism.  The temptation of Christ on the mountain, the offering of the world by the god of this world, the tempta­tion of secular power, is a lure that Nietzsche succumbed to utterly.  Own the world, he says, own this sprawling pile of shit, because it is all we own, and we must own something.  All value, all beauty, all truth, was consigned to the void along with God -- away with the irrational unseen, and so away with morality, away with beauty, away with the conquest of nature.  The joy of conquest, the fierce­ness of the acolytes of Attila, all the bloodthirsty savagery of bread and circuses, all of it stems from the belief that there is no value but the here and now, there is nothing higher to strive for, there is only Darwin and survival.  Worship, the flip-side of sacrifice, becomes the goal; the goal of sacrifice remains unquestioned, only the value of the players is reversed.  Nietzsche did not hate the Church, he envied it.  He envied its power, its control, its unquestioned authority.  This is the aspect, the final temptation of Satan -- not to reject God, but to transcend Him; Nietzsche was no more an atheist than the devil was.  Both of them recognized the power of God, both of them chafed under the restrictions inherent in his existence -- and both desired his position.  The superman is the man to whom the collection of unconditional sacrifice is an inherent right, a right enforced by secular power.  Nietzsche despised the suprem­acy of the imma­terial, he viewed it as emascu­lating and a triumph of death over life, the only means for the weak to dominate the strong -- in its place he substituted the triumph of will over life, of strength over weakness, of force over morality.  And what better prescrip­tion for madness?  A man wracked by physical ailments (Milton's “Everywhere I fly is hell... I am myself hell”) trumpeting the power of the world, a man impotent in his personal life obsessed with the power of using others.  Such utter contra­dictions!  Witness Satan, caught in a point­less battle against a being whose word is law, a being who knew in advance of his rebellion, an all-power­ful, omniscient foe whose invincibility precluded successful revolt.  Lucifer knew he could not win, knew he could not disbe­lieve, and so spent eternity in a futile battle, a la Camus' myth of Sisyphus.  Nietzsche also knew he could not win, could not disbelieve, and so raged against the church using its very weapons -- mysticism, secular power, emotionalism.  Only a rational, passionate reappraisal, a system of ethics with man as the root, a morality which precludes the existence of God, a world-view that bypasses divinity, that ignores infinity -- only this can win against the infi­nite.  Only the triumph of the rational absolute can destroy the irrational infinite.  In this lies the understanding of every failed revolution, revolutions that failed because they envied the premises of their prede­cessors.  The substitution of secular irrationality for divine irrational­ity only moves the evil closer to home -- and removes the possibility of resistance from compet­ing aims.  In the first instance, the socialists vote for the communists (Germany, 1933), religion advocates socialism (Victor­ian England), the aristocracy enshrines both (social reforms during the industrial revolution).  There is a unity of goals -- the destruction of reason -- which when achieved leaves both jackals glaring at each other over the corpse of their victim.  The precarious balancing of these two compet­ing forces creates an unstable mixture of explosive destruction, subject only to the limiting power of their contend­ing entrenchment.  But the true battle is not against religion, or fascism, or socialism, but against irrationality, against ethics that derive from the premise of the unseen.  Nietzsche fell in that battle because he desired the unearned as much as Lucifer, and failed in his rebellion because he refused to bypass the God he feared so horribly...