The Dark Blue Sea, Byron.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.-

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean-roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin-his control

Stops with the shore;-upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

When for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths-thy fields

Are not a spoil for him-thou dost arise

And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields

For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,

Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,

And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray,

And howling, to his gods, where haply lies

His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

And monarchs tremble in their capitals,

The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make

Their clay creator the vain title take

Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,

They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar

Alike the armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters washed them power while they were free,

And many a tyrant since: their shores obey

The stranger, slave or savage; their decay

Has dried up realms to deserts:-not so thou,

Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play-

Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow-

Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time

Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm,

Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving; boundless, endless and sublime-

The image of eternity-the throne

Of the invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone

Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, ocean! And my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wanton'd with thy breakers-they to me

Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

Made them a terror-'twas a pleasing fear,

For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane - as I do here. 

The Dark, Blue Sea, George Gordon Byron, 1842. 

Carl Blechen Stormy Sea with Lighthouse, 1826.

Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, 1969.

At certain epochs, man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection - reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways - through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed upon the visible world.

...

It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan't embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. 

What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, which destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity.  There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed — it would have been better than nothing. 

Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity — What civilization needs:

confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the civilisations—or civilising epochs—have had a weight of energy behind them. 

People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversations and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid. 

~ Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, 1969. Televised documentary by the BBC, which in our humble opinion, is the greatest such programme ever made.

The School of Athens is one of the most famous frescoes by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1511, part of Raphael's commission to decorate the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace & St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City. 

 A key of those depicted:

1: Zeno of Citium 2: Epicurus Possibly, the image of two philosophers, who were typically shown in pairs during the Renaissance: Heraclitus, the "weeping" philosopher, and Democritus, the "laughing" philosopher. 3: unknown (believed to be Raphael), 4: Boethius or Anaximander or Empedocles? 5: Averroes 6: Pythagoras 7: Alcibiades or Alexander the Great? 8: Antisthenes or Xenophon or Timon? 9: Fornarina as a personification of Love or Francesco Maria della Rovere? 10: Aeschines or Xenophon? 11: Parmenides? 12: Socrates 13: Heraclitus 14: Plato 15: Aristotle 16: Diogenes of Sinope 17: Plotinus 18: Euclid or Archimedes with students (Bramante?) 19: Strabo or Zoroaster? 20: Ptolemy? R: Apelles 21: Protogenes.

The Fear of the Past

The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
...

Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense the most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods. The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past.

G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, 1910. 

Christian Mysticism

In the heavens, the Sun and Moon are, by interpreters of dreams, put for the persons of Kings and Queens; but in sacred Prophecy, which regards not single persons, the Sun is put for the whole species and race of Kings, in the kingdom or kingdoms of the world politic, shining with regal power and glory; the Moon for the body of the common people, considered as the King's wife; the Stars for subordinate Princes and great men, or for Bishops and Rulers of the people of God, when the Sun is Christ; light for the glory, truth, and knowledge, wherewith great and good men shine and illuminate others; darkness for obscurity of condition, and for error, blindness and ignorance; darkening, smiting, or setting of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, for the ceasing of a kingdom, or for the desolation thereof, proportional to the darkness; darkening the Sun, turning the Moon into blood, and falling of the Stars, for the same; new Moons, for the return of a dispersed people into a body politic or ecclesiastic.

Sir Isaac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, 1733.

 Marx may win battles, but Malthus will win the war.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Annotations on an Implicit Text, 1977.

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe.

Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa) by Théodore Géricault 1818-19.

Julius Evola - European Decadence

The current “civilisation” of the West is due for a fundamental overhaul, without which it is doomed to collapse sooner or later.

It has carried out the most complete perversion of every rational order of things.

The realm of matter, of gold, of the machine, of number, there is no longer spirit, nor liberty, nor light in it.

The West has lost the sense of command and obedience.

It has lost the sense of Action and of Contemplation.

It has lost the sense of hierarchy, of spiritual power, of man-gods.

It no longer knows nature. It is no longer, for Western man, a living body made of symbols, Gods and ritual gestures—a splendid cosmos, in which man moves freely, like a microcosm within the macrocosm: it has on the contrary decayed to an opaque and fatal exteriority, the mystery of which profane sciences seek to ignore by means of their petty laws and their petty hypotheses.

The West no longer knows Wisdom: it no longer knows the majestic silence of those who have mastered themselves, the bright calm of the Seers, the superb solar reality of those in whom the idea has become blood, life, and power. Wisdom has been supplanted by the rhetoric of “philosophy” and “culture”, the realm of professors, journalists, and sportsmen—the plan, the program, the proclamation. It has succumbed to sentimental, religious, humanitarian contamination, and the race of chatterers who run around madly exalting “becoming” and “practice”, because silence and contemplation frighten them. 

The West no longer knows the State: the valorous State, the Imperium, as synthesis of spirituality and royalty, as a way to the “supraworld”, as known by the great ancient civilisations from China to Egypt, from Persia to Rome and to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, has been submerged in the bourgeois poverty of a trust of slaves and traders.

What might war be, war willed in itself, as a value superior both to winning and losing, as that sacred path to spiritual fulfilment— for whom the celestial seat of Odin, the Valhalla, is the privilege of the heroes fallen on the battlefield; for which in Islam, “holy war”, jihad, is synonymous with “way of God”; for which in Aryan India, the warrior is side by side with the ascetic and, in classic antiquity, mors triumphalis is conceived of as victory over death—these formidable European “activists” no longer know what such a war is. They no longer know warriors but only soldiers, for them a squabble is enough to terrorise and force them back to the rhetoric of humanism, pacifism, and sentimentalism.

Europe has lost its simplicity, it has lost its centrality, it has lost its life. The democratic sickness and the Semitic poison corrode it in all its roots—right down to its law, sciences, and speculative thought. As for leaders—those beings who distinguish themselves, not by violence, greed for profit, their ability as exploiters of slaves, but, on the contrary, by unwavering and transcendent qualities of life—there are none. Europe is a big anodyne body, possessed and shattered by an anxiety which no one dares to express, whose blood is gold, whose flesh is machines, factories and arms, whose brain is a newspaper page—a shapeless body which tosses restlessly, driven by obscure and unpredictable forces which implacably crush anyone who tries to oppose it or even just to avoid its mechanism.

The highly extolled “civilisation” of the West has been able to do all this. This is the vaunted result of the superstition of “Progress”—beyond Roman imperiality, the Doric Greece, and all the other exemplary forms of the great Aryan primordial civilisations.

And the noose tightens everyday around those who are still capable of great loathing and great rebellion.

- From part 1, chapter 1 of Heathen Imperialism, first published as Imperialismo Pagano, 1928.

The Regicides of New England

Paddy Corcoran 

“Cromwell lifting the Coffin-lid and looking at the body of Charles I”, by  Hippolyte Delaroche

On Friday, 30th of January, we remember His Majesty Charles I, who was executed 365 years ago today, on a bitter winter morning in 1649, changing forever the course of England's history and that of the English-speaking peoples. Fifty-nine signatures penned His Majesty's death warrant, and one of its signers and major role players in the execution of the King was William Goffe.

In 1660, when the monarchy was finally restored under Charles II, Goffe fled England for the colonies, taking part in some of the major Indian conflicts there. By this time, nowhere in the Anglosphere were Roundhead sympathies more hideously lukewarm than in New England, especially Massachusetts.

Anti-royalism seemed to flow in the blood of Goffe, who was the son of Stephen Goffe, a prominent Roundhead politician from Sussex, and his zeal for religious separatism was so devout that he was known by those in his circle as “Praying William”. But his rise to prominence among the Parliamentarian milieu that instigated the Civil War came with his meeting of Frances Whalley, a relative of Oliver Cromwell, whose hand he took in marriage in 1642. It was in that same year that he was thrown in prison for his part in attempting to give total control of the militia to the parliament by petition. For this, Cromwell made him a captain in his New Model Army, seeing action at Dunbar and Worcester, and he was also one of the chief aides in Cromwell's dissolution of Rump Parliament.

But it was not only Goffe's high profile among Parliamentarians (whose political fervour was quite mild in comparison to his own) that made him so despicable, for history has proved that that he was actually the first of Cromwell's officers to openly to call for an end to all negotiations with the King, and for the King to be brought to account. He stressed that it was “God's purpose” he be brought to trial, and insisted that it must be done immediately. These demands he so fanatically repeated that he was appointed to the High Court of Justice and took great pleasure in signing the King's death warrant. Goffe's career only grew more successful once the Protectorate was established when he was appointed Major-General for Sussex and Berkshire.

William Goffe

Upon Cromwell's death, and the subsequent falling from power of his son and successor, Richard, Goffe had no choice but to flee the country, and, naturally, found refuge in Massachusetts. He took with him his father-in-law, Richard Whalley, and there met up with another leading Roundhead figure and refugee associated with the regicide, one John Dixwell, a commissioner who sat in judgment on the King. The three settled in Massachusetts, feeling fairly safe for a few years among an overwhelming population of sympathisers. Back home, it was believed that the three were dead, and there were even reports in English newspapers that they'd died in Switzerland among other notable regicides who had fled upon the return of Charles II. But it was not long until the King sent agents to the colonies to procure their arrest.

Goffe, despite being in hiding, still managed to play a major role in King Philip's War, defending the town of Hadley from a major Indian attack in 1676. Until the outbreak of the war, he travelled extensively throughout the region with Whalley and Dixwell, finding asylum in the homes of sympathisers, some of which were distinguished men of New England. It is also believed that they, for a small amount of time, hid in the West Rock hills, or what was then known as “Providence Hill” until the advent of the Indian war.

The Crown's agents never found Goffe, nor Whalley or Dixwell, even after a Royal order was sent by New Haven Colony Governor William Leete to Boston. What the Crown didn't know, however, was that Leete deliberately delayed the King's messengers, giving the regicides enough time to escape. Despite being suspected of helping the three find refuge, Leete, for reasons lost to history, was never charged with obstructing justice.

Unfortunately, today, there are three streets in Connecticut which bear their namesake, which, sadly are a sort of commemoration, a despicable legacy of that region's Roundhead past. But little, if anything at all, is remembered of William Goffe in Britain, nor of the two contemptible regicides he ran with. 

 

May it remain ever so.