Cradle The Fire

All subjective ontological regressions terminate in the abyss of unknowing, into the great void beyond all ken, into the “and then what?” The et ferro here asserts himself, realizing this, he works towards making of himself a glorious pyre which will burn up the amniotic null. Out of darkness, light and out of light, darkness. Darkness fostered by his own hand for the safeguarding of his prizes. The et ferro is preeminently a creature of shade, a acolyte of Apophis – the world-encircler, o’er thrown by the father of Shu and Tefnut. He lies beneath unknowing, seeking to excavate from it the treasures waiting beyond the facility of all limits of perception. -Introduction, First Precepts of the Et Ferro.

A man dies many deaths. The death of the body and then the death of his line and finally, the death of his legacy, the death of his memory, this, the final annihilation. It is dreams which act as the steely bulwark against all such dissolution, whereby the forward-looking man, the man of the morrow, the et ferro, boldly proclaims his defiance of disintegration. He wills to be and from that willing, all other vectors open up before him, gates to which, in goodly time, he might, as yet, fashion a key. What is important is that he affirms those dreams of engagement with the world and ensure they supplant all dreams of escape, for he knows that there is, as yet, nowhere to flee. Our fleeing space must be constructed when the seeding time comes; til then we echo for those still waiting. From dream to deeds he echoes through time, the reverberations of his reshaping of the world far out-pacing his mortal expiration. He moves against entropy, even as it sustains him. “Mad,” you might say, but not nearly mad enough for those of us who behold the end of things in their fullest conceptualization, for those of us who are able to cleave aside the insane shackles of optimism and pessimism alike; blinders all! It is not enough to merely wish that such-and-such were of a certain way without a proper knowing. Those who stumble along such a road have chosen a trepidacious path, for it is, after all, the same as every other, they – those mangy sentimentalists and utopians – have merely folded the wool of their selfsame and mushy brains over their eyes all the better to blot out the pitted spines of the jagged abyss yawning before them like a great and terrible maw. They believe that if they are to fall it were better that they did not see into where! Comfort here is a pathetic balm when the spines, the teeth of that all-consuming mouth, will pierce and tear the flesh and bone all the same and finally swallow one up to the last.

It is from such a recognition that we ought to recognize that existential acrobatics of dancing-about-the-void are both futile and head-thrashingly annoying. No one has the feet for it, for we’ve yet to cultivate the agility. Machines for future times! The inability to acknowledge this fact, a most tiresome routine. All this babbling about “purpose” and “meaning” codified into the stones and trees and movements of celestial bodies or apparent in the general trajectory of history itself. How anthropomorphization drags the mind through the shabby rubble; those battered souls who’ve undergone its ravishment seem to have naught left in their skulls but jellied slime! What is more deplorable is that such is not the case; how many intelligent bodies malformed, how many sterling minds perverted, by this unfalsifiable and seemingly irresistible inclination towards agency-imposition, of Fate!

Those who are yet to come must sheer themselves of all of it. Away with your fickle cries of “predestination.” Away with your shuttering moans of “nihilism.” Away with all pathetic whining of “ultimate purpose” or its lack thereof! Near we draw to nothing of the sort, lest the poison should sully our pristine memory palace, shattering the lovely urns and portraits from the walls with a mindless reptilian fury. They shall not pass our defenses, our palace is too high, our moat, too deep; girded by caltrops and trenches and arrows, valiantly slung from bold and stalwart towers! We call forth a cannonade! Shoot them down, shoot them down! Back, you invaders! Back into the mud and the muck, back into the jellied slime from whence you slither! This shall be our cry. Melodramatic you say? Good. All the better! For it will not be by staid argumentation that we should, as of one body, rise above the murky undercurrents of the populace at large but by dramatic excitation. Nor is it by argumentation that we should convince them; and why should we? Before we convince anyone of anything, we should ask, “Are they worthy of the gesture?” and “are we worthy of asking?!” A baying mob is ever unimpressed by formal logic, preferring instead, the escapism of spectacle, as the Romans well realized. Failing it, the demand for libation will invariably deteriorate into catalytic howls, thirsting antecedents of a wild and grotesque bloodletting; the emergence of the lower brain. No, don’t call us “snobs” we are no such things, “elitists,” yes, but “snob,” why we should resent that deeply! A elitist is not one who, at the first, places himself or herself, as a member of the elite, but one who merely recognizes that those who are of superior attribution should be harried to the front of all that there concerns them. The gaudy flame of our creativity cannot but falter under the auspices of the indolent and insane. Thus, why should we then pass to the great and seething mass the torch or set them about crafting another? That would be foolishness supreme. They’ve not the wits for it. But neither do our “intellectuals” who scribble in their ivory towers endless tracts of faux indignation and righteous proscriptions! Truly, the new theocrats; only theirs – unlike the musty and ascetic religions of old – is a faith of imminent promise and all the more alluring for it. Here and now the paradise! they proclaim, with wild gestures and charts of sorry correlation. But we shall not be seduced, we’ve heard the tale of Odysseus and know well enough all their proclamations of idle splendor amounts to nothing more than slavery. Indeed, the academic is far sorrier than the rabble, for at least the rabble, from which we draw many of our number, has loyalty and that gentler sense of empathic dignity borne neath the dusty sun of shared tribulations and muscle-rending labor; at least they have a pride of their kith and kin and all their precedents. Drawn up in their cloister, the hermetic pendant cares only for his status, his paycheck and the security it brings.

Away with all of that! We will not be monks, absenting the world, nor the baying crowd which mindlessly engages it; we will instead move as eagles, dashing through the thermals, effulgent in the golden gale, ducking in and out of the mundane broil with a flaring of feathers to pluck the snails from the briny swallows. When we split, with our gilded talons, those spiraled shells open, a blazing fire there we shall kindle. Once spied we shall raise up our voices as one and send forth a message to all the world:

Let no hissing downpour abate the flame of your ceaseless fervor, bright men of the morrow! Like Prometheus, we bring that good and radiant stuff which cleaves the tenebrous smog from Fate’s great loom. In goodly time we shall burn even that to the ground, scatter its remnants to the four winds and construct our own in its stead!

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