Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

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Four selections from Wyndham Lewis’s Rude Assignment

Feeling pretty accomplished in my beach reading this vacation; I finished Bend of the World, read Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, Padgett Powell’s short but masterful Lost-Cause-as-senior-daydream novel, and plowed through most of Wyndham Lewis’s “intellectual autobiography” Rude Assignment. I’ve got  the Black Sparrow Press edition, which has six of Ezra Pound’s letters to Lewis regarding the work, which are very entertaining and some really great intellectual sparring. Anyway, here are some selections. On socialism as a bourgeois fad:

The worst blemish in the English character is not, as many people would have it, hypocrisy: it is that the Englishman is a congenital snob. This fact seems to me of importance to socialism — though I am often told it is not. Will the Englishman divest himself of his snobbery, as he passes over into the new social order: or will he take it with him — assuming, in its new environment, horrible and unexpected forms? Will the Stalin of England insist that he is of an awfully good family, and will it be high treason to remind him that his papa hawked fish in the New Cut? Will the shoddy genius of the Old School Tie go hand in hand with the British version of the Commissar?

There has been ‘Labour,’ but in England socialism has mostly existed as salon-socialism, up till now: a middleclass monopoly. I know and have met great numbers of socialists but only two or three issuing from the working-class. You would think that a young middleclass man, when he decided to dedicate himself to the emancipation of the working-class, would lay aside for good the old school tie, and with it the degrading emotions of idiot-pride in the not very interesting fact that his ‘people’ floated at a respectable middleclass distance above the gutter. You would think he would dump all that into the trash-can and try and be serious.

But this as a rule does not happen: among Popular Front acquaintances I have met with more straight social snobbery than anywhere else. Where one had thought only to find a passion for social justice, one so often discovers nothing but an unlovely little power-complex. Snob and socialist are not regarded as mutually exclusive terms in England. And this feudal atavism, or, as it usually is, hangover from the Servants-hall, has not been by any means confined to the small-fry. — When, many years ago, I met Prince Kropotkin, I detected no sign that he remembered that once he had been a prince. That he had left behind, along with his fortune, when he went into a most honourable exile. Perhaps this is easier for an aristocrat: it is easier to leave a great deal, possibly, than to turn your back upon something insignificant.

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Sacred Harp 406: ‘New Harmony’
I want to live a Christian here,
I want to die a-shouting,
I want to feel my Savior near,
While soul and body’s parting.
I want to see bright angels stand
And waiting to receive me,
To bear my soul to Canaan’s land,
Where Christ has gone before me.

My heart is often made to mourn
Because I’m faint and feeble,
And when my Savior seems to frown,
My soul is filled with trouble.
But when He doth again return,
And I repent my folly,
’Tis then I after glory run,
And still my Jesus follow.

I have my bitter and my sweet
While through this world I travel,
Sometimes I shout and often weep,
Which makes my foes to marvel.
But let them think and think again,
I feel I’m bound for heaven;
I hope I shall with Jesus reign,
I therefore still will praise Him.
Say a prayer for our brothers and sisters in Iraq.
atlantis3

We’re all Atlanteans here

 “All that is said by any of us can only be imitation and representation. For if we consider the likenesses which painters make of bodies divine and heavenly, and the different degrees of gratification with which the eye of the spectator receives them, we shall see that we are satisfied with the artist who is able in any degree to imitate the earth and its mountains, and the rivers, and the woods, and the universe, and the things that are and move therein, and further, that knowing nothing precise about such matters, we do not examine or analyze the painting; all that is required is a sort of indistinct and deceptive mode of shadowing them forth.” — Critias

“If thou dost not now recognize thine own thought-forms … the lights will daunt thee, the sounds will awe thee, and the rays will terrify thee.” — Tibetan Book of the Dead

h/t @enagurney, with the music video.

I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered.
*****

Tom Bertonneau investigates the myth of Atlantis, and finds himself quite sympathetic to its expositors:

Historians have long since tidied up history and set all the dates.  The professors know what they know.

But do they really know what they know or are they merely being professional such that, like all professionals nowadays, their choler boils over preemptively concerning any idea not fully vetted by the peer-review committee of Soporifica?  Or on the other hand is there not in the imaginations of Messrs. Rudbeck, Spence, Haggard and Hyne, and their kith and kin, something like a profound intuition?

What kind of intuition?

“A great universal civilization in deep prehistory,” Michell called it, the memory of which persisted until the moment when the Enlightenment ceased to countenance anything except itself about midway through the Eighteenth Century.

I commend to you Rune Soup’s Whisky Rants, all of them. He’s like the Moldbug of chaos magic. The one on Atlantis is very interesting and asks some good questions; I’m not really convinced that the Cuban underwater city is quite worth getting excited about yet, but let’s run with it for a minute:

Atlantis has been found. If you admit that fact then the museum is in immediate need of miles and miles of redecorating. And this is just one place. The whole edifice of the western European narrative starts to slip like a clown’s face in the rain. …

There is a fucking city of step pyramids and processional streets stretching thousands of square metres at the bottom of the sea.

There are several of those, but the specific one in question does have something of an unusual story, involving a Soviet defector named Paulina Zelitsky and her Canadian husband, Paul Weinzweig. There hasn’t been a subsequent expedition since the ‘discovery’ was made in 2001, which is unfortunate but given political realities involving Cuba, not necessarily indicative of any kind of cover-up. Zelitsky more or less disappeared, with the exception of this report about her being arrested in Mexico, until about a year ago when her two-volume memoir, of sorts, came out. I haven’t read it, but the description on Amazon says:

Paulina concludes in her arguments that the main strategy of the current Russian Government is to attain global dominion, naturally prioritizing it in the Arctic which is absolutely strategically important for Russia in military and economic terms. The “sabre-rattling” strategy adopted by the current Russian government not just in Arctic but also in the Gulf of Mexico is directed toward military intimidation of their Arctic neighbors in order to maintain full military control and develop Arctic resources without interference from other Arctic neighbors. The nuclear deterrent cycle is about to repeat once again with Russian government rebuilding its previously abandoned military bases in Cuba and once again secretly sending its navy equipped with nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Sounds crazy, right? But just maybe a little prescient, given this news two weeks ago. She’s also taken up internet commenting, posting largely on Ukrainian affairs — she was educated in Odessa — and is clearly quite opposed to Russia’s new self-assertion on the world stage.

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Jacobites, Masons, and Fredericksburg

I’m about halfway through Jake Bacharach’s The Bend of the World, which is enormously fun to read. You should all go and buy it now. It deals heavily with the occult history of Pittsburgh, and this being a somewhat witchy post, there’s one bit that’s just too topical not to begin with. It’s what is proving to be one of my favorite characters, the protagonist’s best friend Johnny, describing the theories of one Winston Pringle, in a book called Fourth River, Fifth Dimension:

So basically, he said, you’ve got this ancient sacred geometry, sacred topography, what with the three rivers and the underground fourth river all meeting at the Point. Usual back story. Indians knew it was holy, blah blah blah. So the Marquis Du Quesne, who’s the governor-general of New France, and who also just happens to be the grand master of the Priory of Scion, hears about this, in particular the fourth river, which is, duh, obviously, the underground stream of medieval European esotericism, immediately puts together an exhibition, kicks out the Indians, and builds Fort Duquesne. So then Adam Weishaupt, the thirty-third-degree Freemason and immortal founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, gets wind of this, and basically does the Illuminati version of Aw No She Di’in! Now, uh, well, there’s basically a big digression about how Shea and Wilson stole all of Pringle’s ideas about Weishaupt killing and replacing George Washington, but yeah, basically, he uses Washington, who he either is or is manipulating, and conceives the Forbes expedition, and burns down Fort Duquesne, and erects Fort Pitt, and lays the groundwork for the founding of Pittsburgh. Then etc. etc. ad infinitum, a bunch of boring shit. Then Andrew Carnegie arrives and him and Frick get involved; Frick, by the way, is linked back to the Priory of Sion via a tenuous connection to Isaac Newton; the Pinkertons at the Homestead Strike, that’s all basically a blood sacrifice sort of thing, it begins this century-long magical working, which eventually gets taken over by the CIA, of course, which is where Pringle’s family gets involved. It’s the goddamn Remembrances of Conspiracies Past. Well, the point is to open up the transdimensional portal between quantum realities, allowing travel between any points in space-time and total control over the historical timeline and all that good stuff. I’m telling you, it’s fucking awesome.

*****

The fateful Braddock expedition, which preceded the Forbes expedition by several years, crossed the Potomac at a place called the Key of All Keys, the name for a big rock that served as a landmark in what is now Washington, DC. In the army’s ranks at the time was a lieutenant colonel by the name of George Washington. Today, all that remains of the Key of All Keys lies at the bottom of a covered well near the present location of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which may or may not be built on human remains. According to most accounts, the stone from the area was quarried for use in the White House and Capitol.

At some point Braddock’s army was joined by a former Jacobite-turned-country doctor, Hugh Mercer, who had moved to the Pennsylvania frontier in 1746 after serving as a surgeon until the Battle of Culloden. He quickly enlisted in the very same army that he fought ten years earlier. Accounts vary as to where exactly Washington and Mercer met, either at the Monongahela or at the beginning of the Forbes expedition, but at any rate they became close friends. Washington was already a Mason at the time, having joined the newly-formed Fredericksburg Masonic lodge in November 1752 (It was officially chartered by the Grand Lodge of Scotland in 1758).

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Salondotcom linkfest

A week ago, just before the account was returned to us, I went on the Rick Amato show to talk about the suppression of @salondotcom. Quite happy to be introduced as “definitely not a jagoff”:

I forgot to mention that it was probably Salon that reported us, but what can you do. Here’s a round-up of news coverage, after the jump:

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