When I contemplate what the future holds, I see a darkness visible. An inferno of tragic fuckwit inflicted by the ambulatory head wounds known as the political and financial elite.
“I can’t go on…I’ll go on.” — final two sentences of Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable.
At times, I’m baffled as to how we, the scant and scattered few, who refuse to close our eyes and block our hearts to the realities of the day continue to go on. What force restrains one from reeling into the street seized by lamentation?
Yet one foot is placed before the other. One word follows the next on the page. An ineffable understanding draws us into communion with the world and each other, even as the din of disconsolate angels braces the mind and cleaves the heart.
I know I am not alone in this. Nor are you. Although, it seems so. What is the common prayer for those who cannot close themselves off from the agonized soul of the colonized world — for those of us who are ants who dream we are Atlas, and our visions crush us as if it were the weight of the earth itself upon our shoulders?
We face a vast aloneness in the company of billions. Could it be that an affinity of isolation binds us like a prayer of sacred vehemence? Is it possible the animating force borne of imagination has the power to merge our passions thereby bestowing preternatural strength? It seems possible. Otherwise, the immense sadness of the earth would crush us into oblivion.
Hold on through these days of descent into darkness. There is hope, for when darkness devours hope, by means of a poetic descent into the underworld, one is confronted with truths that only can be revealed in darkness. Poets, musical composers, and long time students of the psyche inform us: depth-delving visions evoked in poems, musical revelry, dreams, as well as psychoanalytic insights — that is, the varieties of psychical phenomenon conjured by lyrical prowess, verse, melody, rhythm, incantatory sounds, and soul-plangent imagery — created by revelators of hidden realities — can partially restore what has been lost to a world by materialism’s shriveled and desiccated worldview.
From the mythopoetic perspective, Orpheus can pass into the underworld and back – but Eurydice remains lost to shadow. Why? We only live half way in the world; the rest unfolds as mystery.
Federico Garcia Lorca termed the alchemical marriage of subterranean and terrestrial realms: Deep Song: An auto-chthonic music that allows us to live beyond ourselves… to glimpse larger, more nuanced realities, thus escaping a self-constructed prison imposed by believing the world of subjectivity and habit is the only world possible.
Descent leads to glimpses of numinous light.
Otherwise, without a balance of darkness, one becomes light-intoxicated i.e., lacking in the will and ability to see one’s own hidden (dark) half; hence, one is prone to project one’s own veiled-in-darkness motives upon the actions of others.
Rilke proffers a remedy:
You, darkness, that I come from I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything- shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them! – powers and people-
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
I have faith in night.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Deep Song in no way resembles autotune robotic bacchanals of banality. Deep Song thrums out chord progressions of the Cosmic Blues. Deep Song wails primordial storms and collapsing stars; it sways and rocks to the relentless tides of uncharted eternity and of the alien oceans of our tide-tossed, ungovernable hearts.
The present system, as defined by the neoliberal economic order, is as destructive to the balance of nature as it is to the individual, both body and psyche. One’s body grows obese while Arctic ice and wetlands shrink. Biodiversity decreases as psyches are commodified by ever-proliferating, corporatist/consumer state banality.
But the raging soul of the world will not be assaulted without consequence. Mind and body are intertwined and inseparable from nature, and, when nature responds to our assaults, her replies are known to humankind as the stuff of mythic tragedy and natural catastrophe.
But take heart. As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.
Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.
“To go into the dark with a light is to know the light. /To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,/ and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,/ and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”— Wendell Berry, To Know The Dark
Yet, while it is all well and good to be politically enlightened, approaching the tumult of human events guided by reason and restraint, if the self is not saturated in poetry, one will inhabit a dismal tower looking over a desiccated wasteland.
The crackpot realist’s notion that poetry has no value other than what can be quantified in practical terms emerges from the same mindset that deems nature to be merely worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. Trees of a rain forest can be pulped down into paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume. The underlying meaning of this sentiment: The value of one’s existence is derived by the act of being an asset of the billionaire class (i.e., our fate determined by the soul-defying agendas of a clutch of soul-devouring ghouls).
As a result, the tattered remnants of the neoliberal imagination (embodied in the dismal mindset of Wall Street bagmen (and women) war machine Democrats and the clown car demolition derby of MAGA maniacs condemns the psyche to languish in a broken tower of the mind. The exponentially increasing consequences (e.g., economic collapse, perpetual war, genocide, ecocide) attendant to the noxious excesses of the present paradigm will shake those insular towers to their foundations, and, will caused their structures to totter, buckle and collapse.
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals…And I, their sexton slave!
— Hart Crane , excerpt from The Broken Tower
We have been “sexton slave” to this destructive order for far too long; its lodestar is a death star.
In polar opposition, a poetic view of existence insists that one embrace the sorrow that comes at the end of things. The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs. Yet when the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass.
“Often we’re not so much afraid of our own limitations, as we are of the infinite within us.”–Nelson Mandela (from an interview from his prison cell, conducted by the late Irish poet and priest, John O’Donnahey)
In this way, we are nourished by the ineffable, whereby unseen components of consciousness provide us the strength to carry the weight of darkness. Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, be rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring “concrete” answers to polite dialog – I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?
The following is crucial, because a cultural breakdown is occurring, and culture carries the criteria of psyche, the acts of social engagement through dissent, cultural re-imagining and rebuilding can have a propitious effect upon individual consciousness, an endeavor James Hillman termed “soul-making”.
Remember to disguise yourself as yourself when approached by ghosts of calcified habit and gods of tumultuous change. This is essential: Because what takes hold and brings about the collapse of an empire…is a loss of collective soul e.g., the type of loss of meaning and purpose evinced when only a meaningless, zombie-like drive remains, because, even though, the culture is dead, it refuses to accept the shroud of the earth’s enveloping soil…to have its decomposing remains broken down and returned to the cycle of all things.
As posited above: It is always darkest right before it goes completely dark.
Yet there is the balancing assertion: “The beginning is near.”
Hold both sentiments in your mind and discover which one allows your own heart to beat in sync with the heart of the world, and which will grant the imagination and stamina required to remake the world anew.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet. Visit and subscribe to Phil’s Substack newsletter at https://substack.com/@philrockstroh.
