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One thing I would say (and which I tried and mostly failed to say to friends recently) is that the great hope for a rebirth of romance and art is that it doesn't cost anything in the traditional sense of hard resources. Free will is weightless and massless, and therefore all it would take is one great typhoon of it to turn the whole mess around. Our job, I sense, is to set the table for the feast.

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I agree, though that does currently seem an insurmountable task, considering that the weightlessness of free will does generally lead the masses toward the path of least resistance, and we're swimming upstream. I genuinely hope and pray it can be done, though. I don't want my son to inherit this rot.

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Love this. You even introduced a symbol from the parables. We are due for a rebirth in the arts. Before we can create anew we've got to allow the past to flow into the present. I expect cabal control of the popular arts to break down completely. A large part of society is cut off from the past and that is why they accept faux art as real art, and faux food as real food, etc. We have a lot of government sponsored art that is intended to replace and obscure real art. In the movies, of course. In Rock and Roll (I'm Uncle Sam, yes I am. I've been hiding out in a rock and roll band). In poetry produced by university presses. It's utter shit...government cheese...intended to destroy the marketplace for real art and to suppress real talent.

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Reminds of a time several decades ago, when a much younger and angrier version of me took on a whole crowd of young artists at a certain bar which attracted that clientele. I was a young art student myself, and what started as a friendly debate ended with me in fire-and-brimstone preacher mode, branding them as "sell-outs whoring your souls" for government NEA grants. "How dare you call yourselves artists?!" and that sort of thing. Went over like a lead balloon as you might imagine. :)

But the interesting thing was many of them were cowed into silence, because they knew I was right. They knew that "he who pays the piper calls the tune," and that there really wasn't a counterargument that could be made from reason. The corruption of art has only metastasized since those days. It's an ugly, misshapen mockery.

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More Blake: Nations are destroyed or flourish as their poetry, painting, and architecture are destroyed or flourish. Wisdom, art, and science is the primordial state of man.

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This is something progressives understand that conservatives have all but completely ignored. That's why we're living as if in a conquered nation.

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I agree.

Modernity necessarily requires that you check romanticism at the door, because modernity *is* without inspiration. Modernity is packaged and soulless.

Modernity embodies demoralization, and requires that those who adhere to it -- are shells of humans. No thought, no reason, just execution of endless nonsense societal rules, which ultimately redult in chaos, and the personal destruction of its adherents.

I opted out of modernized ideals naturally. I hate needless drama, and fake-ass people. Fake people have always been around, supporting a system that the normalizes fake hollow people is appalling.

I never thought that the phrase "keeping it real" would literally mean just that.

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Unfortunately, opting out of modernity puts you adrift. Better than opting in, obviously, but I hope that we will figure out a way to recover relationships, culture, and genuine community in a way that might give rise to a new era of romanticism. It seems like an impossible task, but we have to believe it can happen, otherwise it has already won.

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This is what Jacques Ellul called "technique," we are not the first to resist, nor shall we be the last.

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May 26, 2023Liked by Emily Morgan

This is Gold💞💞

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Thank you.

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The idea that modernity and romanticism are mutually exclusive feels like it's got legs.

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I've been mulling this over for some time and the more I think about it, the more deeply I feel it must be true. It explains so much, from the monstrosities Modernity has produced to the beauty and depth we all feel in our bones is lost.

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Oddly, and appropriately, a picture drifted across my feed today comparing streetlights from the 19th century (ornate and baroque) and today (a featureless pole). It made me a little sad.

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I am a bit older than you, at 53, and I've noticed that we no longer talk to each other. My beloved wife doesn't speak to me since I don't share her interest in phone bling and social media. When Facebook first came out, I was old enough to use it for photo sharing, but now I don't use it.

I lived 10 miles out in the country and couldn't see the next-door neighbor at all. You are right; romance is dead, or at least dying, and we are poorer for it.

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Sadly, you can see the poverty of this in every corner of our civilization. We have material wealth and technological superpowers, but no soul. I hope there is a way to reclaim that spirit before it's too late.

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Nicely put. I have been thinking about the Romantic era in poetry of the early 1800s and their battle with the city and the machine "the dark Satanic Mills" we are still fighting this battle over 200 years later.

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Thank you!

Is "The Dark Satanic Mills" a specific poem, or a collection of poems? I haven't heard of it, but it sounds fascinating.

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Jul 21, 2023·edited Jul 21, 2023Liked by Emily Morgan

It's a line from William Blake's poem Jerusalem. If you like music, Emerson Lake, and Palmer does a pretty nice setting of the poem.

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I'll have to read that. Thanks!

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May 27, 2023·edited May 28, 2023Liked by Emily Morgan

It's not a coincidence that William Blake the first romantic spoke of "dark Satanic mills," industrialization and the "enlightenment" was the beginning of the end for the romantic spirit. It brought short term material gain and long term ruin of the soul. We can fight rearguard actions, in the 80s it might have been getting a letterpress and making a handset poetry chapbook. Now it is being here and using words and not "engaging" with the "immersion" of video and CGI. Sterner souls like Uncle Ted look over their glasses with reproach at us for even being here at the virtual salon.

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A romantic should read the classics of the Romantic age. Romanticism is an artistic and philosophical response to inhumane rationalism from the early 19th century. Mary Wollstonecraft's Frankenstein is an ethical response to rationalist science, especially the enlightenment rationalists (Locke). She understood the whole problem with inhumane science as a teenager. She wrote the most important book ever about it. Wordsworth and Coleridge were romantic poets and philosophers. They brought back nature, beauty, and goodness to English poetry which had become austere and inaccessible in the late 18th century. Who exposed a better system of ethics than Charles Dickens did in his novels? The philosophy of the Romantic age is embedded in the literature, and the literature is great and fun to read. Thomas Paine and all the writing of the American Revolutionaries are adjacent to a discussion of Romantic lit. Freedom is part and parcel of the ethics of Romance. Certainly, our enemies look on the notion of human freedom as Romantic. I said all that and I didn't mention my favorite poet William Blake, who has caused two centuries of literary critics to dedicate themselves to understanding his works. Keats and Shelley are other notables. Keats was important to me when I was young. If a person understood the ethics of the Romantic age, she would not be exploitable by the modern Philistines who oppose her. That's the impact of real education. It prepares you for intellectual warfare.

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It's much easier to find romance in the exotic than in the here and now.

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Can you expand on that and what it means for practical rearguard actions? It's kind of opaque.

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