John Martin (1789-1854), Pandemonium (1823-27)
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
I wrote the following shortly after the birth of my son, now age 12:
When questioned by the youth of future generations, those born into the world created by our myopic choices, about how you responded when the earth was burning, will you reply that you went to the mall, sat in public places staring at a glowing electronic box, engaged in cretinous palaver about the private lives of sub-cretinous celebrities and the dim machinations of reality show jerk-rockets?” [One of whom is in his second term as president of the US.]
“At this critical juncture, one’s individual calling will be interwoven with the fate of the earth and the collective destiny of all of humankind. The age of elitist narcissists is drawing to a close. [Man o’ man, that declaration was a humbling display of wishful thinking.] The time for dreamers, visionaries and activists has arrived, and their time of arrival is long past due.” [I know, we are still waiting.]
While we wait, in the dimming light of a dark age, as Yeats’ averred in verse:
The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
— W.B. Yeats
One’s eyes will adjust to a dimming of light; the phenomenon presents an option: to go nocturnal in mindset. The much and wrongly maligned wolf sees in the dark and displays fierceness regarding love for its pack. The archetypal story goes, a wolf will raise a cast out child. The orphaned soul of our troubled, dark times is in desperate need of a nurturing based fierceness of the heart. Dark times can become the ally of those bold in imagination.
We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When Light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye […]
— Emily Dickinson, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark”
Yet: It is always darkest, right before…it goes completely black. Sometimes, it takes total darkness for certain individuals to search within for an internal source of illumination.
If not, primal fears, rooted in the archaic subregions of mind, rise as mindless animus when political and economic dynamics devolve into ossified structures, noxious to the common good. As their structures of self-interest decay from corruption, the elite beneficiaries of the system engage in campaigns deploying demagogic fear-mongering with the agenda of blame-shifting the reasons for the rising miseries of the many. As a result, dark, dangerous energies borne of the stress-fragmented collective mind surge through the culture. There is a darkness (invisible) propelling event in a tragic trajectory.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day
— “Darkness,” Lord Bryon
Vincent Van Gogh, “Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette,” 1885
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
— Dante Alighieri, “The Inferno”
Hence, seeing through into the depths of hidden regions of the psyche, personal and collective, becomes crucial; the gaining of political intelligence, rooted in soul-making, must be in place for those choosing to act as a force of resistance.
Moreover, political intelligence involves more than recognizing, then citing unwelcome facts to the willfully and belligerently obtuse fuckwits, and more is required than, cathartic as it is, positing outrage based on honest feelings. Accurate apprehensions and probing insights also must be freighted with the rigorous imagination attendant to descent into, and contemplation of, the dark regions of the self. (How else is it possible to understand the darkness within others?) Thus a transforming element has been delivered to the psyche, a type of soul-making alchemy arriving from the thoughts of the heart, even as it suffers anguish witnessing the noxious inanity of the times.
Dismal, painful times can create an opening — a pathway to inner, revitalizing reservoirs of vital imagination, even, and in particular, as the trajectory of the world careens through a drought-stricken wasteland of the collective heart. In these times, avoid retreating, by reflex, into the bland tyranny of comfort zones. Yes, viewing the prevailing abomination is mortifying. Yet mortification can transmute into a type of desperation known as courage.
One is greater than one’s comfort zones. So is the imagination. Rigorous imagination does not shut out the world; it gathers the world inside, gathers and alchemizes life’s laughter and tears, love and hatred, darkness and light, grandeur and everyday yearning, thus transforming one’s worldview.
We are not dealing in self-involved, self-reinforcing vanities and banal agendas. The imagination reveals, it is not all personal. There is more to you and to me than we know; therefore, there is more to the world than we are allowing ourselves to apprehend.
As the old order falls away, a new world is brooding within. True, bad news is the order of the day. The good news: You carry within you seeds of a new perspective on the world.
“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
— Miles Davis
Long before there came into existence a materialist view of the world, there was the image-rich mind, withal, the thoughts of the soul, a perspective that apprehended all things in the world and the heavens to be alive.
Why, in our time, as opposed to previous eras, does wisdom not come with age? Instead, for example, insofar as the US political class aging begets regression – flat out childishness — as all the while, under the class stratification inherent to capitalism, the citizenry lapses into bitterness due to a lack of opportunity to not only live fulfilling lives but the constant and pummeling angst of losing everything. Wisdom arriving with age is not possible when the individuals in question are ego-driven tools or the powerless mass in the thrall of the pathologies of a greed-rancid system that only proffers palliatives of rage displacement and depth-devoid distractions.
Beneath the disorder of the current political structure seethes pathology needing to be examined and untangled. Its sick institutions reflect pathos suppressed from the collective mind of capitalist imperium, and, as a result, has festered into societal afflictions.
As a politically aware, critically thinking person, you have evolved past, for example, reactionary shitwits, authority-worshipping ambulatory head wounds, and humor-deficient dogmatists. Now the crucial question becomes, and it is a dilemma of heart, mind and soul, one in which I, for one, am engaged in near constant struggle: Can you evolve past yourself?
One must take in and recognize and respect the immensity of it all. Embrace — try not to shrink before — the unfathomable hugeness extant in life. In this way we grow by becoming part of what is immense as opposed to being stricken and paralyzed by the fact of our smallness before the inexorable movement of events.
A collapse is coming to pass. Decay is a chorus of warning; collapse is a dark angel devoid of mercy. The question reveals itself: How do we navigate such a dark, forbidden terrain? We listen to our heart, mind, and gut about who can be our allies in struggle. What viewpoints can act as midwives of rebirth? We connect our pain with the pain of our besieged and exploited planet. We engaged in the act of soul-making hence there comes the possibility the furies (Erinyes) of the age will be transformed into kindly protectors (Eumenides) of polis and republic.
20. Wisdom shouts in the streets.
21. She cries out in the public square.
She calls to the crowds along the main street, to those gathered in front of the city gate:
22. How long, you simpletons, will you insist on being simpleminded?
How long will you mockers relish your mocking?
How long will you fools hate knowledge?
— Proverbs 1:20-22
Cruelty, blithe indifference, and witnessing the worst among us prosper by means of heartless agendas can pummel the spirit, can wound the soul, can shatter the mind. A sense of dislocation grips consciousness; perception becomes a heap of fragmented images.
William Blake (1757–1827), “Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels”
Yet the spirit has wings. The soul is deathless. And the mind, once the understanding is internalized, becomes focused because a new but ancient state of being is glimpsed in the hope and healing attendant to larger, more imaginative order arriving upon the ruins of the failed and fallen system. Descend within as you rise on the integrity of your wings: you are more resilient than you know for you are contained within the soul of the world’s immense order.
How does it come to be? In an era of manic acceleration, stage a personal protest movement by the act of slowing down. When everything is in the thrall of mindless motion, it becomes urgent to think things through, to see past the recklessness of the age and take in and bask in the treeline at the edge of the mind.
Why the extant surge of cultural mania? The capitalist order is fraying; its structures, as well as the collective psyches of its beneficiaries, are coming undone. They are desperately attempting to hold it all together. They are looting the contents of the national treasury and shunting the loot into their private concerns because the old order is sinking under the weight of its own excess. We are bearing witness to a duck tape economy. Yet mania cannot be sustained. Mania engenders collapse. Beneath the surface, all concerned long for its end. Even the economic and political elite, lifelong denizens of corruption, cannot abide the emptiness howling from the location within where their soul should be located.
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker
Remember this: Nothing turns to dung as quickly as the past’s insistence as to what the future should be.
There can be a type of joy in navigating grim times. Have you noticed: Those who have lied, crawled, clamored, and clawed their way to the top of the capitalist order have ascended to a collapsing tower constructed of dried dung – and they reek of it? The thought occurs to me: We can stand on the green hills of the heart and witness their dung heap of the lying mind collapse.
The Dung Heap, Charles Gogin
As noted, throughout this musing, we are shambling through a dark age. Therefore individuals with whom it is possible to engage with depth and resonance appear to be scattered and far flung. Yet when I engage in discourse with others, I try to remain open to the possibility of the occurrence of: the unfolding of everyday speech bearing the sublime.
The seeds of indomitable imagination brood in the compost of this dark age. Cultivate them within and then you, and then the world, have the possibility of being transformed.
The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.
— C.G. Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, and Trickster
Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19
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. Read other articles by Phil. 
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