Ghosts and Princes

The Defense of Poesy

Lord Dermond

Gregg Glory

So Where Are All the Mad Albanians	1

The Invoking	2

INTRODUCTION	3

The Damned	6

HEROIC CREATION	7

Heroic Creation	9

In Holy Illume	10

PUNK ROCK, ETERNAL YOUTH, AND THE BACCHANALIA OF LIBERTY	13

A Temporal Exhalation	17

Hymn	17

REASON AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CREDENT REGALE	20

Penitent Skies	23

To Tenderest Purity	23

REALIZED DESIRE AND THE INFINITE BOUNDED	25

I Marysa	27

II The Winter Princess	27

III Ariel in Excelsus	27

BEAUTY IS THE ONLY MORAL COMPASS	29

Renegade Pearl	32

To Her Asleep	32

Night Storm	33

THE DEATH OF THE BEATS AND THE AESTHETIC OF THE VILE	34

CODA	35

A Mortality Enclosed	37

HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY	38

The Immortal Words	41

Apollo Belvedere	42

So Where Are All the Mad Albanians

So where are all the mad albanians

Who strike their sticks by blinding right!

The angels of an infinite dreaming,

Who soar in elegant rhythms of soul,

Above crystal peaks, in unbound revelation?

The solitary voice, like a shaft of flame

Dances like silver stickpins of rhyme

Among the eternal fires of inviolable extant,

The triumphant victims of terrifying step

Who rise to the highest in dawn's new trick

And kick away chipping casts of despair.

O mad Albanians, their souls are tortured,

Sounding cries of 'no more words'...

The Invoking

Spirits out of remoter time awake, conclude

This unsteady enterprise I undertake, bestirred

To seek by doing your old victory's certitude.

All action waits unread in the breviary

Conscience scribes on the germinating page of brain,

Turned and unturned by each half hour on the clock---

Unwound once too often, and then named death.

What is in the poet's drink to make him sigh,

Or naked beauty purling at his tender feet

To flood his delta spirit to his muddy sense?

All true doing does its mirrored loop uncoil

Aiming in splendor to uncurl forever

Until red ministries of wishes that chafe

Angelic ears come spattering back at earth

In drum-torrents of sweet-willed rain

Or shatter damned, and eat the uttering voice

That challenged their cold potentiality

With one warm breath, or lucid exhalation

Unbraiding in the air. Vital arbiter!

That in the limpid human summons diamonds up.

I, a loblolly boy adrift alone address you

Shadowed sages pulled from the umbraed pall

Of so many deaths, hurrying to carry fire

In untried hands that take their anxious brand

As easy as snow. Cannot the unearned vow

I voice at night go unerring also?

All raving arrows of a vinegared heart!

Cannot this sovereign whisper lipped by a sleeping head

Suffice the perilous chalice of gathered hands

An over-hasty life has swept together?

Still there is a greater unabating chance

In any decrepit model of your flagging past

Than the thousand inanities dreaming out

Today's false-misted, haze-struck 'tomorrow';

I hear the taxing outcry of your valorous start

And spread my stretching soul to its farthest part--

Which was a heavy mercury in crucible valleys rolled--

And change every flowing form to a unit of that grace

That shrieks ecstatic stasis vacant heavens laced.

INTRODUCTION

'My grande finale, my goodbye...'

J. Lydon

'I can do no more with word, for those of you who don't deserve'

D. Dermond

'Call me liar, and perjure your enterprise'

Gregg G. Brown

A treatise on the highest and the best; no small undertaking! In fact such a magnificent project, the stars of whom are so grand, so powerful, that only a wisp of blinding right may be presumed, as I humbly but heroically endeavor to understand these magicians of spirit, these founts of the most radiant gist. The incarnation is often elusive, intangible and a matter involving the most sacred essences, from Manfred upon the lonely cliffs of his own terror to a serious young songstress pouring her heart upon our blessed altars of perception. The highest expressions of the soul vary in intensity but share the same undying commitment to the noble truths that enwound our human hearts like sweet indigo silks tightening to bleed their sweet lights upon us.

The heroic poet's attention to the value of ideas is among his greatest glories. They have what is almost an intuitive understanding of the creative principle in both spirit and nature. A creative spirit of this kind is unbridled and unbroken by the world at large. A passion for life and the unmoving will to find life in life, to glean the most radiant aspects from all of experience is central to the feelings of the Literai-Elitis. I believe that the ideas of the highest and most spiritual nature are central to each man's life, often ignored or betrayed by imposed conformity or a fear to see that which is beautiful and become a part of it.

I endeavor to forgo all the fear in my life, to meet each radiant prospect or encounter with the same zeal that Byron had- all the time.

The gift of fury is the rare essence that the radiant soul taps and locks into; the will to do something, anything - as long as the action taken burns and feels its most! I spurn those who take the easy tide, gliding through some unknown entanglement of mental conflicts, not real challenges to the highest questions of life, but the kind of intellectual impotencies that render the reader helpless and its author the victim of his own foul lies.

Why does the true poet require a multi-generational 'judgement of his peers' before his word is law? Because a true poet, using beauty as his talk, speaks as an individual to other individuals and—if one believes in all the fractions of the Hindic system—only some infinitesimal proportion of mankind comes in each generation to the light. I myself would throw off such systems to have each man stand independent and reign himself as is possible to be.

Today, individuals coming to this blinding passage of perception and self-assertion are confronted by a state of almost mythic fragmentation. The unity of being that they feel and know, it seems to them, cannot possibly be real, or at least cannot consciously be acknowledged as real. It would demand too many 'impossibilities' if it were really true. And so, the first experience of the Ascendant individualist trying to claim the regale that is humanity's inheritance is often, and almost inexorably, mixed with a whipping sense of torture.

Torture. Given the Regalists' gift/curse to perceive, experience, and codify these sublime graces into a voice unbelled from the heavens, he is unfortunately like the sweetest tongue of heaven singing for the deaf. This is the torture of the artist and it imbues not only his work but every aspect of his experience, demanding some perfected divinity from every rote motion. The Regalist is unaccepting of life as it is dealt and must reconstruct it from spiritual gems of its infinite seas, erecting monuments of everliving word. This recreation of reality comes to the poet like the voice of Michael the Archangel, telling the devil to go to hell, and is his only salvation in a world where LIFE is not held sacred.

I am always held in awe by the tortured furies of modern Ascendants.

Tortured fury. The shattered essence of the artist born in pain, destined to die young, dying. Who understood this? Not the watery eye of a rotting beat poet, but often those who idolized the Beats. Most of the modern Romantics struck their riches by folly or by trainwreck, often inspired by what they percieved was a beat aesthetic. Richard Hell, Patti Smith, T. Verlaine, Colin Newman, Devoto, Lydon, etc, were Romantics and Ascendent Regalists by example and lifeforce rather than as conscious artists.

I am well aware of all the detail, dickering and sinisterly infinite mechanisms modern consciousness has imposed upon the anointed joy of poetry. They are helpful in pinches and may keep the modern reader from wincing. But only the high and mighty frank talk that honesty imposes will ever build a civilization out of these fragments of consciousness again. It must be severe and high and sincere—how else can we ever hope to be these things ourselves again? We must not fear this in ourselves as a matter of some morbid or nitpicking taste; what flower ever stopped blossoming because it thought itself "too beautiful"?

Signed, in the commission of a defense of Poesy:

Gregg G. Brown

Daniel B. Dermond

Respectfully submitted as:

THE LORD DERMOND

GREGG GLORY

THE LORDS OF WORD

The Damned

A spell of adoring April fell on him

Mazed with the dark freshness of the evening light

While the filling oak made its ghostly silhouette alone

Swooning with midnight above a starry ground

Of crocus buds, until, enlivened by the haunting moon,

His every trembling vein flushed bright the skin

And he lay in tumbling sleep, reddened by the night.

Tumultuous dreams that in his waking soul

Were long kept burdened by the disdain of day

Leapt like tigers at the approach of night

And sped to his dazed consciousness again,

Seeking their rapturous release.

Wild images and untamed thoughts first kept

The night with him, unveiling strangeness

In their fantastic change from mundaner memory,

Flashing matches into torrents of reigning fire

Or enduing the noon passage of a bird into the sun

To flame the bewildered horizon with phoenixes;

Interfusing chance with diviner substances

He found a realer fate in accidents

That happened to him. Then a kneeling girl

Appeared, with no rose penumbra or mystic light,

Touching his sleeping ear. He seemed to wake

And stretched half-lifted to her moving lips,

For even as he was stirred and stricken

By the dawning beauty her aspect imposed,

She lent his hearing wreckless unerring visions

She had, in some angel's hibernation, composed:

"Respire as spirits of former time--

Tempering justice in tranquillity, inventing

Themes for espousing night to improvise on

In angel's meditation of unabating soul; ignite!

Claim the perilous grace of divinest liberty!

Thy soul, in blood profound, imbues splendor

In afferent traceries of nurturent veins,

Enthralling thrown infinities here forever,

Where one scarlet touch inscribes eternities

Against a face chastely serene, now lit

With unrepentant love in spun regard

Evadeless ecstasies endow and bless."

She bent, pursuing some darker aching part

Of her enchanting story, and further still pursued

The unwinding of her vision in his streaming eyes

Until, her inwept paradise unburdened,

They kissed, exchanging subtle breaths.

He bent upwards against her, as when joy

Overtakes some dread state in exultation

Transmuting the possessed. And then, as swift

As lightning leaves the vacant sky to shake

Unlighted with sorrowing thunder, she fled

And left no footprint on the swelling seam

Of his vacant brain, astonished as the skies.

Nothing in the darkness answered the compelling cries

Torn from his mouth; his eyes in wretchedness shone.

He pored across the landscape, holding fast

To any fainting detail imagination might

Misconstrue as hers. He closed his eyes, and there!

Her voice pursued him into the unlidded dark,

Calm as the sovereign thoughts she chanted of.

Many hours he passed in awed silence thus,

Or perhaps half speaking as he heard,

Listening to the everliving lays of heaven

Kindle once again with a contented smile.

"The poet's lips, straining the unbelieving air,

Disclose a gasp, and, murmuring astonishment,

Speak what his own unlived dreams have given him."

Gregg G. Brown

HEROIC CREATION

Heroic creation beatifies the creator because of the creator's knowledge that, while his creation is eternal, he must die. (This is also why any eternal Creator's worlds are a botch.) And yet he creates eternal things—not out of the possibility that he might enjoy them (as a child might create and think)-- but to assert himself over the universe through effective ethical action AS A MAN. This also gives rise to the occasional, extreme love of the artificial, or man-made, in some decadents; they are smelling their way towards individual heroism. It also shows the individual's absolute superiority to circumstance, etc. It is in this way that the creator acknowledges, masters, and defines his situation.

But is the moral question being asked in this situation the correct one? Namely, that an individual—in order to exist, must assert his equality to, and then superiority over, the universe? And, How does making the assertion that a man is superior to the universe define a man? Why is this the necessary ethical situation? Is it merely the ethical situation? Is it the necessary situation because it is the defining situation, or vice versa?

The cry of definition or asserted awareness of individual self is the first necessary step to anything else because any action that follows will require either an actor to execute or an object to act upon; without the differentiation between universe and self created by the assertion of awareness nothing separate from (or within) the universe would exist in the first place. Lacking individuation, there is nothing to prove its moral equality, superiority, or failure either to the created individual or the silently witnessing universe—or anything else for that matter.

A man must act heroically—either creatively as defined above, or tragically as with Oedipus, Macbeth and company—in order to become more rightly aware of his ethical situation (and thereby exist more deeply and fully as an individual). A man acts to prove to himself that he is indeed the individual he asserts and claims himself to be. This act of 'proving' causes the individual to become increasingly conscious of his situation—and of beauty. Oedipus becomes fully conscious of his situation and THEN pokes out his eyes—voluntarily embracing his suffering. By the end of the Oedipus trilogy his awareness of beauty is also extreme and he 'enters heaven' as an equal—beatified totally.

Byron, Shelley and Prometheus (who is a man in the pagan god-like sense, and not a god in the alienating Christian sense) are masters of themselves because they have, like Zarathustra, collapsed into their humanity. This is nothing else than the situation that demands that they assert their individual equality to the universe; they are re-made, self-
created and defined as Ubermensch thus. Tie on the cape, pals!

Christ himself was an example of a man performing this same ethical oblation, but the liberating power of his story was taken away by the organized church which said that Christ died for the sins of all men. With that being the case, no more Christs were needed, or indeed, even allowed; this manifestation of self-redemption was unique. This type of foreknown and foredoomed embracing of heroic suffering would, in the rest of Western tradition, normally be termed 'tragic,' with Christ dying, not for our sins, but for his own glory: the cold and ineradicable proof of his existence as an individual, in time, in the world, for all time.

Christ was the model of an individual man, not an anonymous godhead.

Is this initial assertion an act of creation itself, or does it instead acknowledge a grace in the universe that can throw up into existence something not itself? Does it create or discover a new morally independent universe in each individual? The answer to this question is immaterial—since it is the conscious assertion of its existence that allows the individual to go on and take actions to prove this assertion true—first to its own consciousness and then—as a gift almost—to the rest of the world and to the universe itself. In the case of heroic creation, the process takes a step further and asserts its superiority over the universe, and then goes on to prove this even greater assertion true.

And it is this created object of the artist—and, in the supreme case of the poet, the poem—that must bear this stress and perdure ineradicable in the created consciousness of generations of individuals.

A poem is chiselled from the immovable rock of a purified imagination, and as such it is its nature to be original, i.e. to be what it is. And it is exactly this individuality embodied and made manifest that may prove the heroically creating individual's assertion of superiority over the universe true. In other words, there is no necessity that the universe can impose on the free individual, while, at the same time, the heroically creating individual can (and indeed must, to be heroically, individually creating) impose his volition on the blank eternity the universe presents.

The imagination needed to undertake such a projection of self, or out of one's self, is purified by the individual's volition to exist as an individual, and as such cannot take part in anything that is less than one-hundred percent itself, and is therefore, of that necessity, original. A poem cannot borrow the vital portions and unique breadth of another's soul, just as a man of virtue cannot hide from who he is, no matter how heroic or monstrous the envisioned shadow his imagination projects.

A lord of word takes no shortcuts to glory when it comes to his work. A poem can only respond to that which is an intrinsic part of each individual's soul, having nothing to do with the more casual styles or quirks that an age may impose or an individual assume. In the end, a poem, like a human being—which is to say an independent source of moral and imaginal excellence and self-existent force—must be true to its own form, bearing in its being a singular soul that indeed and in every way becomes a living spirit itself, spinning free in the rational space provided by the radiant vision its creator upholds.

An unborrowed conscience that consumes all it touches in blessed magnificence is the spiritual pulp necessary to contain, arrange, and create such words of unerring vision. This is the challenge forced upon every writer, and it is what makes him write in the desperate hope that a sufficient segment of humanity has not forgotten how to recognize the enduring, individual value in themselves. For if they have, they will never be able to truly appreciate a great poem, which, as an individual itself, demands the total response only a fully conscious individual can muster, or be able to rise in the capable sun of a new day to reach for all that such a self-awakening could bring.

Heroic Creation

From whatever I cannot spurn, I create

Tranquil visions to outlast deceiving fate.

Here in this dark estate of earth, the mask of man

Is unravelled from our spindled universal plan:

The face must move, be expressive, break,---

Not bound woven-up and mummified by

foretelling tongues

Until all wilts pre-decided under a compelling sun;

Children cannot play, the creator not create!

In Holy Illume

Visionary excess uprose in the stolen tides

Crystalline, perduring, vetted in the instant

Golden hymns pouring requisite challenge bled

Telling spoken thunders of obliterate night, discasing

Napalm essences confined respiring within.

Amontillado longing has layered in dote snow

This solitude's long cacodemon alone,

So long alone! coffined is the resplendent dare

Resolving dawn had etched heroic in infant light,

Holy illume robing hope's winking oval.

Singletree astra vent the penetrate sigh

In crescent exhilarations unbounding might

And overarch in reck disaster's devoutest crash,

Asymptote stars purloining their spirit's ash

To deadlight infinities lapsing black

Witholding the shocked taste of vestral tongues

Amending heaven in rapturous recurr.

Act again the vibrant chroma of a soul

Rendered restless vexillum in forever frission

Touching eternity as you touch a tear!

Availing tenderness, who propels the afferent aubaude

Sympathetic skies flicker dark to listen on

And dawn-starred morning's stir lessened to quiescence is

Chime of me what your lustrous substance says,

A reborn sounding out what nature offers hollow---

The bell-heart victory whipping blazing wings!

Consuming the specter revelation suspiring still

Hidden in sacred songs' reforming breath

Hand-made to dissipate at the spirit's reveille---

The spiring call trafficking miracle from will,

O oblate rose enfolding the casual fires

That I tender, scansorial scapegrace

Deigning imagination's dream of love to earth,

Floating bridal above the violet sacgreal flood

I, mimic bittern eclipsing space, become

A noble spirit beheld in the overflowing air

Time's soilent chanson never can erase.

Vibrato folly windlassed to a heart

Too old for aching, newborn in blisses!

Better raving death's whitened pestilence inhale

Fretted with the russet dew of morn, than be

Of all this molting richness reft.

Vitiate existence sheds its rude root

Commanding mink appellations of divinity

To squander undying on the breath of earth,

Scintillate acres condensed in the

Brightened loop of a man's brave saying---

Causeless caduceus fires risible ever

In the roadhouse roar of torrid exhalations.

Chase perron the persiflage ecstacy

From the bone fortitude billowing birth

Into the absent garden, willowy terrae,

Thronged among corolla weeps of lilies

And foxgloves cascadent as the waterfall

Where restful banks of slant rhododendrons shade

Hydra eyes of opium, corposant disperse,

Inherit coronas auroraed from the misted moon,

In cirrous lacramata uncurl each timid lid

Chastizing disaster in the espousing skin

While rosetted haloes about the argent body break

Roulade glories gospelling the spine until

Like sultry angels hastening paradise casts down

We burst cinquefoil in the cispidane kingdom

Rivering of ourselves the immaculate substance,

Grace-abiding in the tinct rove of memory.

Devouring gilt whitens in the rimed eye,

A devotional hauteur that cannot avoid

Sharpened joys siliquose breaths elude,

Immersing salt ninevahs-- rapt heavens

Blowing from our mouths! Sidereal child

Withy-spirited in the wristing beam

Withstand alive the thunderpeal's throatlatch

Remaining recherche in the light you weave.

Torch-lit liberty laughs in the willing flaunt

Of glistered death, sundering pulpit---

Elixive veins inventing the baptismal wells

Sunning solitude pulses glowpoint to look upon

As if tissued insistences of a gossamer world

Sinistral failed, twisting the penchant veil

That clouds our doings to pinched nothingness.

Pursue the fled ice steps of what

Has never left, inveterate stitch staith,

Lipping the vireo's cordial incantations,

Never stale, deep in intricate night's exult,

Upwelling the radiant lashes once again,

Stammel descantings rosined choicest coral

Never breaching the sacred tympan must, and be

What shadows of summer skies in hymned immensity

Half guess the golden purpose of the inspiring sun;

Become what the staring eagle cannot see

Although he stare revolving fires to the whitecomb sea

Or sphinxlike out-wait time's inseamed mystery.

Gregg G. Brown

BLANK GENERATION

PUNK ROCK, ETERNAL YOUTH, AND THE BACCHANALIA OF LIBERTY

Y'know its fascinating the difference between those who have...

There's those who make it and those who never make.

And y'know its fascinating because its really very clear

Either you've got it honey, or you ain't!

---The Rich Kids, Ghosts of Princes in Towers, circa 1978

Punk rock tore an ascending arc over the 1970s.

It is an arc that does not falter still, emblazoned in the permanent whirl that all imaginative exertions trace. Often mistakenly labeled nihilists, they instead codified an era of the individual more unerringly than any tribe of artists since the flaming Romantics. There had to be some reason, some real reason, why, in the cynical innocence of seventeen, when some anonymous hand put on the Stiff Little Finger's 'Gotta Getaway,' I was trapped, smiling into the darkness.

There was, in all this ecstatic and angry utterance, no damning naysaying of the nihilist, but rather an essential stripping down of all that could not become, or sustain, the single individual in his fierce pride and abject plight. And once all extraneous distraction of status or erroneous feeling is stripped out of a man, or fallen into the dust as with Lear on his bald heath or Richard Hell in the elemental landscape of Downtown, a man alone must extinguish or soar.

It is only the assertion of self among the destruction of all else that can allow or compel the individual to then ascend, alive for perhaps the first time in the ardent regale of the imagination, smiling into the darkness. This is always the inviolable work of the imagination, commanding of each man that he make real the moral infinity of his individual possibility—that he draw fire from the dross of his existence. As the lyricist says, "among our chances there's a chance we can choose."

So these ghosts, these princes in towers,

It seems to me they got it made:

Because they sulk, and destruct, for no reason!

Well maybe they ain't afraid!

When Shelley, in his Defense of poetry, talks about the "invisible effluence" sent out by the great perceptive individuals of antiquity reaching into contemporary minds and thus "sustaining the life of all," he is NOT taking the Platonic line about how some immensely distant 'Ideal Realm' is accessible because permanently unchanging in any epoch--- what he is talking about are self-created men asserting an ethical effulgency of unimaginable strength: the strength of an individual. Shelley is asserting the fact that the ethical efficacy of the individual, as literally embodied in poetry, cannot be negatively estimated. This is why punks were never nihilists, and never could be, alive in their asserted shiver of selfhood. No limit of the individual is assignable. Poetry and the individual are, in this sense, indivisible.

They're ghost of princes in towers,

They're the sharp ones, then and now.

And it's ONE: that we're one of them.

TWO: and it's true

that THREE: it's free and easy that

beFOUR too long, [they'll] come back to THIS!

Its as simple as the song: "before too long, come back to this:" Only those who truly live as men and exist as individuals can move in any direction at all, take any direct action, or have any effect on either history or themselves. The history a true individual makes, or creates out of the infinite moral imagination of his mind can never fade or fail to have it effect; we must, if sincerely asserted, "come back to THIS." Only when executed sincerely is the infallible returning to "THIS"—the ascendant assertion of the individual over the context of history and into the creation of it—a creation of the returning self as well. A man must with noble and self-loving divinity consecrate himself to this awesome task. To return to the sacred assertions of others without the supremely conscious intent to undertake the creation of oneself, is merely to read and not to do. This is the ethical nullity of the archivist, and not the victorious regale of the ascendant spirit.

The assertion that is necessary to make the undying return to the permanent words of an individual, and to truly touch those words and let them pinch yourself open, is itself an assertion that is in accord with the initial assertion that resulted in the creation of the selfhood of recording poet in the first place. This is reading with intent. The recording poets, or ascendant regalists alive only in the assertion of their imaginations over the universe, are the "sharp ones [who] got it made,"—which is to say, they built themselves; they are asserted individuals, created as individuals by grace of that assertion. How did they come to that grace and build themselves? "Well, maybe they ain't afraid."

Just a singing 'bout the ghosts of princes in towers

Said some boys, and how!

The princes in towers are ourselves, when, and if, created by the gilded assertion of selfhood. These princes are the self-created individuals of every clime and time talking to us in the permanent poetry of their consciousness recorded.

And it is the act of saying, and thus seeing, in the trim minute of the poem the "boys" speak—that makes them princes of themselves. To know and create oneself the first time is the model of all other returns to or re-experiencings of that act of creation. Any such ghostly visitation of the "past" (or recurring assertion of infinite self over the dim universe), costing not less than everything, the individual necessarily stripped to his skinny essence in order to even understand the creation he is witnessing and participating in, is itself a recognition of that divinest self the erring world perpetually masks and plunders.

The boys saying, or singing, about the princes in towers, is the HOW of the princes in towers as well; it partakes of their principle of self-creation. The doing, the saying, the singing, and the recognition that demands not less than everything, is itself the ethical act of creation: the observation, understanding and act of creation co-occurring in this single action all at once. It cannot be divvied up into heavens of elsewhere or dim dreams of afterdeath.

Everything must happen in the individual's undying instant of self-recognition. Time is the illusion that we cannot shake, and the one challenge that let's us take a chance on dying forever or truly existing as deathless individuals in the moment. Without time, which undercuts us all, all actions carry an equal value; each thing effortless and defunct, a wasted day at the beach immortalized in unpurchased acrylic—the picked shells arranged for easy remembrance.

Time is supreme over us in this way. In this way, as Richard Hell would say,

"Only time can write a song that's really really real.

The best a man can say is how it's played or did this feel

And he only knows as much as time to him reveals."

But once man is aware of time, beauty is made possible because a large part of "beauty" is a sense of perfection passing away. As Wallace Stevens defines it, beauty is "the fitful tracing of a portal," the immortal memory of unextinguishable glory alive again for an instant in the brain of an apprehending individual who knows that he must die, shattering his perfect apprehension of that still vital perfection.

Heroic suffering is beautiful because the sufferer, asserting himself over the universe, is beatified by this assertion. The hero then embraces the voluntary 'inevitability' of this new beauty's death heroically, in time. This final act of embracing volition serves as icing on the cake of asserted selfhood, proving, beyond doubt and out of time, the individual's case, or assertion, TRUE.

Johnny Rotten—and later John Lydon—made this same vital assertion twice under two names: an unrehearsed man knowing himself individual and capable against anything the world could throw at him. His burning theatre prayed for the audience to create themselves alive—one self-creation insisting on a myriad others. This would reveal the original creator's regale as real, so that he might then ascend and never dissipate. Any of Richard Hell's fabled performances are equal to this test. And to the degree that each performance was a creation of self, the audience's reaction could be dropped as an insignificant afterthought.

Punk music is beautiful because in it is encoded the actual ACT of individuals asserting themselves over the universe. The music was never it. As Sid said: "Who cares about the music?

I am always held in awe by the tortured furies of such modern ascendance.

A Temporal Exhalation

The unextinguished wave of a tameless strength

Trembles the unseen revelations that fall

Among our kindling eyes.

Voiceless shadows of this undying flame behold

The unknown envisioned, clasping ecstasy

From an illumined pursuance.

The living truths her laughing spirit held

Render death out of a blue veiled paradise

In the awakening wings of a dream:

To weep as we would flow, storming

The thin eclipse of the living, consumed!

Diffused by a sightless joy,

Enduring the pale breath of an unshared heart,

Desolation fled unto those immortal hollows

Of eternity's abode.

Daniel B. Dermond

Hymn

I

No power moves through the absent womb of world

Save the unchilding freedoms we exhume,

Rareeshow raptures or agonies of grace

Initialled nights glorying boyhood's chrysalid had shed,

Choosing or willing the infinities that we use.

Anything is possible on the prayered moment if

We can ourselves conform to our intensest wish.

II

Sudden glory, like a chastizing star, comes down

In visitation of a beauty so profound

It charms from the chorus mass of men and hearts

Slim glimmers of awakened individual; like a spark

Sighing half-alive, into weedy rushes blown

That shift disconsolate in brutish dreams beneath the swell

Of vaulting summer skies, hugely serene,

That wait in their million fires, half-alone,

For the solitary touch to shatter them, and fall.

III

When nature's blossoming bower hovers over--

Impelling love of kind and kind for kindred

Into the roving mind lost dew-dazzled in the grass

Where leaf soft leans on leaf while faded hours pass

Thoughtless in the light weaving blades tie rainbows of,

All confusions of the thousand rivers of thought we wove

Return to the solitary glory of their mountain cone above.

IV

Does the mutable rose regret the sorrow

That seeded its mystery forth,

When some previous forethought 'tomorrow'

Spoken by argent dreams into the midnight ear did late

Blind its parents to their unhappy state?

What momentary interplay of unquitting faith

Can ever give to us the tenth we pledge to it?

Unbeholden, proud, irreducible and true: ourselves.

Out of ecstasy engendered can never come hate.

V

But death is no soft pursuer, and crimson without relent

Stalks the lambent arteries of the brain

Shifting an unlifted sword of terrifying flame,

Crowned with the antlered ratoon barbs of blood.

To survive past his infliction would vitiate our hour

Or fold what we are into what will be, or should.

We are winning princes of ever-nascent hue

Until dread and expectation dethrone our power.

VI

The individual and his hissing spit of flame

Remain an inviolable fire, never shamed

By that which rises outlandish from the crux

Of this safe diminishment and purgatorial flux

Of knowing and unknowing we purblind endure,

Then clamor to regain, aping ignorance's blessing word,

Crying out upon the rock: I do not know, not what, not why!

VII

Beauty dissipates like the morning star, moving on

To an unknown noon we never can remake;

O artisan of ecstasies, defy

With inmost grace my tembril heart's white-speaking argosy

That foretells disasters in a triumph never crowned,

Or weak in the dividing chine of sable fields

Thinks eyes that see her dying will never see her healed.

VIII

Beauty brushes up the brigand love in me,

Feels severe heavens burn

Banished in a blink of pain;

O summer dove, gone too often, so lightly afraid

Of my intruding face, thrust too high again...!

What should sustain this troubled ecstasy I feel

Vanished breathless into those misty rocks

Swept with ominous shadows malformed by thought,

Chambering a dark feeling I cannot bear to see?

IX

All life is a snaky finger pulling out a braid!

Still I feel the opposite

Crowd into my aching thought

Until every true light in darkness takes some part,

And a looming mood is descending to obscure

The innocent auguries of ever-sought, that risp

The haloed meadow in a world gone sour, eclipsing

Each dew-weighted blossom with some soft blot.

Gregg G. Brown

REASON AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CREDENT REGALE

Reason- The identification and integration of the material provided by one's senses, to be used as the guiding rule of life and the purified fount of our rational actions and most sacred gestures.

Reason has meaningful action in a man to the extent that it takes action upon those things that are permanent in him.

Reason ferries from the senses the penetrating information which we cannot question and holds that information rightly before the mind so that the mind can then, without distortion, find in these blocks of world that have entered us banners to blazon forth ourselves. The act of creative identity (allusion being its lowest form) is a property of the mind proper—This is the heroic creative essence of a man, undimmed by time, but endowed by grace to give expression of itself in this dying realm.

It has been widely held that those partaking in any ascendant regale discard personal experience in search of broader themes, i.e subordinating the individual to some amalgam of vague understandings. This is a flawed and dismissive understanding that surprisingly garners serious consideration to this day. The Romantics, when acting as spokesmen of the ascendent regale, held the individual among the highest of stars; only matter dealing with the highest and lowest emotions was absorbed by Romantics. These things have troubled and encouraged man and been at the center of artistic endeavor since day 1, i.e an attempt to give meaning to a human's life on this planet and to understand the emotions that are universally understood to provide that meaning.

'The chain of linked thought,' unbroken by the ages—and of which the Romantics form a participating link—is, as Shelley understood, the understanding shared as human beings that lends permanent value to poetry and life.

This chain of linked thought is composed of the expressions that individuals have given of their individual existences. Such expressions, called beautiful, have permanence imposed upon them by the creative faculty of the individual as shaped and expressed in the world by reason. This permanence is enduring and proven true whenever another individual brushes across the other's production and grasps the smack of essence in it. This is the chain, an understanding embodied and then 'shared' or re-experienced by subsequent individuals. The links are embodied expressions of self themselves, the radiant nodes of dutiful beauty. We have no cold will capable of affecting the outflux of such expressions—they are a rare touching of world, ferrying reason, and creative self. We have only and first the power to wilfully recognize the individual essences that we bear burningly within us, and then to powerfully say: I am, and will be! Or, as I would submit, to recognize this pre-existing condition.

A man's most noble and glorious purpose and ultimate goal is to seek and secure his own happiness. The will of human conception is an undying commitment to what the mind perceives. Intuition is greatly explored in Regalist works; however, the unwavering commitment to what the mind perceives to be true is at the forefront. A poet of the highest order trusts his senses before any claim of 'automatic knowledge'.

True Ascendants recognize no god who is separate from their own faculty, rather they embody God in each line of radiant verse. Any limit placed upon this freedom is evil, a devil exacting obedience from the unencumbered mind. We reject a god of qualified charm in favor of an embrasure of divinity and idealism. Does God exist? Ascendent Regalists know no more of this than any given handful of mystics sticking around their own dark caves of delusion. God may absolutely exist! Some varieties of the Christian religion states that God is alive inside of each one of us. Exactly! Define your terms and reveal a god unto the soul of each man, every soul its own savoir, revelling in the moment.

Reason as it applies to the artistic endeavour of the Regalist poet is as air for a lung. Reason is the unique faculty of the human mind that perceives that material provided by the senses and through a process of integration gives meaning to that material. A Lord of Word has a heightened capacity in this regard, since he perceives more and from that can derive more essential truths from that raw imagery. Reason as the guide of all rational human action is even more essentially awakened in the mind and voice of the divinely exalted poet.

Perfection. The thinning glimpses of a light so uniquely purified in the opalescent lens of a beheld tendency, a grace so obliquely denied to all—except to the Lords of Word who revive this tendency in each undying breath of a renewed grace. The true Regalist of this modern age perceives and recreates experience as it might and ought to be—the essence of Romanticism—rather than waste time mired in the mundane superfluities of this imperfect spectre. This indicates a perfection of spirit, a symmetrical angel unbound in a revelation of truth so indomitable—so spiritually exact that not to realize and revel in its discovery is an abnegation of your humanity to a degree without limit; and yet this blindness is, and remains, artistically, the moral code of our day.

What purpose does Reason fulfil for the self-activated, self-achieving and self-asserted individual?

Reason is the noble faculty because it carries into action all that makes of a man himself. Without this fiction, or function, we would be no better than wraiths crying aloud to unlistening airs.

This leads us instantly to the mental state—and eventual reality of those states of being or surpassing moods of Hope and Expectation.

Hope and expectation. First realized through a life of triumph and fully realized by a triumph of life, living through a pure imagination and unresigned will. This is the triumph over tragedy, a purely human thing and the highest expression in art of man's purpose.

Expectation in terms of the poetic vision's relationship to life and death can acquire the character of a faith. This is so because true poetic vision apprehends a conflux of reality that endures beyond ourselves. And this assurance is prophetic that what we undertake today with our truest selves itself partakes of that which will be true tomorrow. A permanent creative act embodying beauty which will still speak to any individual at any time in any future. It is the proclaimed existence of individuality—and that individuality's victory over the decaying universe in the time of life that guarantees that this is so. And if death is all that intervenes, how can it be different in any future?

Hope and Expectation are necessary constituents of any moral stance to be adopted by an individual who recognizes himself as such. To know oneself an individual capable of glories equal to all the visible feast we feed on, and not have such hopes of oneself that would make skies blush would be a matter of intimate, and nearly infinite, self-
degradation. Indeed, one would not demand such uninhibited victories of oneself, but rather expect their ready accomplishment. All such accomplishment being moral, and having the quality of an individual's enhancing stance towards the world, and not, as in the magical thoughts of childhood, to think that one can make objects move by doting on them, or other such magician's images ridiculously, mundanely, embodied. That is a caricature of the Ascendant Regalist position, not its living aspect. Of course, this hope and expectation of oneself moves by an instant sympathy to all other humans--- who have but to claim this individuality themselves to become self-fulfilling harbingers of the same hopes and equally great and human expectations. The vast self-devaluation of those in the world can easily become a consuming contrast for any vivified individual. In Byron, the perception of such contrast led him to imagine the world as a desert with no objects great enough within it on which to express his individual moral force. Indeed, there is tragedy in it. But it is not material to the individual's self-revelation. Language, however, is always equal to any individual's expended effort because it, like reason—though superior to it—partakes BOTH of individual consciousness and uncolored reality.

The effort to establish a credent regale here on this earth, in this life (was there ever any other heaven?) is crucially facilitated by the right use of reason.

Reason is that faculty that helps to maintain the sovereignty of the creative, individual essence in a man. It feeds the source with outer realities and carries back to the world images of itself colored by the sovereign rarity of man's central sun. This is the radiance that we feel in unblasted moments, mystical to the unapprehending, personal and real to all who feel it. It is, in the scope of this essay, the frank talk of one individual to another. As the sun brings forth every lifeform of the earth out of itself for its yellow eye to witness, as in a perfecting, infective and creative mirror, so in the same way does the individual release unbounded fragments of itself into the world with fertile grace: In this way he has immortal, infinite, individual moral effect. Scraps of this violent wind that shakes our souls, we name 'the beautiful.'

Reason keeps and maintains the connection between the creative self and the world, letting our moral center have its actual impact in the world. It is through reason that we live, in the moment and this world, not another; and it is the right use of reason that saves this existence from being nothing but vanity.

Penitent Skies

Penitent skies fall to her uplifted face

Spurning vermillion reels of obsequy

Still night had enchanted with simpering shades

Born to fawn at whatever her coral soul imposed.

Naked girl of insistences

Dismiss this churn of universe

With a backpaddle of that turnless hand

Spun starlight spins to expire upon!

Dawn's jade twirl cannot climb to kiss

The disastrous greens of her envisioned eyes;

Wrapped with a bandage of incendiary tongue,

I cannot unbraid this claiming fire within me

That spikes these whipping words.

To Tenderest Purity

O' sweetest girl of a laughter returning,

Entrance me in your tides of gold.

I no longer sleep, but ride radiantly

In the basks of your eternal glow;

The chancing ember of thy tenderest eye

Splashes riving valiance unto my soul,

My heart swelling within all this magnitude.

The lucent omen of our invisible respire

Descends upon each unseen dream, awaiting

Its birth upon this solitary scheme

As cool airs crowd in renewed immensities

Deigning majesty to every spirit's trespass

And spinning existences of inceptive winds

Like some itinerant beating of angel's breath.

Daniel B. Dermond

REALIZED DESIRE AND THE INFINITE BOUNDED

Ascendant Regalists make the hugest statements imaginable utilizing the infinite elysium of the mind.

This is part of the expected hugeness of any Romantic, Regalist, or Ascendant statement: that individuals will eternally exist, or come to know themselves as existing, and that this existence will be permanent and universe-annihilating in any time past, present, or to come. It first descries and than cries out about the infinite moral value of its own individuality self-discovered and asserted. It then trusts, and, rationally, through the senses, with art and sensual cunning, stunningly demonstrates and states that this individuality can affect the universe and subvert to some extent the time that rules it, BY ITS OWN CREATION. For the asserted perception to be valid, this must be so, since any morality perceived or created only has its value to the extent that it tells us correctly How To Act.

These creations, once apprehended, provide the blossom and the proof of the present argument. For the individual they provide the substance of his self-salvation and context of his existence in this world. They embody his personal moral force and tell him how to live!

Out of the living context spawned by the making of these "hugest statements," several realizations consistently recur. These realizations are some of the necessary markers of individual consciousness. Milestones of being arriving to oneself out of the mind's undifferentiated fog:

When a man has his distractions stripped from him, how much more clearly stands before him the grace of his individual wish!

To realize or expand in the moment as much as the soul intends is both the obvious and only goal of any extant consciousness.

The situation of the individual reveals man as absolute lord and disciple of his own divinity--- a master of an unnamed fate. Art is a process involved in this revelation, good art is a process that assumes its glorious incarnations through what may be termed a sculpture of soul.

Through the wished incarnations of an art of realized desire, a man may step into his self-
created existence as an ineradicable entirety--- his moral force intact and his imagination brilliantly in place: his immortal mind will have come to some perfect expression in this world--- in a victorious moment that can NOT, strictly speaking, be imagined, but must be lived before it can be conceived. An infinite individual manifestation of a man's moral force embodied in the bounded world of time. A miracle? No—it is the Ascendant's expected vivification and experience of life. And it is by reason that this credent regale is erected.

This is how a man, defying time, becomes at once both ghost and prince.

The immortal mind and the infinite bounded—these oxymorons point to the ethical essence of the new Ascendant spirit this essay unfolds in an enduring simpleness.

Plato, Kant, and the dry philosophers of mind have always solved the dilemma of these statements' readily apparent truth by dividing the world into the visible and invisible, or perfected, or spiritual, realms. Instead, the individual asserts moral unity, AS AN INDIVIDUAL, allowing us to see and feel the singleness of every impulse and creation and expression this life drives into us and sparks from us.

The true and utter independence of this spirit must out!

It cannot be contained, even by imagining a heaven of infinite perfection "elsewhere" for it to wear itself out in. This is one of those dull scabbards Shelley spoke of when he wrote that "Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

Zen's no-heaven and the bhuddists' "the defeat of desire is the imagination of desire's ultimate expression and purpose" is another haggard scabbard as well. Any comfort or distraction these thesises provide must disappear the minute a man wakes up to himself in asserted, conscious, blessed and perfected independent life.

Poetry, more than any other art, confirms this magisterial joy and commission of honor, and damns the pernicious waste of every other form of swaying evasion because it is conscious, directed, and articulate. It comes from a specific, asserted consciousness and MUST enter another to have its effect. Nothing less than a total response is required of the reader—or co-creator of the imagination's means and meanings.

A theory of 'misreading' or misprision in circulation in these late decades misses the point entirely—claiming that each goofed up reading of a poem creates a second poem, etc. Instead, each correct reading of a poem creates a second INDIVIDUAL!!!! Not one inside the reader, but the reader himself, dragged into his divinity for the first time. A poem DEMANDS that it be read with exact clarity before it can even exist--- because it is one with consciousness. It is the indelible jello of this life's sussurations.

NOTE: "the infinite bounded": it must be bounded and bonded by the length, love, and example of a single individual's life. There is no "infinite" or "perfected" realm as Plato proposes. In this specific, limited sense, the poetic ideal is 'bounded' and made 'real' instead of being invested with a dead spiritualism. And yet, the individual is infinite in a very real sense since, when weighed in the balance, the universe itself cannot lessen or desecrate him by gross comparison. But what sort of infinity are we talking about? We are talking about what a man does in life, and therefore we are talking about ethics, and morality, and society to the extent that individuals touch, colliding their highest of worlds in harmonious union.

I Marysa

Her untouched vision hurls a dangerous fire,

with eyes so ethereal in jade contemplation,

as an illumined essence that burns eternal

or a newborn star in its purest insistence.

She invents her own light in a tenderest wile

kissing trecherous splendors and rapturous sway

from the coraled roses of an envisioning sky

in the most blessed form of her untamed sight.

And spins so sweetly in heaven's cool breath

like a radiant angel with shining beguiles,

uplifting my heart from the ashes of dismay

with the unseen hands of her consuming blaze.

II The Winter Princess

The undying fires of a perfected opalescence

Conspire the temptress embers in her sacral view

That enrapture my soul beyond all swept intensities

Like a liquified spirit consuming all she embraces,

With the emulous fingers of an enflaming torch

That skimmer in caresses of beseeming discourse,

Recalling heavenly essences in her angelic trace.

Eyes aswirl in their starry majesties, that turn

The blinking exiles within her everlit hue,

She beholds a resolute compose; flaunting etern

With a skin of primmest pearl, the blessing pinks

That summon my glass heart to awake and unfold

Without pain, awaiting within a purified tear

As I die in the pulse of her inscriptive veins.

III Ariel in Excelsus

Render the promised ephemeral sapphires

Your unconquerable soliloquies inscribe,

Daring synced infinities upon my lone heart.

Take the newborn lips of this invisible sea

And invent spiral bloods' elemental ecstasy,

Inspiring light uplifted from scarlet fires

And scripting momentary eternities that shift

In cool translations of our coral heavens,

To remember my own perilous divinities.

And you, radiant spirit of dauntless repose!

O' ebullient child of never ending days,

Consume our sculpted tide; linger golden soul

Asleep in vagrant vigours of ignited glories.

Lend grace to all these unabating reveries

Spooling causeless rose to our blushing resumes,

The ornamental roundings of choiring respire,

Quiescent bolts blessed in alluvial majesties

Striking the spindrift paradise that moors

Our lawless hearts among the untamed lily.

A beheld presence enthralled in azured aspiring

Trembles in the glow of your miraculous temerities,

Revealing an ennobled tear from the lit virtue

Of your fair jewels with purest spiritual rains.

To nurture so sweetly all my afferent rosaries

In the angels of your contemplative breath,

With rosen overtures of unreclaimed grace

That ascend beyond a star's rising exigence

To invisible revelations conspired of time,

You imbue sublime splendor in my undying

Eye, with a love supremely cherished, until...

Daniel B. Dermond

BEAUTY IS THE ONLY MORAL COMPASS

A dancing pageant, or any instance of the beautiful, assumes its 'intellectual beauty' on the basis of its divinity in real experience. The perfection of such a perception artistically embodied is an intellectual achievement of the highest order. A poet of the highest order is an evolving individualist with an imagination of heightened perspectives. Chance, death and human misfortune are considered the ruled pawns of a reflective spirit and self revealing in an imaginal bound.

Once the individual and the independent spirit, as defined in this essay, are held up as a real ideal, a manifest perfection touchable by every man willing to create himself in the assertion of that self's existence, anarchy becomes an easy necessity, as does atheism. In this state, what is to be the moral or social compass for man?

The apprehension of beauty.

Every poet who has ever lived and generated genius has done so in a sober, well-lived life. His evils are as dust in the balance. The degenerate king or unprincipled despot has locked into the manifestations of sin ( and the network of the social contract) far more irreparably than any independent layabout.

Men of individual genius who have apprehended their moral case and it inherent freedoms arrange their brief lives automatically around the apprehension of beauty, since that is the highest and best use of all that is highest and best in man. And what makes these individuals the highest and best?

Their apprehension and forceful claiming of themselves as individuals in a universe of nulls.

All this talk of self-claiming, asserted creation and Will gets taken by the Hitler idiots as will over others—the mass—instead as will over oneself; it is a mastering of the inertia of birth, at least to the point of self-creation. After that, all other activity gains its moral credence as activity even from that initial willful apprehension.

As soon as a man understands and/or asserts his value and existence as an individual, he naturally addresses himself to eternity, since death instantly sets itself up as the last block the unthinking universe can throw up before him to interfere with his individual's perpetual, unique and value-creation-oriented existence. Then what does all the spastic and hectoring specter of death become but another inducement to beauty and all the highest and best productions and reminiscences of those imperishable moments of ecstatic consciousness?

It was said of Shelley that: "By calling the heart to an ideal, and by bringing about what Shelley describes as 'transforming enlargements of the imagination,' poets become 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'"

This ideal, towards which we are constantly either called or corralled, is constantly—and I think incorrectly—labelled the same Ideal that Plato preached: a separate and untouchable heaven of ideal forms. I would like to draw a distinct difference between any such realm and the Ideal that a poet must hold in his heart to have an effect on his life that would allow him to undertake any meaningful 'transforming enlargements of the imagination.' Shelley's own experience of this Ideal realm, as described in his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, itself argues against this realm being described as 'untouchable.'

The completeness of the visitation enacted upon the speaker of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty argues against this beauty's remoteness, or its existence as a mere 'shadow vision' and not palpable reality. The ideal that the heart is called to in the poem, and in all poets and, I think, every individual, is the complete acknowledgement and apprehension of the individual's freedom, this immediate and life-altering experience of ethical liberation being anything but remote, but is instead intimate in the extreme—as is the style of experience described by Shelley in his poem.

Plato's Ideal Realm may only be considered as irreparably separate these days because of the complete imaginal hegemony of Kant—who split the world into mind and body, or spirit and form, and whose philosophy demands that they never touch. Plato's metaphors, however, may quite possibly not have been understood by the Greeks or Shelley as quite so untouchable, but rather as taking on more of the sort of meanings and sense this essay undertakes.

Shelley's 'transforming enlargements of the imagination' may be understood too as those inter-changing and inter-charging leaps of the individual's asserted sense of self and the moral beauty which draws that self into the universe by its claims. The transformations can then be understood as part of the ongoing life-process of heroic creation, constantly calling on the imagination to claim its invented universe. This claiming and inventing then taking on the organizing characteristics of legislative order as the ideas of Beauty, Individual, and Created System become more and more indistinguishable—the beatification of those saints indwelling in ourselves.

The apprehension of beauty becomes the moral compass of the individual because that is the only way that heroic creation can take place; the only way that bits of soggy reality can be organized into permanent representations of the absolute consciousness that races in us as the universe races in god's mind. It is a principle of organization that supercedes as it precedes any conception of 'the good.' It includes the Good as a fire must include fuel, to refine for use to produce the brightest flames.

Heroic creation gives man the chance to 'flirt with death,' and still claim, 'but I don't care about it' with an undying cry. To the degree that this deep apprehension of beauty guides and decides an individual's behavior it is the ethical force of the universe. Shelley saw Milton's excellence and moral suasiveness in the energy imparted to Satan in Paradise Lost. This excellence is apperceived exactly to the extent that that energy and excellence are given to Satan to make the poem more beautiful and fill the brilliant individual's defeat with defiance.

Morality is the flower of beauty in the world.

What else might avail in man's pinching circumstance where false heavens and the distraction of death have been deleted of their abstract and compelling characteristics?

Beauty draws each man to it to the extent that its vitality increases each observer's liveliness. It sweetens without sickening and ever gives pleasure to the purest portions of an individual, which it helps to awaken for the purpose of having that pleasure more greatly enjoyed and received. There is no model for this concept in history or life other than the innate idea of unending and increasing pleasure and beauty called by the godless LOVE. The greatest harmony and order reaches so far into the individual that it eventually demands that the individual create harmony, order and beauty out of himself, so that this interpenetration may have completeness and demonstrate the reality of original creation.

Beauty demands of the individual only himself, never subservience or bland acquiescence.

When a man is excited to the point of genius, he is the most himself and the most universal in terms of vital individuality. Because only the most asserted individuality can create beauty, and because the most beautiful is what is created and partakes of the intimate eternity of the individual, the two quickly consummate an inseparability in the history of genius. How could anything of a lesser source give true pleasure to the free individual? Beauty can begin the siren call at any and every level of perceptible pleasure, and if followed will eventually demand the abolition of God, predetermination, hate, and all that debilitates the creative faculty in the individual.

When an individual claims himself and his freedoms, poets become the acknowledged legislators of the world because poetry is the only way free consciousnesses can communicate, via the eternity of beauty heroic creation produces—individual to individual.

Therefore, beauty is the only moral compass for the individual because it is the only outside agent that can actually reach his independent center and demand that that center respond. It is, perhaps, the only real object in the universe for the individual to respond to, act upon, etc. In a world of beautiful objects, every action becomes a demonstration of Love, every commitment a simple entirety as deep as ourselves.

Ethics is all about what a man does in this life, and what he should do: if beauty is the only object sufficiently real and individual for a man to act upon, then it is obviously intimately tied up with all ethical action.

Beauty is the moral compass of the individual because it is the agent, result, and object of all individual activity.

Renegade Pearl

The renegade pearl of her conscience unconsumed

Writhes repentless in the purl of shifting fires;

I taste her infant breath-- like asphodels

Enduring rain, scenting perduring nothing risible rose!

Her hesitant spirit wakes the finitudes we crave,

Suspect eyes reinventing the evening's spent char,

Giving night the one, acetylene touch

While she trembles alone in her vintage heaven of wait.

The light in her chaste fingers undoing rue

From all this blessing conspire lift the sacral hue;

Spilling love unbelievable from her telltale eye,

They caress the everliving in eternal charge.

To Her Asleep

All sleeping nature in morpheant calm

From your darling breath takes contagion

And teaches the sacred ache looming in your smile,--

Infinite fragment of all divine principle,--

To rhododendrons balled against unsifted snow

And, abrupt pupil, injects january's fricatives

With august's unadulterated ululations.

You demand the encrypting eye espouse

Arrant whims of celluloid fire--

Prised from the uncomprehending tilt

Of all these elemental longings I pursue,

Arced within our finer breast. Or did.

How in the torn winds resuscitate

This abandoned grace?

Her spirit lifts a spiral fire

Whose vivid wish may once consent to touch

Enduing mists with acerose light.

Still is it her-- in this trenchant whirl gone blue,

Alive in this misprision that you chase,

Spinning virulent coils grasping

After this abiding prayer?

Night Storm

The storm's unushered, prophetic dark,

And livid wind welled violet between

Scarlet uncertain oaks, blueveined in flashes,---

Upended elements pried from the purpose

Dull day proposes, these elements

Rhapsodize to obey your compelling grace

As I, who move unshielded among them,

Am spun to molten love by the owned harmonious noise

Sending white tendrils into stone gated ears

Until melodious waves crest and besieging enter

To touch a magenta core, unsealed:

So touched, so tortured.

Gregg G. Brown

BEAT GENERATION

THE DEATH OF THE BEATS AND THE AESTHETIC OF THE VILE

The age of the beat poet has reached its unacknowledged terminus.

No single human emotion or phase of thought is of strong enough composition or duration to serve as the prismatic foundation of any really revolutionary artistic movement or expression.

And yet, this is what, in essence, the beats have proposed to accomplish, spreading their insinuous notions through forty years of generations so that even the untempered vitalities of the youngest in society can see no cohesive form of self-purchase or individual expression outside the dead forms imposed by their grandfather's rebellion. And this rebellion was instantly, as with almost every effort to eschew the wide vagaries of the lawless heart in man, converted into what amounted to a monastic cult, complete with anal exercises, the eating of dirt, and the subjugation of the flesh's revelations and mind's pure emanations to an iron rule, an aesthetic of the vile, taking the place of Loyola's indignities.

There is little left to save from among its languid utterances; little that is not void of man's sense of being alive in the world, and joying or despairing in the face of that.

Among its best phrases and contortions there is always the appeal for outside help, a despairing wish to have some immortal judgement imposed to save themselves from thought or feeling. Or occasionally, and equally despairing, there is expressed a wish for God.

Even the most famous of their lines carry this limitation:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection...

All saints are most at home among the rats and fleas; the mental wards are full of divine personalities.

It is as if the fit, the fever, the contagion of this despair had gone into the home of every prosperous nullity of our society and settled on his children. Raised in a masterless house, they tried to find some system of thought that, nullities themselves, would save them and damn their parents.

But, guilty themselves of the sin of judgement, what they hobbled together took themselves apart.

An entire, sickened generation occupying their precious time shaking off the 'dust of this world'! In their bland spiritual hunger, they are driven to taste of discredited religion. For shame! A generation of preachers selling ghettoized (as they always are, obscure at the start, squalid to the end) lives of the saints—too often themselves!

Of course, this eventually led to the airless rapture of disincarnation, and the philosophical stance of a no-self void-embrace mentality. The sinuous East had captured their too tranquil souls. All of this activity holding our fascination only to the extent—and in the same way—that each man's damnation is different. From my pieeyed perspective, they seem a silly five decades of lotus-eaters.

Beat poetry. An appropriate title. Although poetry of this order is not entirely without anything to redeem it, the guiding reason or prime mover of its creations is corrupt in its inception. Because beat poetry seeks to debase its own artform with a religious aesthetic of vulgarity and emptiness to the exclusion of all other sensible objects, any delicate or different emotions that have ever made human beings feel like living spirits with value and purpose is thrown out in favor of a cowtow to absent divinity; indeed it is necessarily excluded in favor of some 'personal approach,' that, because of its very narrowness, can never truly speak to the soul of man, the visionary individual triumphant and self-
redeemed.

Clothed in the gilded will of the artist they endeavor, from whatever the psychological—possibly schizophrenic—source (and all of their energy is of no deeper or greater source than that), to destroy the purity of those actions undertaken by a ritual perceiving and embodied by the reason in the world as almost faultless totems of the individual.

Symptomatic of these destroyers is their sainted adherence to the aesthetic of the vile. Drugged revelations of the needle or the knife constitute their entire range of experience. No music swoons the temporal ear to increase the dose of their vitality.

Most Americans find their escape towards poetry in the regimen of a chosen or imposed religion, their sacred texts a bizarre outpouring of the human heart. The beats, concentrating on a single color, or 'effect' able to be extracted from human experience and put into poetry, have constricted the bandwidth of the individual spirit, emaciating through rigorous doctrine even the supple body of the texts they turn to. This has happened in many instances throughout human history, and the result is always an impoverished aesthetic, the construction of a few rotting temples in the hills (or rank tenements in San Francisco), the tortured religious impulse of a degraded youth desecrated to the rote of idle worship.

A more essential, or Essentialist, doctrine must leave no faction of our experience untouched. There must be no quartering of humanity for an increased 'effect,' or bent to the purpose of making some obscure, cultist 'point' in argument. At the same time, neither are order and beauty to be deleted from the ecstatic sum of what we are, but the hierarchy revealed, if any, is to be one discovered, not imposed.

CODA

1993. We have been largely engulfed over the latter portion of this century by the will to be modern at the expense of everything that gives art value, i.e real meaning. I have been the unfortunate witness to the worst kind of adulation heaped upon the sour, rotting corpses who hide behind their wrinkled beards spouting some foul diatribe about their miserable lives in a pernicious attempt to escape reality. Such critical fallacy has removed us from true dramatic elevation and thus an elevation of the senses. There is a deliberate avoidance of the a soul's primary intransigence and a mature recognition of human limitation.

A Mortality Enclosed

Desperate exigencies of sifted light

Straight radiant depart a wilted soul

Not wrapped by the felony touch of dust

But uplifted in scourged golds infolding her

As blood scarves defend a weeping head from death.

So much is hefted out of this sepulchral singing

My blindfish heart rives in satiate dwells

To swig until christened or drunk enough

To swell my thin monody to her coral repose,

Flecking lucent spectrums of heaven's lacewing weeping.

Shirred angel, unsplint this shinplaster self

Outfaced by your blue radiant weeps, and

Take this shunt offering that limes the raving grave!

Charivari mourners cluster the lorn wake;

I melt to a shive, retouched. Too often retouched.

Gregg G. Brown

HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY

It seems, in my experience, that there's the perception among the masses that the Ascendent hero (and the Regalist essence of art) is often dissolved of its reality by supernatural osmosis, that the protagonist is not fully realized since he does not suffer and destruct from his own despair. This gravest transmission of perversity was the introduction that I received to the unaging muse of the Ascendant Regale. A point always eluding these smiling grime runners is that the true hero, whatever the suffering he may endure, uses his pain to elevate himself and his world above and beyond that suffering, perhaps viewing his life's wreckage from a heightened vantage, the images he sees most clearly burning more deeply in a consciousness of purest form. The Romantics knew these tenderest of attentions granted to the most elemental shadows of an indelible grace could be codified by tongue, note or brush into angelic glimpses, supremely entering our temples of solitude by the perfected wing of holy return. I must endeavor, always, to receive such a sweet communion at the altars of this infinite entirety.

This destruction and suffering which invites the protagonist to re-imagine his experience is an example of an individual whose truth is discovered by means of a creative expression of this individuality under severely straightened circumstances.

Tragedy finds its self-definition in the heroic endurance and embrace/acceptance of a "fate" halfhidden from the protagonist. This is an example of the greatness of the individual as measured against the entire universe. It is a type of glory play bursting radiantly from the unrivalled depths of the Greek imagination's respect for the human mind.

The protagonist's fashion of facing his exquisitely unraveled and eventually revealed "fate" demonstrates the moral equality of the two halves of the proving equation: man = universe.

This is a demonstration both excellent and powerful, in its way. But what of the victory? Why not have the individual change history and fate, triumphing finally in a radiant spate of expelled imagination?

This would be another sort of proof that the individual, self-asserted and self-revealing, is equal to all that impinges upon him, the universe and time, all things past and present combined. Once again: man = universe, in terms both infinite and moral.

What different qualities, other than the uncircumscribed striving of the protagonist, are called into existence by the vital notion of a Victory? There is called into necessary existence, it seems to me, not heroic suffering fatally embraced, but heroic imagination. To change history requires that the universe be reimagined. As in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, self-definition is derived from the hugeness of the imaginative leap heroically undertaken by the protagonist. It is related to the notion of a paradigm switch in the history of science where entire fields of knowledge and understanding are suddenly revealed to us to exist in an entirely new and credible relation, replacing previous assumptions.

In the Victory, this process would include a radical touching of the infinite in ourselves (through the act of asserted self-awareness of individuality) and then impacting the world with it. The well-known 'butterfly effect' in weather forecasting is one demonstration that the individual is indeed capable of such hugenesses. The butterfly effect also relies on an inherent chaos or freedom in things themselves that allows the individual to have a sort of 'cascading' effect on reality. One act influences another act, which influences another act....

Heroic endurance, acceptance of 'fated' role, and depth of volition conjured in all tragedy gives us plenty of examples of the ethical necessity for the initial existence of the individual in and AGAINST history. The necessity of this asserted individual existence makes it possible for the individual in a tragedy to change history—to alter his 'fate' and master his impinging circumstances. Without this ability, power, and freedom to choose on the part of the protagonist, his eventual embrace of suffering would be meaningless—a forced and foredoomed choice. In a victory, the emphasis of the individual's situation changes from: Can man change history (in other words, can he sufficiently demonstrate his potential for individual existence) to: A man MUST change history.

By the end of a tragedy, the hero has successfully engineered a way to have imagination invest his own existence with value and self-understanding. Usually he is standing at death's deep gate: this is tragedy's hectoring victory. The imagination is revealed as real and powerful, defining and saving an asserted individual under tragic circumstance, in the spite of all. Shakespeare's King Lear only begins to discover and value himself after every passing tidbit of life's superfluities have been tossed away—at first neglectfully (his kingdom to his daughters) but then and increasingly and with increased consciousness and conscientiousness (giving his clothes to the raging howl of the storm).

And it is at this stage that Lear discovers that he is A MAN and invents and saves himself. Circumstances have, in rare configuration, combined to convince him to allow Imagination's victorious invasion. It is now that he can again kill and eat, and sing about going to prison. He is, as captain, king or prince, freest and first in the undominated landscape of his imagination.

A man alone must either extinguish or soar.

I think that man does change history all the time. The trick of it is to become conscious of this impact/creativity—proving one's volition and individuality thus: to give meaning to Byron's cry: "Shelley, I WILL do SOMEthing."

That was a man intimately conscious of his potential, ethical situation, and effect. Oedipus suffers, Byron and Shelley create and change history. Dadaists "do anything" and have their impact, because they have involved man's blessed volition as did the Greeks et al, proving the ethical equation (man = universe) true and vital still.

But Shelley and Byron were the masters. When they 'did anything,' they did what was highest and best. They were the most themselves and the most of themselves, the most human, the most man-like, and greatest. Taking their superiority over the universe for granted, they created a second one out of themselves almost out-of-hand, unavoidably.

"Beauty is truth, and truth beauty," because beauty comes of a man's recognition of this conscious nexus—time itself adding a necessary, proving and ephemeral poignancy to the eternities we play with, the bright universes that WE shelve or unjar.

Today: The situation remains unchanged.

NOTE: Memory gives time reality to man, birthing beauty's possibility. It is almost sufficient to retreat into that alternate eternity of the past, which has total meaning and is capable of absolute, fixed and resolved beatification.

The Immortal Words

Lillied winds of our adorning blisses

The darling flame of its visionary seed,

In man's blinded eyes or fruitless trees

Or among congeries of the blessed realm

As midnight grieved for her dying blaze,

Owed to the sensation of unerring creed,

The ornamental motions of a light unseen.

So sweet, the wiles of this angelic sky,

Nobly serene in our wicked spring eyes,

A spirit beheld in a violet will shining

As heaven's girl skated eternal respire,

Hymning intricately in nightingale airs

Astride the intangible tongues of thunder,

The voice overflowing a temple's divining,

Silent, bare, reborn of a vision immortal.

Untouched by tranquility in newborn mood,

The braided beatings of my heart untamed,

Pour my lorn wishes to this ecstatic light,

Radiant vision starred in green contemplate

Dared hoping, asunder in unresolved nights.

Glistening, the mind revives the daylight

As wreathes of blessing forms interfused

A purest soul, raised in celestial flight!

Sleeping mother of her most glorious rose,

Extinguishes woe from the unborrowed soul,

A yearning sublime to a vision of whence,

Blest in immensity for rapturous moments-

Through tears and vale and lingering sleep

The hastened rains of her heart had burst;

It has remained, without change nor regret

From the returning vitals of passionate seas,

Life dawning in a holiest raiment of thirst

And golden airs ringing in uncurled ecstasies.

The beauty and fortitude of a sight renewed,

Is touched by this tenderest spirit, revealing

Itself in her gentlest exhalations of truth,

Like those incantations of stars, when light

Remembers feeling, in illumine here forever.

The specter of eternity, her invisible hands

Upon a torrid shore, boundless in coral reform,

Why renew, why linger to sustain my old heart?

Our dreams were relived before, from all things

Espoused upon azure skies, returning once more

In a fire whose smile kindles the infinite soul

Or benedictions which the eclipsing world sees,

Consuming the undying last breath of mortality.

Daniel B. Dermond

Apollo Belvedere

1

Is this hand stopped that commanded heavens: weep!

Does this angel's foot unstirred know love

For its enclosing stony bower, whose imagined flight it keeps

Locked in laurel and bay wrapped upwards to thighs that moved---

In gracing imitation lending what life keeps?

Past still stars in a rose bolt of thought they wove

Restless imaginings

Has this youth resigned the reigning fury of its powers

That thoughtless as the cheating dream of sleep

Reveals in repose the still undissipated glory of its hour?

Does this temporal air unquiet lives possess

And ache to burn through, trace its faded pageant yet?

2

This arcite find, in a world too plain for hating,

This disturbless gem among coruscate wrecks of majesty

That replenishes what autumn lessened with waiting

Give back, O lambent statue,--- what we gave and give:

Compeerless love that inhabits the spirit willing, exhaling

Noble chansons imputed by baser breath, and live!

Nothing of that beauty in which you dwell, disdaining

The choking sneers of drugged humanity, as light

Disdains mud, through purer air illuminating

What is best and nearest Heaven as the mind finds right

Interfusing loveliness with the manic grace of birth

Forever arriving, to resurrected senses' uplifted might

Blow the salt foam links of enduring hope and worth,

Drowning continents of dread, enchaining the earth!

3

Become in waking what in slumbered stony limbs

Lies composed and stolen: vigilant, universal, true!

Let again the visionary eye white steeps climb

Arching and overarching brightnesses to unknown blues

That signal a universe at rest; O it sleeps

To be quickened by whatever comes to quicken you!

My eyes in darkened contemplation close, or half-close,

Against the mellow dying sun's half-extinguished ray.

Those arms before me and that undimming eye turn liquid

in the hush---

All I see's a vision, the eye that shifts in hallucinated misery

From its embalming grove, the countenance disentangled

from its lush

Confinement; the lips that speak in light the imagined joy

May speak again, and now, as on humankind's first day. I see

A death reversed, the spirit kindled that was ash, burning free!

4

O high and savage, wild spirit impel my voice

Through this dross of world and rank habitation,

Completing the impulse that visits without choice

The divining mind of man, a crystal exhalation

Pursuing all through the gross swamp of loss, and worse,

Until the ages-inhibited palace in a word is built,

a consummation.

Let not the invading dignity of God in awe

Or foisting ministries of superstition linger

To drop a pall on the inceptive brightness we would show:

The individual in his tensile case is cause and stir of this---

Of all the bellowing activity of world and whirl below,

A principle aloft on the rapt pinions of his flight,

the disdaining gaze forgetting each abyss.

Never was the world into sonorous darkness cast, but yet

A heralding dew did canvas its midnight branches in a net.

5

O pilot dawn that from chanting darkness vaults

Your clear tight line of song and light

Find a treble brightness in these words I choose and vaunt!

Oceans cold and amber-black thin to skies of light

And every denser, troubled atmosphere's dispersed,

Changed into tolled notes of this brave saying's might!

Banished is the night, where frigid terror sweats its blasts

Into the mind's receiving dark, dispelled

The bitten hand, the frighted eye, the breath that draws

its last:

All in one groan to courageous laughter fall.

O light, o song, o life compelling swift and fast

This torrent of my soul, in joy consume it all!

Transform by my seed of light this globing black

To cones of prophecy and victory that give life back!

Gregg G. Brown

Done in the knowledge that that which is best can never fail.

Gregg G. Brown

Daniel B. Dermond

THE LORDS OF WORD