In my experience it seems that there is a perception among the masses that the creative hero (and the Credent Regalist essence of art) is often has its reality dissolved by some supernatural osmosis into the vacant aether. They argue that the protagonist is not fully realized since he does not suffer and destruct from his own despair. This is a grave perversion of how Regalist art actually operates. Yet, it was via this negative image of beauty and hope, through this despairing critique, that I was first introduced to the unaging muse of the Credent Regale. The true hero, whatever suffering he endures, uses his pain to elevate himself and his imagined world above and beyond that suffering, perhaps viewing his lifes wreckage from a heightened vantage, seeing the images of his wreckage with an aesthetic sharpness that burns more clearly and more cleanly into his revivified consciousness as pure form. The Romantics knew that the tender attentions the consciousness feels, granted by these elemental shadows of pure form, could be codified by tongue, note or brush into angelic glimpses that supremely enter our temples of solitude on the perfected wings of holy return. I must endeavor, always, to receive such sweet communion at the altars of this infinite entirety.
The modern despairing critique of the Credent regale was most often expressed as an imitation, or failed, tragedy. The modern tragedy had the individual suffer and self-destruct from his own despairhelpless in a hopeless circumstance. Imagination, if it was called on at all, was called on to magnify the impossibility of salvationthe necessity of self-extinguishment became all. The modern tragedy misunderstood the whole point of ancient tragedyor remained willfully ignorant of its graces. In ancient tragedy the suffering and destruction of the protagonist invites him to re-imagine his experience in a way that rescues meaning and dignity from the tragic deconstruction of his character. Tragedy is an example of an individual whose self-truth is discovered by means of a creative self-expression of his individuality under severly straightened circumstances. In ancient tragedy, the individual found a way, through suffering and self-destruction and despair, to embrace his fate without suffering the additional loss of his individuality, often at the cost of his very lifedead but individual in a hopeless circumstance.
Tragedy finds its self-definition in the heroic endurance and embrace/acceptance of a fate halfhidden from the protagonist. This frail victory of the individual despite death displays the greatness of that individual as measured against the entire killing universe. Tragedy is, in this way, essentially a type of glory play bursting radiantly from the unrivalled depths of the Greek imaginations respect for the human mind.
The protagonists personal 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 demonstration is both excellent and powerful, in its way. But still, it is a tragedywhat of the victory? Why not have the individual change history and fate, triumphing finally in a radiant spate of expelled imagination?
A victory 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 creating a Victory? There is called into necessary existence, it seems to me, not heroic suffering fatally embraced, but heroic imagination joyfully triumphant. To change history requires that the universe be reimagined. As in Shelleys Prometheus Unbound, self-definition is derived from the hugeness of the imaginative leap heroically undertaken by the protagonist. This seems 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 as existing 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 protagonists willful act of asserted self-awareness of individuality) and then impacting the world with that moral inner-infinity. The well-known butterfly effect in weather forecasting is one demonstration that the individual is indeed capable of such hugenesses. The fictional possibility has a basis in realitys own flexibilityits capacity to change and be re-arranged. The butterfly effect 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, the self-acceptance of ones fated role, and the depth of volition conjured in all tragedy give us plenty of examples of the ethical necessity for the initial existence of the individual within and AGAINST history. Individual imagination and self-consciousness remain unimpaired despite the rotten circumstancesthe circumstances themselves often cast by the Greeks as semi-conscious operatives such as Nemesis. Consciousnes is a quality pervasive in the universe itself then and not simply a human intrusion. The necessity of individual existence to assert itself, however, makes it possible for the individual in a tragedy to change historyto alter his fate and master his impinging circumstances. Without this ability, this power, and this freedom to choose on the part of the protagonist, his eventual embracing of his own suffering would be meaninglessa forced and foredoomed choice. In a victory, the emphasis on the individuals situation changes from: Can one man retain his imaginative capability to change history despite his circumstances (in other words, can he sufficiently demonstrate his potential for individual existence) to: Every 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 deaths deep gate: this is tragedys hectoring victory. The imagination is revealed as real and powerful, defining and saving an asserted individual under tragic circumstances, in spite of all. Shakespeares King Lear only begins to discover and value himself after every passing tidbit of lifes superfluities has been tossed awayat first neglectfully (his kingdom to his daughters) but then and increasingly and with increased consciousness and conscientiousness (eventually giving even his very clothes to the raging howling storm).
It is then, naked and alone by choice as much as by chance, that Lear discovers that he is an individual MAN and invents and saves himself. Circumstances have, in rare configuration, combined to convince him to allow Imaginations victorious invasion. I exist! The I of I exist is infinitely real and my own. My I is imaginatively and morally capable, despite the roaring storm. 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 own 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/creativitythus proving ones volition and individuality: to give meaning to Byrons cry: Shelley, I WILL do SOMEthing. Byron was an individual intimately conscious of his potential, his ethical situation, and his capacity to have a meaningful effect. Oedipus suffers and saves his individuality, Byron and Shelley create and change history out of their individuality. Dadaists do anything and still have their impact, because they have self-consciously involved mans 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. This continual, effortless self-creation would be the Victorys area of aesthetic exploration. This exploration would be done not in some solipsistic wish-fulfillment dream-world, but in an active, sympathetic involvement of all with all resembling something more like Love. The Victory is an image of the Credent Regale made manifest. As Lautremont has said, Poetry, if it is to be made AT ALL, must be made BY all. The Victory would show such poetry in its evolving state of lively co-creation. Individual worlds would be interactively shared and would impact on each other with a vital growingnessall the richness of Shakespeares pageant AND all of the singularity of a Richard the Third. It is a matter of each characters vital self-assertion of individuality in circumstances where all of the other characters are also self-consciously themselves. And, since everyone has this impact on everyone else all of the time anyway, it is really just a matter of each character becoming self-aware of this impact. Each bit player must elevate himself to a playwright in a world without pre-determined limits. And, as for realism, wouldnt this be the truest picture of our lives in time anyhow?
Time itself, without the assistance of any other agency, may lend poignancy and tragedy enough to all of our imaginative self-assertions, even in the Victory. Memory gives time reality to man, birthing beautys 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. But, of course, as aesthetically perfect as the past is capable of being re-made in one mans mind, it is only the ACT of sharing that past in the present and the future that can share that vision of things with the world at large and thus express and prove that individuals vision to be aesthetically and morally true. There is no selfhood without acts of self.
Beauty is truth, and truth beauty, because beauty comes as a result of a mans recognition of this conscious nexustime 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.
Done in the knowledge that that which is best can never fail.
Gregg G. Brown
Daniel B. Dermond
THE LORDS OF WORD
From the collection "Ghosts and Princes"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.