Credent Regalists make the hugest statements imaginable utilizing the infinite elysium of the mind.
This is part of the expected hugeness of any Regalist statement: that individuals eternally exist, or will come to know themselves as existing, and that this self-percieved 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 THE ACT OF 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 the ultimate 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 that arrive at the defining self out of experiences 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 each man as absolute lord and disciple of his own divinitythe 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 the soul.
Through the wished incarnations of an art of realized desire, an individual may step into his self-created existence as an ineradicable entiretyhis moral force intact and his imagination brilliantly in place: his immortal mind will have come to some perfect expression in this worldin a victorious moment that can NOT, strictly speaking, be imagined, but must be lived before it can be conceived. An infinite individual manifestation of that individuals moral force embodied in the bounded world of time. A miracle? Noit is the Credent Regales reasonable and expected vivification and experience of life. And it is by reason that this credent regale is erected.
This is how an individual man, defying time, becomes at once both ghost and prince.
The immortal mind and the infinite boundedthese oxymorons point to the ethical essence of the new Regalist spirit this essay unfolds in enduring simpleness.
The motive for metaphorthe desire to be Other, to be other than, to be elsewhere, is included in an individuals hope, and in the heros capable expectations he has of himself. All that Plato and Kant were doing with their abstractions was rescuing metaphor for rational contemplation. With these philosophers there was a permanent elsewhere to which we could never, by definition, ever have access; for Plato it was the realm of Ideal Forms, for Kant, it was reality itself, the so-called noumena. As long as these realms existed, possibility existed, and imagined, metaphoric indentifications remained possible; all tables might indeed be Table. The sympathetic metaphor of compassion in Sanskrits tat tvam tasi (thou art that) is one moral expression, or use, of metaphor. Plato and Kant reserved hidden, or inaccessible, realms where these metaphoric identifications could still take place. Religion retained its heaven.
The importance and impact of properly operating metaphor should never be underestimated. Fundamentalism is the death of every religion. A metaphor is desire encoded, not codified. Fundamentalism codifies the metaphors of various religions and thereby kills the very faith it claims to be the fiercest proponent of. What was a living fountain becomes a frozen cageencasing and killing an alienated individuality. When prisons are used for punishment instead of rehabilitation, it tolls the death-knell of a societys imagination. Society no longer has faith in the individuals ability to re-imagine himself as a productive member of that societyCharlie Manson wins his argument when he abjured personal responsibility for his actions and claimed that you [society] made me.
Instead of this failure and death, the Credent Regal demands that every self-consciously self-asserting individual retain and express their ability to be an other selfa self self-imagined. The heavens of the Credent Regale are the possibilities of ones future self, and the necessity of its moral manifestation in time. Such a self must die in order to have its final definition. Without death, there is no grace in life. This intense focus on individual selves and independent imaginations and histories lends a poignancy to our missions that an external heaven, or reclusive realm of Ideal Forms, or and inaccessible noumena, could never give. To live this newly created self, this manifested metaphor, is an act of realized desire that brings our heaven home.
Plato, Kant, and the dry philosophers of mind have always solved the dilemma of the readily apparent truth of the immortal mind and the infinite bounded by dividing the world into 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.
Zens no-heaven and the bhuddists the defeat of desire is the imagination of desires 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 readeror co-creator of the imaginations means and meanings.
A theory of misreading or misprision in circulation in these late decades misses the point entirelyclaiming 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 lifes susurrations.
NOTE: the infinite bounded : it must be bounded and bonded by the length, love, and example of a single individuals 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.
From the collection "Ghosts and Princes"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.