Reason is that which identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses. This process results in the guiding rules of a rational life; this ideational integration of the senses and meaning provides a purified fount for both our rational actions in the world and our most sacred gestures about the world.
Reason ferries information from the senses (which is not accessible to unmediated questioning) and holds that information rightly before the mind that 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 man, undimmed by time, and endowed with the grace to express itself in this dying realm. Reason finds meaningful action in man to the extent that it takes action upon that which is permanent in him.
It has been widely held that those partaking in any Credent Regale discard personal experience in search of broader themes. This subordination of the individual to some amalgam of vague understandings or half-understood abstract ideals can never truly be expressive of individuality. This is a flawed and dismissive understanding that, surprisingly, garners serious consideration to this day. The Romantics, when acting as spokesmen of the Credent Regale, exalted the idea of the individual as one of the highest of stars; only matters dealing with the highest and lowest emotions were utilized by the Romantics. Such emotions have troubled and encouraged man and been at the center of artistic endeavor since day one. It is nothing less than the attempt to give meaning to a humans life on this planet and to understand the emotions that are universally acknowledged as providing that meaning.
The chain of linked thought, unbroken through the agesand of which the Romantics form a participating linkis, as Shelley knew, 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 which shapes and transfers these expressions into the world through reason. The proof of this permanence manifests whenever another individual brushes across the individuals expression and grasps the essence of 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. More than reason alone is responsible for the outflux of such expressionsthey are a rare touching of all three aspects of our total reality: outer world, ferrying reason, and inner creative self. All creativity, all self-consciousness, and all communicable human experience come down to this self-defining power we have to willfully 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.
Mans most noble and glorious purpose, his ultimate goal, is to seek and secure his own happiness. The will of human imaginative conception expresses an undying commitment to what the mind perceives. Intuition, leaps and guesses, are greatly explored in Regalist works. It is, however, the unwavering commitment to what the mind perceives to be true that is at the forefront of Regalist concern. A poet of the highest order trusts his senses before any claims of supernatural inspiration or automatic knowledge.
True Credent Regalists recognize no god who is said to exist separate from their own faculties, rather they embody God in each line of radiant verse, and in each sacred gesture of their self-consciously lived lives. Any limit placed upon this individual freedom to experience and express anythingeven Godis evil, a devil exacting a minimizing obedience from the unencumbered mind. We reject a god of qualified charms and instead embrace our own divinity and idealism. Does God exist? Credent Regalists dont know any more about 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 state that God is alive inside of each one of us. Bon Dieu! Exactly! Define your terms and reveal a god unto the soul of each man, every soul its own savoir, reveling in the moment of its conscious apprehension and self-conscious expression.
Reason as it applies to the artistic endeavor of the Regalist poet is as vitally necessary as air is for the proper operation of the lungs. Reason is the unique faculty of the human mind that perceives the 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 allexcept 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 bewhich is the essence of Romanticismrather than wasting time mired in the mundane, non-participatory superfluities of this imperfect spectre. Simply accepting experiences as they come to you denies your part in those experiences, or at least does not self-consciously apprehend your part in them. The human will and imagination are ever-active, and are never the slave of what some would try to pass off as mere fact. To consciously participate, with the imagination, in reasons integration of facts into meaning indicates a perfection of spirit, a symmetrical angel unbound in a revelation of truth so indomitableso 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 fulfill for the self-activated, self-achieving and self-asserted individual?
Reason is the noble faculty that carries into action all that makes an individual himself. Without this fiction, or function, we would be no more than wraiths crying aloud to the unlistening air.
This leads us instantly to the mental stateand to the eventual reality of the states of being or surpassing moods of Hope and Expectation. Hope and expectation. First consciously recognized through a life of triumph and then fully realized by a triumph of life, the act of living through a pure imagination and unresigned will. This is the individuals triumph over tragedy, a purely human thing that is the highest expression in art of mans ultimate purpose.
Expectation, in terms of the poetic visions relationship to life and death, can acquire the character of a faith. This is so because true poetic vision apprehends a confluence of realities that endures beyond ourselves. The assurance that such a vision gives takes on a prophetic character in the foreknowledge that that which we undertake today with our truest selves itself partakes of that which will still be true tomorrow. Such permanent creative acts embody a beauty which will still speak to any individual at any time in any future. Such acts proclaim the existence of individualityand of that individualitys victory over the decaying universeall within the scope of a single lifetime; the fulfillment of such a prophesy requires no agent outside of an individual lifes experiences. And if death is all that intervenes, how can such a victory be different in any individuals future?
Hope and Expectation are necessary constituents of any moral stance to be adopted by an individual who recognizes himself as an individual. To know oneself as an individual capable of glories equal to all the visible feast we feed on, and to then not have such hopes and expectations 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.
Any such victory and all such accomplishment is essentially moral in its character. It embodies a directed meaning that includes self-consciousness, rather than a simple meaning which can never be more than a mere fact of consciousness. Such a victory has the quality of an individuals enhancing stance toward the world. This does not mean that the victorious Credent Regalist thinks that his imaginative apprehension of the world can magically control that world, as when a child thinks that he can magically move an object just by wishing it would move. That is a caricature of the Credent Regalist position, not its living aspect.
The hopes and expectations one has for oneself move by an instantaneous sympathy to all other humanswhat is true for me can be true for all. These others have only to claim this individuality for themselves to become self-fulfilling harbingers of the same hopes and equally great and human expectations. But so many spit the manna from their mouths. This vast self-devaluation of others in the world can easily become a consuming contrast for any vivified individual. With Byron, the perception of such a contrast led him to imagine the world was a desert with no objects great enough in it on which to express his individual moral force. Indeed, there is tragedy in such circumstances. But it is not material to the individuals self-revelation. Language, however, is always equal to any individuals expended effort because it, like reasonthough superior to itlanguage 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 mans central sunhis self-consciousness. This is the radiance that we feel in unblasted moments, deemed mystical by the unapprehending, but recognized as personal and real by 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 himself into the world with fertile grace: In this way he has an immortal, infinite, individual moral effect. Scraps of this violent wind that shakes our souls we name the beautiful.
Reason keeps the connection between the creative self and the world alive, letting our moral center have its actual impact in the world. It is through reason that we live, in the moment and in this world, not in another; and it is the right use of reason that saves this existence from being nothing but vanity.
From the collection "Ghosts and Princes"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.