Embracing the Decline, part 5

Under Every Grief and Pine

Somewhat ominously, since last week's post, protests have erupted in Liverpool after a video was circulated apparently showing a 15-year old girl being approached and propositioned by a 25-year old man, allegedly a migrant being housed at the Suites Hotel in Knowsley. A 19-year old man has been charged with violent disorder and assault. A police van was torched, although an eyewitness claimed it was parked and then abandoned as an act of deliberate provocation.

I could try to disentangle some of the threads that weave through this particular story, but I feel it would be a waste of time. Over the pond, in Ohio, USA, a freight train crash has already been dubbed as the worst environmental disaster in American history, while the mainstream media are distracting the public by saying “look! Look at the balloon!”

Suffice to say, I believe all of this is a foreshadowing of the kind of discordance we are likely to see much more of us as we proceed through the 21^st century. Doubtless, there are psy-ops and false-flags left, right, and centre; agent provocateurs and opportunists and miscreants on all sides. None of that will make the situation any less confusing, dangerous, or unpleasant; quite the contrary.

When I look at my country, I'm not filled with optimism. We're on the way down, no question about it; we've been so god-damned long, that it looks like up to us, to paraphrase Admiral Morrison's son. The psychological fall-out from the revelation that a large section of the British Establishment seemed to be complicit in enabling two of the world's most notorious child-traffickers to victimise hundreds of young people still hasn't fully been felt, while the uproar about vast networks of grooming-gangs has barely even started. One of the aforementioned child-traffickers (Jimmy Savile) was given extensive access to hospitals by the National Health Service; that same NHS has just injected the majority of the population with a cocktail of experimental poisons that could end up seriously compromising the health and fertility of all those conned into getting them. The timbers are rotting and frail, and the spores from the mould are dangerous to breathe; I don't know if there will be a country called “Britain” outside of history books in fifty years' time, let alone one hundred.

Was Oswald Spengler right in saying that “optimism is a form of cowardice”? I have to admit that sort of aphorism gives me a bit of a gleeful kick, cheerful curmudgeon that I am. Nonetheless, it may not be necessary to go quite that far. As our own William Blake, one of the last true Bards of Albion, wrote:

Joy & Woe are woven fine

A Clothing for the soul divine

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine

This stanza is quoted by a character in my great-grandfather JB Priestley's play Time and the Conways, which deals with the immense collective trauma caused by the Great War. Although relatively few people are alive today to remember, the War shattered Western culture in a way that is difficult for those who grew up in its aftermath to really understand. Priestley described the summer of 1913 as the last flowering of a world that was destroyed the following year. Many writers, Spengler included, saw it as being the beginning of the end for the West. Future historians will probably agree with them.

As such, Priestley was very much given to melancholy. For some reason – perhaps because one of his most popular novels was entitled The Good Companions – he had a reputation as a rather light, jolly writer, and while I'm told that in person he was a great laugh, I can't understand how he got this reputation, as his often-sombre disposition is powerfully expressed in his writing. As he grew older, and as his friendship with Carl Jung deepened, he began to lose hope in political solutions, and his focus as a writer became more internal, psychological, and, ultimately, spiritual. One of his most remarkable pieces of writing comes from the autobiographical Rain Upon Godshill, in which he describes a dream in which:

...I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon the myriads of birds flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds.

But now, in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and the time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek and then, in a flash, bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort?

As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us at all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy.

But now the gear was changed again, and time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But, along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of beings.

Amidst the crimson churning of history, the unquenchable flame of life burns on for ever more.

Be well.