15 March 2024

Peace will surely come

A letter to Palestine from Faina Savenkova, the children’s author in the Donbass. I have no comment of my own to add; it suffices to let her speak for herself:
Hello, Palestine!

My name is Faina. All my short life I have lived in war. I know what a blockade is. I know what it’s like to be under fire. I know how it is when people are dying not far away, but you hold on with all your might because your whole family needs water. I know what it is to realize that old people and children have been and are being killed by weapons supplied by the West, and you can do nothing. Every day, like you, we bury our fathers and mothers and children. They destroy, like you, hospitals, and temples just because we want to be free and happy. I know what war is. I know what it is to lose friends, but I ask you to hold on and not to despair. We will cope with everything, no matter how hard it is.

In Donetsk and Lugansk there is the Alley of Angels. There is a memorial there dedicated to the children who were killed by Ukraine. I can say with bitterness that Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria have their own Alley of Angels who died under destroyed mosques and churches. Because the world is unjust and cruel, and the enemy is merciless. But I have hope that Donbass, Syria, and Palestine will be free and children will stop dying from shells. And the souls of the victims of these wars will look down on us from heaven, protecting our fragile lives. That’s what will happen. That’s what I believe. I do not know what will happen tomorrow to each of us, for we all live in war, but peace will surely come.

With love to you,
your friend Faina Savenkova

22 February 2024

Of Guatemala and Gaza


This past Tuesday, after two and a half years of construction and labour of those monastics and faithful under the guidance of Archimandrite Evangelos Patá, a seminary and mission centre opened in the Huehuetenango District of Guatemala, reports Pravoslavie.Ru. The Orthodox community in Guatemala is one of the explosive success stories of twenty-first century Orthodox mission work, particularly after 2010 when 500,000 Guatemalans—mostly indigenous Maya people—converted en masse. A steady stream of converts into the Orthodox Church has continued since then.

This new seminary and mission centre will ‘serve the spiritual, educational and administrative needs of the faithful’, who are As Fr John Chakos puts it on his blog: ‘The palpable joy that filled this day reflected the vibrant Christian faith of the long suffering Mayan people who endured much throughout their tragic history, but never lost hope.’


How true this is. The ‘tragic history’ of the Guatemalan Mayan people is one which can be attributed directly to American imperialism and the legacy of colonialism. During this time, the Guatemalan military and government forces, trained by the School of the Americas and funded by the American government, used ‘scorched earth’ tactics against the Indigenous people of the country: including death squads, ‘disappearances’, strafing from helicopters, internment camps, forced starvation, torture and sexual violence. Leftists, labour leaders and union organisers were also subjected to this targetted violence from the state. Canadian folk-rock musician Bruce Cockburn, after visiting Guatemala during this time, wrote the song ‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’ specifically about this situation.

The flocking of Indigenous Maya Guatemalans to the Orthodox Church in the present day, may be considered one of the fruits, primarily, of the career of Archimandrite Andrés Girón, a cleric who took up the cause of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, specifically during this time of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1980s. For his efforts, Archimandrite Giron was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church on account of his pro-Indigenous stand, and he fled to Mexico after several assassination attempts on him by the right-wing government, after which he joined the Orthodox Church and continued his advocacy work. Although he was an agrarian-minded Christian and not a Marxist, he gained the moniker ‘Father Revolutionary’ from both his supporters and his opponents, particularly when he began supporting progressive land reforms which would benefit the Indigenous peoples. He even began political action against the US-backed military government, at the head of the left-wing, anti-capitalist Asociación Nacional Campesina Pro-Tierra, and direct action by occupying and farming land collectively for the benefit of the people living there.


Archimandrite Andrés Girón

Even though his electoral campaigns did not win him much support in terms of government reform, the Indigenous Mayans quickly gravitated to his social ideals, not to mention his religious convictions. At a time when the Catholic Church was divided between a reactionary hierarchy and a liberation-theological parish priesthood (and the hierarchy winning out more often than not); and when Evangelical Protestantism was marching in lockstep with state violence and American-style capitalism and white supremacy; Orthodox Christianity began to look all the more attractive. When Fr Andrés Girón joined the Orthodox Church in 2010, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Mayans came with him. Stop me if any of this starts to sound familiar.

I beat this drum a lot. I have remarked before, and repeatedly, that the Indigenous peoples of Asia and America are a valuable witness within Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy at its best does not see Indigenous traditions and languages as things to be assimilated from the outside or suppressed from above. It values these traditions and languages in themselves, and transfigures them from the inside.


Orthodox womens’ monastery in Kyltovo, Komi Republic, Russia

For example: Orthodox Bibles, prayer books, patericons and religious texts have been published in Indigenous languages such as Sakha, Nenets, Evenki, Chukchi, Khanty, Skolt Sámi, Komi, Veps, Aleut and Tlingit and Yup’ik. Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, Saint Herman the Wonderworker of Alaska and, later, Saint Tikhon of Moscow defended Indigenous rights against oppression and exploitation first by Russian and later by American pecuniary interests and colonisation. (One can see from these examples that the witness of Fr Andrés Girón was not without precedent!) But Indigenous people themselves have contributed to Orthodoxy in profound and ineluctable ways. Saint Peter the Aleut, Saint Jacob Netsvetov, Saint Olga of Alaska... these Indigenous saints have deeply and without question enriched the experience of American Orthodoxy. And the former two of these saints did so, while Indigenous people in the Americas were undergoing one of the worst genocides of human history.

Now, let us turn our attention, for the sake of comparison, to another Indigenous people. The people of the country of Palestine are descended, indisputably from a scientific and genetic point of view, from the ancient Levantines. Modern Palestinians are genetically closest to the Bronze Age inhabitants of Canaan, with unbroken ancestral roots in the Levant going back nearly 4000 years. (We ethnic Ashkenazim simply cannot claim the same thing: over forty percent of our autosomal ancestral DNA originates in Western Europe--France and Germany.) What appears clear now, is that this Indigenous population of the ancient Holy Land has undergone numerous cultural and religious and linguistic shifts through the millennia. So although Palestinians are culturally Arabic, and the majority are Muslims, their presence in the place where they are long predates the Arab conquests and the rise of Islâm!


Church of St Porphyrios, Gaza, Palestine

Indeed, Palestinians were among the first Christians. Gaza was a Christian city. The Church of Saint Porphyrios, which was bombarded by the Israel Occupation Forces two weeks into their current war, dates back over sixteen hundred years. Gaza was home to Christian saints such as Bishop Saint Porphyrios himself, Abba Dorotheos, Saint Vitalios and Saint Silvanos, to name but a few. Before Palestine was Muslim, Palestinians followed Jesus Christ. And before Palestinians followed Christ, Palestinians were without question among the people who worshipped the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, at the Second Temple.

Despite the prevarication and mealy-mouthed excuses that issue from on high in Washington and New York, there can be very little doubt now that what is going on right now as we speak, in the home territory of this very oldest of Christian Churches, is a genocide of the Palestinian people, at the hands of another US-backed far-right parafascist government: complete with scorched-earth tactics, death squads, weaponised starvation, torture, sexual violence. In short, the Palestinians now are suffering everything that the Indigenous Guatemalans faced from the military dictatorship of that country in the 80s and 90s. And the American government backs the Israeli fascists to the hilt.


Archbishop Alexios of Gaza

But if there is another Indigenous genocide occurring right now in Gaza, there is also another Fr Andrés Girón, in the saintly Archbishop Alexios of Gaza. Archbishop Alexios has courageously declared that he will not abandon his flock there even if he is the last Christian standing in Gaza. And he has dedicated his work to giving food and clean water and shelter to any who have come to need it, even as they are being denied these by the military. And he has rededicated himself to praying for the dead, the dead without number: and many of these dead are Christians.

The Indigenous Christians of the Holy Land need our solidarity, and they need it now more than ever. But, just as Efraín Ríos Montt has gone down to Sheol, while the relatives of people he ordered to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands are flocking to the Church to be joined to Christ, so too will Netanyahu and his hateful right-wing butcher-regime and his death squads go down to the pit, while the names of the innocents who died at Saint Porphyrios shall be sung by the heavenly choirs without end. Of this I am sure. And if God wills it, may He let Gaza again breathe, be free and be green, as Guatemala may now (to a certain extent) do.

14 February 2024

The dragon and the bear

First of all, (sort of) belated blessings for Spring Festival this year, and a Happy Year of the Dragon! It’s the middle of Golden Week, so I’m still in the window!

恭喜发财!幸福安康!万事如意!身体健康!龙马精神,财运亨通!

According to the Yijing, the relevant hexagram seal for this year is qian 谦, or ‘modesty’, composed of an upper trigram kun 坤 (the receptive, field) and a lower trigram gen 艮 (keeping still, mountain).

The judgement associated with this seal is as follows:
MODESTY creates success.
The superior man carries things through.
And the associated image for his seal is that of a subterranean mountain.
Within the earth, a mountain:
The image of MODESTY.
Thus the superior man reduces that which is too much,
And augments that which is too little.
He weighs things and makes them equal.
This image in fact reminds me of something that Fr Thomas Hopko of blessed memory once wrote on the subject. Modesty (that is to say, humility) is not a matter of self-abasement in his view:
Humility does not mean degradation or remorse. It does not mean effecting some sort of demeaning external behaviour. It does not mean considering oneself the most vile and loathsome of creatures. Christ Himself was humble and He did not do this… Genuine humility means to see reality as it actually is in God. It means to know oneself and others as known by God… The humble lay aside all vanity and conceit in the service of the least of God’s creatures, and to consider no good act as beneath one’s dignity and honour.
In order to ‘reduce that which is too much’, we have to have a certain standard as to what ‘too much’ is; and we can’t do that without looking outside of ourselves for the standard. The same goes with ‘augmenting that which is too little’, ‘weighing things’ and ‘making them equal’. The standards are not to be found in us, but to realise that requires that we understand reality by a different measure than our own fallible perspective. Faith may move mountains, even if it is as small as a mustard seed which is buried in the earth. But to understand this parable, we can’t be reading it with the eyes of worldly pride.

~~~

And, by the way, in the interest of rectification of names, it is properly called Spring Festival (春节). That is even though this festival does mark the New Year on the agrarian calendar, and even though it technically falls during winter. Traditionally, farmers used Spring Festival as a yearly marker to prepare for the necessary work that needed to be done by the vernal equinox—hence the name.

Despite the woke usage nowadays, Spring Festival is not, properly speaking, a ‘Lunar’ New Year, because the traditional agrarian calendar is in fact a lunisolar calendar, with intercalations to make up for discrepancies with the solar year, and not a true lunar calendar. And thank goodness for that, because if it were a true lunar calendar, Spring Festival would jump around as much as Ramadan does. But I don’t see anyone lining up to call Spring Festival the ‘Lunisolar New Year’.

And… wait, where and when was the traditional agrarian calendar developed again? It wasn’t developed in Seoul. It wasn’t developed in Tôkyô. And it sure wasn’t developed in Manila (where agricultural work is based on the tropical ‘dry’ and ‘rainy’ seasons with no need for a lunisolar marker for the coming of spring). It was developed along the Yellow River in the Central Plains of China. The agrarian calendar is traditionally accredited to the Yellow Emperor in about 2700 BC, with reforms to it being made during the Shang (1600 BC – 1046 BC) and Zhou (1046 BC – 256 BC) Dynasties. The New Year on this calendar was first celebrated in the Central States: what is now China.

So, for English-speaking people to call it ‘Chinese New Year’ is, even if not exactingly correct as a translation, still completely understandable. Further: it’s asinine for the perpetually-aggrieved wokesters, Redditors and bourgeois Korean and Japanese nationalists to try to ‘correct’ them prescriptively, to the even more incorrect ‘Lunar New Year’.

~~~

Two days before Spring Festival, also, media personality and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson held an interview with the President of Russia, released on the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. It’s a two-hour-long interview, but I highly encourage watching it.
What somewhat surprised me about it, actually, was how unsurprising Putin’s historiographical position was. There was nothing at all idiosyncratic, revisionist or even overtly nationalist in Putin’s reading of medieval and early modern Russian history. If anything, it was a standard textbook treatment of the subject which held to consensus positions on the creation of the Rus’ polity under Ryurik, the baptism of Kievan Rus’, the Tatar yoke, the geopolitical struggle between Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Treaty of Pereyaslavl and so on. But the fact that he dwelt upon the history of medieval and early modern Rus’ far longer than Carlson was clearly comfortable with, shows that Putin not only takes that history seriously but thinks it is worthwhile for Americans to be exposed, even to an abridged textbook version of it.

It somewhat restored my respect for Putin, as well, that he refused to be baited or led, as Carlson was clearly attempting to do, into acceding to or supporting American conservative culture-war aims or narratives. Most notably: when Carlson attempted to push forward his idea that China would attempt to exert its hegemony over Russia in a more intolerable way than America would, Putin at once dismissed this as a ‘bogeyman story’. He further emphasised that China was Russia’s neighbour with a long land border; that it was a valuable partner in trade; and that its leadership is much more interested in compromise than in confrontation or domination. Putin is not about to sell out his good relationship with such a neighbour for a fistful of empty promises from the West.

To give another example, Putin steadfastly declined to delve into the details of any of his dealings with former (or current) American leadership. At first I found this rhetorical tactic a little frustrating. I was wondering why he was protecting these people, or lending them a cover of plausible deniability. But after a while I came to realise that Putin was simply being a diplomat. Even though he clearly has grievances with the way Russia has been treated by America and by the West more broadly, even under Yeltsin’s tenure, he isn’t in the business of singling out particular American political figures for particular instances of blame. For similar reasons, he also didn’t give in to Tucker’s questions about the current state of the American social fabric and its relations with the government… though there it might really be a weak point in his knowledge rather than a gentlemanly attempt not to take sides.

But Putin also, to his credit, refused to offer support even implicitly, for the idea that a change in administration alone could bring about a thaw in relations with Russia. Carlson was clearly leading him with his questions toward an admission that Trump would be preferable to Biden for Russia. But for Putin, it clearly isn’t a question of a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. (I made exactly this point eight years ago also; I’m glad it still holds up!) Putin observes that the American élite mentality which prevails in both parties, and which attempts to destroy anything that it can’t control, needs to shift first.

So, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but a major tip of the hat to Tucker Carlson for holding this interview. It needs to be seen; Carlson has provided a valuable service to the American people to be able to hear the arguments of the other side for themselves. As for Carlson himself, though, as an interviewer… he seemed to be rather out of his depth, and one could get the impression at a couple of points that Putin was playing with him, even trolling him a bit (as when he hinted at Carlson’s unsuccessful attempt to join the CIA).

I hope that (in the spirit of the Yijing for this New Year), we can approach this interview with the Russian President in a spirit of humility, in the interest of correcting our deficiencies or exaggerations in vision, and making things equal.

03 February 2024

Iraq War III, Syria War II, Yemen War II

Man, I get sick to death of this culture of remakes. Hollywood really doesn’t have any new or original ideas, do they? It’s just Iron Man this, Batman that: military abuses abroad, police abuses at home. And even the focus group-tested corporate-boardroom storylines don’t change. Or rather, I should say, the lies. We have to bomb Iraq because of… wait, what again? Weapons of mass destruction? Oh, wait, no, it’s those evil Eye-ranians up to their no-good tricks. Because three soldiers are dead who… wait, what were they doing there, again? Why were they there? I thought the Iraqi government had already given us the eviction notice? Or several? Why were they even there in the first place?

So, under Biden we have another war. Another unilateral illegal military action, without Congressional approval, open-ended, with no strategy for either victory or exit. And we have declared it, make no mistake, on the people of Iraq—who apparently haven’t suffered enough these past two decades on our account—and on the people of Syria, who apparently also haven’t suffered enough these past dozen years. Oh, and on the people of Yemen just for good measure, because why not? Clearly 377,000 dead people, mostly children, in that country didn’t get that message across firmly enough. And of course, we have also declared war on truth, because American imperium has no greater enemy than reality.

But tell me again how it’s those evil Eye-ranians who are to blame. Or the Russians, always the Russians. As Ginsberg put it: ‘Its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.’ Point the finger anywhere but at Washington, anywhere but at Hollywood, anywhere but at Wall Street, anywhere but at yourself—in short, anywhere but at those actually responsible.

I’m sick. I’m not motion-sick; there is no motion, and that’s the problem. I’m sick to death. I’m sick of the lies. And I’m sick that children die, under the flag that I’m told is mine, while we all clap along passively in the theatre and wait for the after-credits teaser that previews the next million children to die. I beg God to let me leave the room, but I can’t. What else can I do? They’re not going to stop the reel no matter how much I object, and attract the heckling of the people in back who are still in their trances. But there’s nothing else for me to do, except pray.

29 January 2024

Marx, Freud and Darwin - an aphorism


Marx, Freud and Darwin are excellent physicians. The terrible mistake lies in making any one of them into a metaphysician.

17 January 2024

Hypersonic Missiles and the millennial desire/inability to believe

My Anglophilia has been notably muted of late. I hope my reasons for this will not be taken as petty. On an external level, I simply find vanishingly little to admire about modern Britain: which still somehow allows Prince Andrew to walk around free, which persists under the political ‘leadership’ of Rishi Sunak, and which continues under the cultural sway of the likes of Piers Morgan and Jo Rowling (whose politics have become predictable, boring, and almost a sad self-caricature at this point). And on a personal level, I’m still struggling with some of my own psychosexual hang-ups, with which my early Anglophilia seems to have been very deeply entangled. My Anglophilia has been battered and bruised, certainly. It’s a lot quieter than it used to be. But it’s still there and runs quite deep.

And one Briton whom I am quite happy to celebrate for his artistic and cultural achievements is rock musician Sam Fender.
Maybe we were born and raised too cynical;
In the wake of a miracle, we’d never believe.
You impersonate the seasons—your gold autumnal haze,
But something dies inside you when winter rears its face.
Fender’s got two studio albums out now, Hypersonic Missiles and Seventeen Going Under—both of which are tremendous testaments to the enduring appeal and rejuvenation of rock ‘n’ roll music generally. But it’s Hypersonic Missiles in particular that I want to focus on here.

Hypersonic Missiles is deceptively simple in terms of its musical character. His music has a certain transatlantic appeal, with roots rock, blues rock and American heartland rock written deeply into its figurative DNA… not surprising when one considers that Sam Fender considers Born to Run- and ‘Dancing in the Dark’-era Bruce Springsteen to be one of his formative influences, along with soul legends Otis Ray Redding and Donny Hathaway. There’s nothing pretentious about Fender—no progressive time-signature shenanigans, no operatic frills. His music is proudly and defiantly a stylistic throwback, while at the same time retaining its own deeply British independent character.

With such a melodic character, one might expect the lyrics of his songs to follow a similarly straightforward direction: rebellion, outlaw ballads, life on the open road. No such matter. Fender’s lyrics are deeply introspective and even philosophical. My intention here, actually, is to provide Hypersonic Missiles as a poetic-lyrical companion piece to my friend Daniel Schwindt’s There Must Be More than This. These two works raise many of the same questions, raise many of the same cries of internal pain, struggle over many of the same social and even religious problems.

This may seem an odd pairing. Sam Fender is, like many Britons of his age, agnostic—when asked if he was religious, his simple and immediate answer was ‘no’, even though half of his family is religious. His experience of being at a religious camp ended in a sacrilegious prank he and a friend played on the camp wardens that got them expelled. By contrast, Daniel Schwindt has been a committed Catholic traditionalist for as long as I’ve known him. Politically, Fender has been a bog-standard British leftist for a long time, Corbyn supporter and so forth. ‘Play God’, the first single released from this album, was largely greeted as a dystopian anti-Trump anthem, for example—though recently he’s made some noises about being disenchanted with the left. Schwindt’s politics are deeply syncretic, though I would still classify them as conservative.

But Fender’s album and Schwindt’s book share a certain commonality of observation… even of spiritual aspiration. Both of them write out of a certain shared cultural alienation common to millennials in the Anglophone West. In both of their works there is a will, a strong thirst, to believe in something greater, something better… but that will is hampered by having grown up on a foundation of shifting sand.

Hypersonic Missiles is not a concept album, but the songs do hang together thematically. It’s an indifferent, even callous, world that is viewed through the eyes of the young and the vulnerable. The title song, which is also the opening track, is sung through the eyes of a narrator (loosely autobiographical in Fender’s case) whose fatalist attitude toward the modern world and its leaders—who say it’s ‘high time for hypersonic missiles’—gets him called a ‘nihilist’. Yet his attitude of powerlessness in the face of world realities that he has neither the power nor the knowledge to affect, is one which he has learned from his ‘elders’: ‘the silver-tongued suits and cartoons that rule my world’. This very much parallels Daniel Schwindt’s broad characterisation of the millennial predicament.

But there’s more to it than that. Fender’s narrator has difficulty really committing even to his own positions. He owns up to some degree of knowledge, but then disavows it in the same breath: ‘kids in Gaza are bombed and I’m just out of it’; ‘I’m not smart enough to change a thing’; ‘I’ve no answers, only questions, don’t you ask a thing’. It’s as though this narrator understands that there is something being asked of him that he can’t deliver… an understanding that gets spun out and explored in greater detail in ‘White Privilege’: this dovetails very closely with Schwindt’s characterisation of millennial ‘guilt’. The only thing he can own up to is a commitment to love the recipient of said song:
But I believe in what I’m feeling,
And I’m falling for you.
And though this world is gonna end, but till then,
I’ll give you everything I have—I’ll give you everything I am.
It’s not entirely blameless, that the thing that Fender’s narrator finds most ‘real’, the things he can ‘believe’, is a feeling. I think he understands quite well that this is not enough to base any kind of commitment on, yet at the same time, it’s all he has, and it’s the only thing he has control over.

This broad, what I will call attitudinal, agnosticism (rather than religious agnosticism) is what underwrites the entirety of the album. It isn’t an accident, therefore, that the spectre of suicide, of overdose, of death-by-despair, lingers over the whole album like a threatening cloud. In ‘The Borders’, Fender cites how his friend’s godmother ‘took those pills, and now she’s gone’. And of course ‘Dead Boys’ is all about the too-many deaths-by-despair of young men in the impoverished towns of the English north where Fender grew up. And the snarling, imprecatory ‘Use’ at the end of the album maintains a kind of strange ambiguity likening certain kinds of abusive interpersonal relationships to abusive drug habits.

This attitudinal agnosticism contrasts starkly with a certain degree of Scriptural literacy in Fender, which is most noticeable in ‘The Borders’. ‘The Borders’ is a loosely-autobiographical song of Fender in his younger days, who lost a friend who was like a brother to him in many ways. Yet the language he uses in it, and the character of the two boys, very closely recalls the Old Testament tales of estranged brothers: Esau and Jacob most notably, but there are also hints of Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and Judah, even Abel and Cain, in the tale he spins… transposed into the contemporary key of Geordie poverty. The friendship / foster-brotherhood Fender describes rises out of shared experiences: growing up in houses of divorce, abuse, neglect, generational anger… but also the resentments of one against the other build up from the start: ‘and your dad took off when you were a baby, and you still hate me for my dad stuck around.

There are these glimmers of hope, like when Fender’s friend’s godmother helps him deal with his anger issues. But then those glimmers of hope die. There is no turn in the story in ‘The Borders’. Not only is there no faith that can save the friends and foster-brothers from estrangement, but even the possibility of faith is occluded. The story ends with one brother’s hand at the other brother’s throat. Unlike Ishmael and Isaac, unlike Esau and Jacob, there is no reconciliation. But Fender is still alive and singing—even if it is as hebel, as a passing breath—suggesting that maybe there is hope somewhere… outside the song and its story.

This deeply underscores Daniel Schwindt’s assertion that it requires massive effort, often seeming insurmountable, for millennials to believe. The sort of faith required to effect a reconciliation like the one which ‘The Borders’ seems to yearn for but doesn’t happen—simply isn’t there. And we see certain intimations of the background of fundamental uncertainty (both economic and existential) that underlies this lack of belief.

The most hopeful song on the album, actually, is ‘You’re Not the Only One’, quoted above. It’s a song in which Fender’s narrator is addressing a lover who feels alienated from the fake smiles around her, the pressure to conform, and the meaningless rituals of ‘night life’. The narrator assures her, tells her that she’s not alone, that he admires her composure but also shares her disillusionment. Yet even here there’s a strange ambiguity, a double meaning in the language which distances itself from certainty. (What lover wants to be told that they’re ‘not the only one’?) A similar disillusionment diffuses another not-really-love-song here, ‘Will We Talk?’, which distinctly un-romantically explores the mixed feelings and internal contradictions of the ‘age-old ritual’ of a one-night stand.

Other songs speak to conditions which are more universal and less grounded in specifically-millennial generational angst. ‘Saturday’ describes the age-old work-week grind and the longing for the release of the weekend; ‘That Sound’, the classic mentality of the rock musician for whom meaning and beauty in life is found in his music (and in precious few other places). Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger and John Mellencamp again assert themselves. ‘Two People’ is a distinctly non-millennial song: Fender is describing the travails of an older couple in an abusive, unhappy relationship. One is tempted to think of this song as something of a reply or a coda to ‘Jack and Diane’ or ‘The River’, though ‘Two People’ is much less specific than these—its protagonists are anonymous.

But there is also a kind of generational response to ‘Born to Run’ here, too, in ‘Leave Fast’. There’s a lot less hope that getting out of Dodge is an option in ‘Leave Fast’, which is in fact slow and elegiac in tone, but there’s also a lot more urgency:
Mass of filth and rubbish outside the houses,
And broken fridges and torn up sofas.
The boy racers tearing down the beehive road
Leading out to coastlines,
Where kids freeze their lungs
And run amongst the rolling dunes away from everyone.
The fact that this song takes the form of a conversation with an ‘old man’ who was apparently less fortunate in getting out of his situation than Springsteen was in getting out of Jersey (as a culture writ large), makes this song a suitable close to the album.

Hypersonic Missiles is, at first glance, a fairly bleak album. But because it speaks to the reality of a world where faith (and still less certainty) are hard to come by, and because it speaks to that reality with empathy and understanding, even the bleak moments are characterised by a sense that Fender suffers with us through them. Beneath the unbelief which is so prominent, there is a deep unmet desire to believe. And the album as a whole is shot through with these painfully-bright incomplete slivers of hope, these fragments of promises that things might get better. Honestly, Hypersonic Missiles is one of the best expressions of millennial spirituality that I’ve yet heard, particularly in light of Schwindt’s work.

31 December 2023

Yinxu on the Mississippi——密西西比河边殷墟

As mentioned in my blog post about Ulysses S Grant yesterday, I got to visit Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site together with my in-laws. Cahokia. Immense, monumental ancient step-pyramids and earthen mounds that date back a thousand years… right at the southern tip of the American Midwest.

Cahokia, located just on the other side of the Mississippi River from St Louis, in Illinois, is a thousand-year-old archaeological site consisting of a number of large raised earthen structures, as well as the remnants of a wooden stockade and a ‘Woodhenge’—a now-reconstructed ring of 49 wooden posts which archaeologists believe to have functioned as an immense solar calendar, used to calculate the equinoxes. Monks Mound is the largest pyramid north of the Mexican border, with a base measuring 13 acres in area (equal to the Great Pyramid at Giza), 955 feet across and 775 feet wide, and currently reaching a height of 100 feet.
The Cahokia Mounds were the site of a massive urban settlement between the years 900 and 1350 AD. From the archaeological evidence it can clearly be seen to have been a thriving centre of trade, with a distinct social hierarchy, metalworking and sophisticated astronomical and agricultural methods. (Woodhenge attests to the astronomical sophistication, as does the fact that the mounds and the plaza are constructed in an ‘hourglass’ shape bounded by two strict east-west lines of construction.) It could thus be said with ease, that the middle Mississippian polity which built and lived among the mounds was a civilisation in the true sense of the word.

It was a fascinating experience to walk in the shadows of the mounds… and then to climb Monks Mound with its sweeping vistas. There is something truly numinous about standing in Cahokia, a kind of awe that I have only twice or thrice felt before in my life: at the Yinxu Archaeological Site in Anyang; at Tianzi Jia Liu in Luoyang; and standing inside the old city walls in Luoyang and Xi’an. This is not the same as religious awe, the sense of standing in the presence of the Divine. For that, I go to Divine Liturgy, or pray before icons of Christ and His Mother. It is a very different, very human and this-worldly sort of awe—the sense of standing on a spot that you knew (not just felt, or fancied, but knew) that others had stood, three, five, ten thousand years before you. Call it civilisational awe.
It is standing in just such places—yea, even in places where mass human sacrifice was conducted—that one begins to understand what Konstantin Leont’ev understood in between the lines of his philosophical and medical writings. Cultures are alive; they have life-cycles. And even when they pass out of earthly existence and memory, they leave traces behind them that one can’t help but feel. However much our modern sensibilities, our religious and humanitarian scruples (which have been not so much earned on our own merits as entailed upon us by bitter experience of past ages), might turn back upon us at the contemplation of a civilisation perpetuating itself through the infliction of violent ritual death upon its own… there is nonetheless something truly splendid and grandiose about it, a kind of stoic and sanguine beauty which pervades the remains.

It was fascinating to walk amid this ancient monument, this millennium-old testament left by a pre-contact Indigenous civilisation, together with three Chinese people who are very near and dear to me. What was interesting in particular to me was how close the ancient sites of their own intimate knowledge were to the fore of their minds as we walked together.
Their first thought, also, was to liken the place to Yinxu, and also to the Bingmayong. The cruelty—the picturesque cruelty, the cruelty of fell beauty—of a Shang state perpetuated by mass human sacrifice, or of the First Qin Emperor who built a great Wall partly with the blood and bones of the men that he ruled, posed a ready parallel to what one might see at Mound 72. Hundreds of virgin maidens, exquisitely arrayed in marine shells, and then slain and arrayed at the southernmost point of the complex, their remains aligned in perfect reverence with the cardinal directions, the eternal tracks of sun and moon and season, giving life and death in their turn…

And what right have we, we shallow and arrogant children, we neonates in the grand scheme, to pass judgement upon this civilisation or those who inherited it? What do we know of what is sacred, or of what is true or what is correct? What price have we paid for that knowledge? Let’s give Nietzsche his due and acknowledge it: nowhere close to a price high enough, assuredly. Today we palefaces wax sentimental and lachrymose over the fate of the idealised Native American, with his fading ethic of spiritual and environmental harmony… yet we have no deep understanding by what route, by what autochthonous root in fact, the Indigenous peoples of this continent have come to such an ethic.
The stately, bloody grandeur of the Cahokia Mounds, even in its ruined current state, speaks still in resounding echoes of its former colossal resplendence, followed by its equally titanic collapse… this was the price, these were the conditions under which the Dakota and their cousin-nations learned what wisdom they still hold about the necessity of humility in the face of nature, about the need to honour one’s connectedness to others before the Creator. And the ancestors of the Lakota and Dakota, of the Kansa and Ponca, of the Ho-Chunk, the Choctaw and the Creek—they earned that wisdom, and carefully tended it down the generations, easily over 150 years before the white man ever laid eyes on the silver banks of the Mississippi.

The posited prehistoric connexions between the Han Chinese and the Indigenous peoples of this continent may be vastly overstated. But what is true, is that the Chinese civilisation and the heirs to the Cahokian civilisation (let’s not be coy and pretend that we don’t know who they are, or that they aren’t still with us today), share a great deal in common, when it comes to having dealt with the life-cycle of their civilisations. Let’s not whitewash those similarities, and still less downplay them or sentimentalise them or moralise them. Let us face them as they are.

If these ruminations on Cahokia strike one as too pre-Christian, too radical-reactionary, too culturally-maximalist, too elegiac of premodern brutality—in short, too Leont’evian—good. I want people to feel at least a glimmer of the mingled discomfort and awe that I felt as I led my feet and legs carefully along the tended paths, between and among the mortuary grounds and the hallowed heights of those ancient mounds.