Essays
Thus, the old Caucasian epics conceal a profound truth: that mankind stands not at the bottom of the hierarchy but at its fulcrum. In myth, we are the link between matter and spirit, the beneficiaries of a covenant older than history. Our legends remind us that the act of creation was never meant to be monopolized by an elite few, but to be tended,... See more
Matthew • The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus
Indeed, in popular Nart cycles such as The First Sickle , The Golden Apple Tree of the Narts , and How Sosruquo Brought Back the Seeds of the Millet , the attentive reader will discern striking parallels to mythic episodes across the Indo-Eurasian continuum: the Indo-Aryan Tvaṣṭṛ and his forging of the thunderbolt; the Greek Garden of the... See more
The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus
The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photographs. The uncomfortable, complex, and often difficult intimacy of the paintings characterizes their timeless humanity. The photograph of these paintings is just a collection of symbols, of words in... See more
Objectifying Expression
The young would-be feminists flocking to “WitchTok” for advice on how to conjure love and manifest success are hardly atheists. Neither are the young men of the right who, if not crowding back into traditionalist churches, grope for a spirituality of strength, vitality, and meaning among the aesthetic ruins of ancient warrior cults. These are... See more
N. S. Lyons • Dark Enchantment | N. S. Lyons
The redemption arc, in clumsy hands, becomes cheesy and unbelievable, offending good taste more often than not. Granted. But literature has, in the past, found ways to handle this sort of plot delicately, and to great effect. After all, the question of how a person changes ought to absolutely possess a novelist – as a matter of philosophical... See more
The Lost Redemption Arc
Poetry is an essential part of society—but only as itself and not as a vehicle for something else.
Micah Mattix • The Integrity of Poetry | Micah Mattix
Apropos of nothing.
Apropos of nothing.
"Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work." The Aesthetic of Silence, Susan Sontag.
The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.