Rambling Among the Ruins
The world is built on the broken shoulders of crushed giants. Its dust the bones of empires decomposed and blown about by the winds of time. Nations have risen and fallen and risen again. Great minds, grinding and weighing and considering, have bent the course of history around them. Carving their name on the face of the earth to do battle with the winds like the feet of Ozymandias in the desert.
Such is the moment in which you live. The very screen upon which you read this testifies; how many men and women died to make it? How many wars throughout human history did it take to give you the smartphone? From the mud of Messopotamia how many tablets were inscribed, baked, broken, re-assembled and scanned to create the magic mirror that bears the name today?
Given that you are reading this I can assume with a high degree of certainty a few things about you. You are presumably a carbon based human, have a soul, a passing acquaintance with the English language, and (according to the analytics of this fledgling blog) probably live in America. (To the ten percent of my audience in China, congratulations your VPNs are working nicely.) How much of what you believe is fair and just come from the philosophers and men you barely know of? The pattern of what you believe is right and moral has been the descended legacy of two thousand years worth of thought on what eternal souls call thinking. The freedoms you enjoy (“For the moment!” Cries the political prophet of doom) are thanks to the long tradition of thought that is the christian heritage, from which sprang the West and the world as you know it. With coffee houses, country music, Twitter, crescent wrenches and Norm MacDonald. We are all boats rising on the tide of history, the product of a million minds and a billion thoughts.
The past is a loud, shouting symphony of beautiful madness watched over and guided by the hand of a God with a powerful sense of humour. (Martin Luther’s inspired insults alone testify to that) We, the towering intelects of the modern age, look back on history and mistake our perspective for wisdom. We know what is good and what is evil, we know history has its right and wrong side and by the powers we are on it’s right! We can sneer at and ridicule those men of the past, we see their mistakes and idiocracy for what it is. “Meaningless, meaningless!” Cries the scientist. “Of old they believed in the powers of the heavens but we now know they can’t be. Therefore curse the universe and die!” Then, once drunk on their despair, they wave their numbers like scripture, hoping for aliens.
How did we get here? How did our modern landscape come to be? What exactly are the nature of these ruins we dwell amongst, criticize and tear down simply because they are old and we think ourselves new. What is their shape? Their message? And what do they warn of? Who is John Galt?
I can see some of it, I have read the maps, read their legends and looked at parts with a microscope, but my knowledge is three miles wide and only a foot deep in this river of time. But even I can see there is more here than appears. The creeping spread of gnosticism, the change in poetry after the mud-blood horrors of World War One. Ideas and philosophies locked in bitter combat their enormous game of chess carried out while much of the world remains blissfully unaware of their titanic machinations. The symptoms of these battles are clearly visible: Donald Trump, Australian COVID lockdowns, George RR Martin, failed Middle Eastern nation building, Build Back Better Bill, Joe Rogan, the UN, Stephen King’s twitter feed, Marvel movies. Parents fight School boards and ignore the grinning evil of Darwin and Marx.
I suppose all this is to say I need to read more books. “I only know half as much as I should like and I’d like to know twice as much as I do.”
That is part of the reason for these “chronicles”, a place to write about what I discover towards these ends and make sense of this world in which I find myself. Perhaps it is all ground you already know, mayhap you can learn a thing or two with me. But for now I will be the happy adventurer amongst these crumbling palaces of the mind, an archaeologist, joyfully winding my way towards richer understanding, with a Bible in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other and a .44 Mag under my shoulder.
Until the internet is shut off, or I die, you will find me here. Rambling away.
