At the end of the last thrilling episode of our journey through the tangled wilderness of The Nibelung’s Ring, Richard Wagner, fleeing from the kingdom of Saxony with a price on his head, had just reached safety in Switzerland. There he would remain, scraping by on the money he could make from writing and trying…
Category: Monthly Post
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Politics
It’s a common misconception that myths, legends, and fairy tales have lost all their power in the modern world. Nothing could be more inaccurate. Here I’m not discussing covert mythologies like belief in progress, though of course a strong case can be made for that. I mean myths and legends in the modern sense of…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Legends
When I commented two weeks ago that we had strayed into a Wagnerian period of history, I wasn’t anticipating events like those of the Saturday just past. Nonetheless, here we are, with an apparent fluke of circumstance only an opera composer could get away with being acted out in broad daylight, sending the destiny of…
A Path that Abides
We could talk about a great many things right now. Despite all the efforts of the political classes in the United States and its inner circle of allies, the world is shaking off the enforced stasis of the last few decades and moving toward an era of tumultuous realignment. The remarkable success of populist parties…
Walking Away From The Marketplace
The recent sequence of posts here on lenocracy (from Latin leno, a pimp)—that is, the form of political economy in which productive economic activity gets squeezed dry by various kinds of legally mandated pimping—has fielded a response I find interesting. Next to nobody has tried to argue that lenocracy is an unfair description of the…
The Secret of the Sages
Two weeks ago we talked about the way that life throughout the modern industrial world has fallen into the grip of lenocracy—that is, a system in which pimping of one kind or another is the most common feature of economic life, or in less idiosyncratic language, a system in which every economic exchange is exploited…
The Laughter of Wolves
As I write these words, lean gray wolves are pacing through a rain-soaked landscape in eastern Europe. Dim rumbling sounds in the far distance, like summer thunder that’s strayed into the wrong season, don’t bother them. Nor does it trouble them that the forest around them is dotted with the decaying ruins of buildings abandoned…
A Life Remembered
I don’t get into personal matters in these essays very often. Partly that’s because I’m a fairly private person, partly it’s because the cult of personality that pervades today’s literary and creative scenes is so dreary; this whole notion that literature and the arts exist so that writers and artists can “express themselves” belongs in…
An Anthropocene Worth Having
For more than two years now I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce a way of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature that cuts straight across nearly all of the conventional thinking on that subject. It’s been a challenge. I’m glad to say, though, that a project now being lauded by the corporate-enabler…
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
These days I hear a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible to change the world, and if so, how to go about it. It’s understandable that this should be so, since the world around us is such a steaming mess. Nor, despite the bleatings of true believers in progress, is it getting better. …