Remembering the Forgotten Muses

A brief introduction to this project

One of the most promising aspects of the current dissident scene is the concerted effort to create an ‘art-right’. This seems to have originated from a 2020 essay by Curtis Yarvin, subsequently acted upon by Lomez of Passage Publishing, whose Passage Prize competitions have galvanized a whole host of anons into trying their hands at poetry, fiction and visual art. Of course there had previously been plenty of talk about dissident art, and far too many essays with titles like ‘Why We Need More Art In The Movement’, but what distinguishes this new project is the desire to separate artistic efforts from political propaganda.

This essay, from someone who has nothing to do with the art-right, can stand as a throwback examplar of the older approach. It refers to art as a subset of ‘metapolitics’ (a telltale expression of contempt for it, like referring to girls as “3D women”), and demands conformity to a laundry list of propaganda points while giving back no artistic suggestions whatsoever. But note that even this author, in the same breath with which he reduces all art to propaganda, warns his readers against the dangers of laying the propaganda on too thick. Critics might say that there is no essential difference between his essay and that of Yarvin, who is merely playing the game of metapolitics with more intelligence and tact.

If dissidents are to give art its proper due, we must we must transpose our principles into it analogically, instead of merely extending them out of politics. Let us begin by ceasing to think about what art can do for dissidents, and asking what dissidents can do for art. Let us ask whether an anti-modern, radical-traditionalist approach can serve to revitalize art forms that have gone to the dogs under the democratist state.

Surely no art form in the modern world has fallen into such a wretched state of degradation than poetry. Other arts, however far past their heydays, have either retained their importance and vitality (music) or else found alternative work for themselves (representational art lives on in animation, theatre in cinema, etc.). But poetry has become formless, undefinable and purposeless, hence irrelevant to most people – and worse, synonymous with cringe, due to its continued use as a vomitorium for the maladaptive daydreams of the midwitocracy.¹

When I began to take a second look at this art, I noticed a recent book called The Point of Poetry, written for the express purpose of refuting the stereotypes and winning over the ‘metrophobes’. Having failed to find much of substance in a brief summary by the author, I took a chance on the book, and ended up trawling its almost 300 pages in mounting frustration for a satisfactory answer to the question posed by its title. I do not count such circumlocutions as “poetry is undoubtedly best read aloud”, “poets are nature’s art restorers”, “poets, at least the best of them, do deal in things that matter”, “poetry is a uniquely human birthright”, “poetry is a highly disciplined intellectual exercise”, “poetry is inherently provocative”, and – last and eke least – “we will always need poets because they are the only men and women who insist there’s a difference between apology and justice.”

Let me draw an analogy for those of you who fail to see the problem here. Imagine living in a world where the purpose of martial arts has been forgotten, and the degenerate remnants of karate and judo and other styles have been turned over to bullshidoists who fight like anorexic schoolgirls. Imagine desiring to learn real martial arts, and picking up a book called – let’s say – The Point of Karate, billed as a welcome return to good old traditionalist horse-sense on the subject. And then imagine reading through 300 pages of waffle about the mystic spirituality of karate, the manly grace of the katas, the stoic discipline of karate masters, the benefits of frequent strenuous exercise and elementary Japanese proficiency, without ever encountering a single acknowledgement of the fact that the point of karate is to fight.

In the present day, such a blunt statement of the bleeding obvious would sound reductive. But in an era that had forgotten the point of karate, it would serve as a necessary reboot to basics – a starting-point from which everything else could be recovered, a body in which to fix the disintegrated soul of the art.

But is it possible to make an analogous statement on the point of poetry? The answer is, yes – but not without controversy.

So here it is: the point of poetry is to remember.

Even this may come across as excessively vague, so let me clarify it a bit. What I am saying is that poetry, at least in its original form, can be understood as an art of memory. This means that it is related cladistically not only to prose, music and its modern shadow-self, but also to mnemotechnics – the art of fixing ideas in the mind by imaginative imagery, symbols, locations, narratives, and verbal aids.

One point in favour of this view is that it offers a succinct explanation for poetry’s modern decline. It is a commonplace, especially in dissident circles, that technology fulfills human needs while destroying human abilities – that television damages imagination, that mass production throws artisans out of work, that firearms render blade and bow obsolete, and so on. But while most such ‘craft-eating’ technologies appeared very recently in human history, the technology of writing has had thousands of years to eat away at the art of poetry. And now that mass literacy, schooling and propaganda has given rise to a ‘hyperliterate’ society with no independent oral traditions, we should not be so surprised to see poetry finally crack and totter under the weight of its engorged parasite.

As is attested by the Iliad and Odyssey, the Rig-Veda, etc., traditional poetry was already a highly developed art long before writing appeared on the scene. It also carried a social importance and artistic primacy that moderns may struggle to imagine. As Calvert Watkins writes in How To Kill a Dragon (p.179):

It should be emphasized that in the early Indo-European world the primary form of artistic expression is precisely verbal. Visual art typically plays a distinctly limited role until relatively late in the tradition. In Indo-European-speaking areas from the British Isles, the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic continent, Italy and Hellas, to Anatolia, Iranian Asia, and Western India the discrepancy in sophistication between plastic and verbal art at the dawn of our documentation is striking. Contrast the blackened, rather pedestrian Athenian pot from the 8th century B.C. hidden away in a dark corner of the museum in Athens, the Dipylon jug, and the childish lettering of its inscription, with the unchallenged mastery of meter, formulaic technique, and poetic creativity…which the crafter of its text exhibits…

For the Indo-European world, the further we go back the greater the emphasis on purely verbal art, the art of the spoken word.

Watkins devotes most of this book to tracing common poetic phrases and themes across the earliest texts of Greek, Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages. Undoubtedly we must envisage the Bronze Age speakers of Proto-Indo-European (the people who shall not be named, but used to be called the Aryans) as having possessed a complete poetic tradition during or prior to their conquest spree. Yet even this says nothing about the more distant origins of the art.

Eric Havelock, writing specifically of preliterate Greece, describes a social order entirely dependent on the art of poetry for its collective faculty of memory (Preface to Plato, pp.93-4):

It was of the essence of Homeric poetry that it represented in its epoch the sole vehicle of important and significant communication. It therefore was called upon to memorialise and preserve the social apparatus, the governing mechanism, and the education for leadership and social management, to use Plato’s word. It is not only that Agamemnon, for example, if he had to muster a fleet at Aulis might be compelled to get his directives organised in rhythmic verse so that they could remain unaltered in transmission. This same verse was essential to the educational system on which the entire society depended for its continuity and coherence. All public business depended on it, all transactions which were guided by general norms. The poet was in the first instance society’s scribe and scholar and jurist and only in a secondary sense its artist and showman.

Of course this was a very different form of poetry from that which bears the name today. We can get some idea of how different it was by recalling that it was personified in Ancient Greece by the three Heliconian Muses, whose names were Mneme (‘Memory’), Melete (‘Meditation’) and Aoide (‘Song’).² Not only the Muse of Memory but also that of Song are relevant to the crucial mnemonic function of poetry, for the collective preservation of memory depended on the transmission of words to listeners by music and rhythmic speech. Needless to say, both of these Muses have been forsaken and forgotten by modern literary poetry, which can at best lay claim to a precarious matronage by the Muse of Meditation alone.

A modern representation of the three Heliconian Muses, amusing themselves as they wait for modern poets to remember them

Wherever literacy was introduced, from Ancient Greece to Anglo-Saxon England, it went on to conquer vast swathes of cultural territory from oral-traditional poetry. But it stopped far short of destroying the art that it had sidelined – not only because oral song and story continued to flourish among illiterates, but because poetry was able to adapt to the situation and grow into new literary forms. Indeed, the practical demotion of poetry opened the path to an efflorescence of its aesthetic beauty; for example, the Spenserian stanzas of The Faerie Queene are far more complex and ornate than the Old English meter of Beowulf, precisely because they are further removed from the frailties of human memory and the limitations of oral transmission.

To illustrate the fact that this nonetheless represents a decadence of poetry, let us return for a moment to our analogy between the martial and the minervan arts. Let us imagine a more feminized, pacified and violence-monopolized world, in which martial arts have become irrelevant to self-defence and are cultivated solely for the sake of showing off in Youtube videos. We might expect karate, judo, taekwondo et al to degenerate over time into ever more beautiful and impractical ballet-dances – a process more or less analogous to that which occurred in poetry after most of its practical functions were taken over by the art of writing. We might also expect successive attempts to arrest this decadence and bring martial arts back to earth – which, unless they sought to take them all the way back to the original purpose of combat, would only succeed in turning the dancing from ballet to butoh.

Herein lies the advantage of approaching poetry by the lesser-trodden path of mnemotechnics. Whatever else one might say about this craft, it is nothing if not practical, and it does not take much looking to find in it a partial microcosm of the lost practical functions of poetry.

It should go without saying that the structures of poetic diction – meter, rhyme, parallelism, etc. – are imbued with mnemonic virtues that ‘free verse’ utterly lacks. What is less well-understood is that this, at least as far as traditional poetry is concerned, is only the tip of the iceberg. This is how Havelock (in Preface to Plato, p.88-9), describes the storytelling art of the oral-traditional poet:

Let us think of him [Homer] therefore as a man living in a large house crowded with furniture, both necessary and elaborate. His task is to thread his way through the house, touching and feeling the furniture as he goes and reporting its shape and texture. He chooses a winding and leisurely route which shall in the course of a day's recital allow him to touch and handle most of what is in the house. The route that he picks will have its own design. This becomes his story, and represents the nearest that he can approach to sheer invention. This house, these rooms, and the furniture he did not himself fashion: he must continually and affectionately recall them to us. But as he touches or handles he may do a little refurbishing, a little dusting off, and perhaps make small arrangements of his own, though never major ones. Only in the route he chooses does he exercise decisive choice.³ Such is the art of the encyclopedic minstrel, who as he reports also maintains the social and moral apparatus of an oral culture.

As far as Havelock is concerned, this is nothing more than a useful simile. But the mnemonist will surely recognize in it something of the famous method of loci, which involves a mental journey around a real or imaginary location liberally punctuated by memorized images. The more aesthetically striking, symbolically logical, or emotionally evocative the image, the better it can be memorized – that is to say, mnemotechnics depends on all of the qualities by which poetry stands or falls, though they may not be deployed at the same level of subtlety.

Yet according to the Roman rhetorical treatises that contain the earliest surviving descriptions of memory techniques, the method of loci was invented two centuries after Homer by the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. As the traditional story has it, Simonedes was the sole survivor of the collapse of a banquet-hall in which he had been performing, and hit upon the technique after finding that he was able to identify the bodies by remembering the places in which the guests had been sitting. Are we not being anachronistic in projecting such a mental process onto Homer?

Simonides of Ceos is called away from the collapsing banquet-hall by the gods Castor and Pollux

The truth, of course, is that neither Simonides nor anyone else had to make up memory techniques from whole cloth. Just as the tame animal is bred from the wild one, and the conlang modelled on the natural language, mnemotechnics is derived from prehistoric methods of collective culture-preservation⁴ best encapsulated in the West by the art of traditional poetry. Mnemotechnics is of course the lesser craft – a stripping-down of Havelock’s ‘tribal encyclopedia’ to a set of workmanlike tools for temporary and convenient memorization by individuals.

But at least one historical poet was able to ‘back-breed’ mnemotechnics and literary poetry into something better resembling their great common ancestor. That poet was Dante, and the result was the Divine Comedy – which, according to Frances Yates in her history The Art of Memory (p.95), cannot be understood without reference to the scholastic use of mnemotechnics to memorize virtues, vices and spiritual cosmology:

That Dante’s Inferno could be regarded as a kind of memory system for memorising, Hell and its punishments with striking images on orders of places, will come as a great shock… It is by no means a crude approach, nor an impossible one. If one thinks of the poem as based on orders of places in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and as a cosmic order of places in which the spheres of Hell are the spheres of Heaven in reverse, it begins to appear as a summa of similitudes and exempla, ranged in order and set out upon the universe. And if one discovers that Prudence, under many diverse similitudes, is a leading symbolic theme of the poem, its three parts can be seen as memoria, remembering vices and their punishments in Hell, intelligentia, the use of the present for penitence and acquisition of virtue, and providentia, the looking forward to Heaven. In this interpretation, the principles of artificial memory, as understood in the Middle Ages, would stimulate the intense visualisation of many similitudes in the intense effort to hold in memory the scheme of salvation, and the complex network of virtues and vices and their rewards and punishments – the effect of a prudent man who uses memory as a part of Prudence.

Dante’s terza rima is nothing if not a literary style, and his mythopoeia bears an unmistakably individual stamp.⁵ But if what Yates says of him is true, he may have been closer even than Virgil to the art of Homer. His work is sufficient proof that while poetry may fall, it is possible for some to swim upstream.⁶

But I do not content myself with reminding poets to think a bit more like Homer or write a bit more like Dante. What I am proposing is a more ambitious project, the restoration of traditional poetry. This cannot be a task for one man (least of all one as limited as myself), and yet it would require such a radical upending of poetry as to be repugnant to those already steeped in the modern form of the art. Hence my conviction that it is a job for the dissident art-right – if, and only if, it is serious about courting the Muses outside the goon-cave of ‘metapolitics’.

However, the quest comes with no guarantee of success, and a host of objections present themselves at the outset. Why should we attempt to restore a form of poetry that is everywhere obsolete? How can we restore it, without knowing exactly what it was like? Wouldn’t we be forging a ‘fake tradition’ to be deboonked by every stridulating soyjak out there? Rather than swing at each of these shadows, let us shed light on them all at once, by returning to our analogy between poetry and martial arts.

We have imagined a world in which the purpose of martial arts has been forgotten, and extant styles such as karate have degenerated into dancing. Now let us further imagine that a revivalist group takes up the maxim that the point of karate is to fight, and attempts to restore that art to its former glory. The problem is that the degeneracy has gone on for long enough to sever the chain of oral transmission from teacher to student. Unable to learn much of value from the dancing-dojos, and as yet unqualified to make things up as they go along, the revivalists have to recover what they can from incomplete descriptions and old photos of techniques.

Let us assume, for the sake of analogy, that there would be too many gaps in the record for the whole art of karate to be reconstructed in this way. This would obviously sound the death-knell for an ‘academic’ approach founded solely on appeals to historical accuracy. But all would not be lost, because martial arts are not mere collections of historical facts, but practical solutions addressed to perennial problems of the human mind and body. By means of physical training, contact sparring, and the use of the art for self-defence, the karate revivalists could interrogate these unchanging realities to find out what works and what does not.

Even if they succeeded in this, they would end up not with the old extinct karate, but with a neo-karate – a distinct martial art founded on karate, but variously innovated and adapted, and likely mingled with bric-a-brac salvaged from other styles. Yet this would always have been the best realistic outcome. Though the timbers of the fallen tree cannot be pieced together, the salvaged seed can thrive in new soil.

In much the same way, poetic restorationists would have to stand upon history without getting stuck in it. We would certainly be obliged to consult the academic literature on traditional poetry, and labour long and hard to extract its fossils from the glacial ice of early literacy. But our object could never be the precise reconstruction of what has passed away – for even if this were possible (and I can tell you in advance that it is not), the result would not be communicable to modern audiences. Our main concern should be to come up with an art that works in practice – and in order to do so, we would have to keep in touch with memory and song, which are to the minervan art of poetry what training and sparring are to the martial art of karate.

So much for the how of restoration – and as for the why, it too emerges clearly from our analogy. Is it at all plausible that people would want to revive martial arts in a world that had been utterly pacified by a violence-monopolizing state? The answer is yes – provided that the rulers of this state had not really pacified the world, but instead used their position to subject ordinary people to arbitrary violence by their political clients. In this scenario, although karate revivalists would have no illusions about fighting the state, they would presumably be scapegoats and dissidents looking to defend their persons and lessen their dependency on their enemies.

Analogously, the restoration of traditional poetry is an idea born in the shadow of culture-monopolism by the total state. It comes from a will to take back the fundamental human faculties of song, story, and subcreation, which have been liquidated by mass literacy, television and music-radio and sucked away into a centralized culture-machine run by stupid and malicious ideologues. It is a project for those dissidents who willing to work towards cultural self-reliance, instead of passively bellyaching about the latest round of beige-and-gay bugman slop.

Some have despairingly asked what dissident artists are supposed to do with no funding, no patronage, and nothing going for them but raw human talent. The answer is, of course, precisely what we are already doing – seeking out art forms that maximize the impact of talent while minimizing production costs, from the short story to the viral song video to the humble internet meme. We can thus hardly afford to ignore an art form that was rudimentary enough for Bronze Age tribesmen, and yet perfectible enough to have produced the works of Homer. The determination to build our own house out of the ruins may demand monumental efforts of us, but it will never require us to hide our hearts or sell our souls so as to infiltrate the culture-machine.

If you’re not sure where to begin, stay tuned.

1. This damning verdict is aimed at the modern state of the mainstream Anglo tradition, and does not necessarily apply to other poetic traditions. For instance, the form of poetry known as rap music is in a healthier state (it has oral improvisation, metrical structure, quality control, relevance to ordinary people, etc.), but it is a separate tradition created by Anglicized Sub-Saharan Africans, and in any case it too is going to the dogs.

2. The later nine Olympian Muses, who merely personify different types of poetry such as epic, lyric, hymnic, etc., were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (‘Remembrance’).

3. As I hope to prove in later posts, Havelock is wrong to think that the ‘routes’ (story-patterns) of traditional poetry are arbitrary while the ‘objects’ (themes and type-scenes) are more or less immutable. But in other respects his description is an enlightening one.

4. Lynne Kelly’s book, The Memory Code, reveals the full gamut of these techniques in the cultures of peoples that managed to avoid the technology of writing until modernity.

5. As we have said, mnemonists prize those images that are maximally striking and evocative, and this leads naturally to the imaginative deployment of individuals personally known to them. Therefore it is not surprising that Dante placed certain of his political enemies in the Inferno to do duty as exemplars of the vices; but it was no more ‘petty-minded’ of him to do so than for him to have placed Beatrice in Paradise.

6. We might also mention in this connection the mythopoeia of J.R.R. Tolkien, although he wrote mostly in prose and may not have been able to navigate his Middle-Earth by memory.