I opened my eyes slowly, my face pressed against the pillow, no clue as to how long I had slept for. I looked toward the window. The drapes partially closed letting a few bright rays of sun peer through the window. I see the branches close to the house, moving in the wind. A gust comes and I hear the low sound, soft yet full of force, the tree branches move slowly at first and then dance wildly in the wind. The bright winter sun casting shadows through window. There is a silence throughout the house. No music, no television, no crying babies. Only the dream-like light of the afternoon, the life of the winds, always moving, pushing and pulling. A force bigger than us, alive and jubilant.
I wish this moment could last forever. I feel so far away. I feel as though I am a part of another world, my own world. It is not so often we get much of a break these days. It is only on Saturday that we have a break. We are not online, we don't use our phones, we don't drive in the car, we don't listen to music or media of any kind. We are separate, in our own world. A whole continent could sink into the earth, but on Saturday we won't know until evening comes, and we are plugged in again.
My mind is clearest on Saturdays. It is because I am not connected to the rest of the world. I can allow my mind to wander without my thought being dashed and shot down right away by countless other forces we all encounter in our daily plugged-in lives. On Saturdays anything is possible. My mind can wander and explore. There is nothing too bold, nothing too improbable. There is no chance for a bold thought to be brought down by the great lowering democratic masses. When in my own world, I am the architect of all that I want to be. I can build grand structures in my mind, new avenues, unexplored pathways into the future without the spirit killers of post-modernity.
The world is a different world when it is your world. The world is not already controlled in a cage, there is no ceiling looming. There is no electrified fence around the perimeter, keeping you in the sandbox, never daring to even think of an exit or the thought that there may lay something beyond. When you rule your own world you are not a part of the mass of followers, you are not corralled like cattle with blinders on. You are are in control, you are free, you are creative and you are more yourself. You don't take on, whether you like it or not, the behaviors, psychological disorders, corrupt thought processes of the masses that you encounter, whether you choose it or not. When you rule your own world, you are closer to yourself than ever before.
It is not so often that many get away to this place. It is not so often that most get a chance to live in a world that is their own. Most live their whole lives in someone else's world. There isn't one single person who's "world" this is. It is the world of the hive-mind, it is the lowest possible world that manifests itself from the lowest common denominator and lowest urges of the masses. The wishes or idea of one is no match for the great avalanche, the great snowball of the lowest urges, lowest impulses and lowest reflexes of the mass-democratic-techno world. Today, most are trapped in this world, every day of their life.
This death of dreaming starts at a young age today. Kids skateboard, play outside, ride bikes and explore less today than they did before. There are lots of reasons why. The same goes for adults. Adults interact outside of work, face to face with other adults, participate in active groups and communities less today than they did before. Today, people are trapped in the virtual world, the ceiling is there, holding them down, holding their dreams down. They cannot wander and wonder. They are trapped like an animal in a cage that no longer remembers what it is like to be free. There is an inkling there, but it is faint. All the forces of the world, of the lowering masses, the forces of scientism, predicability, virtual fake-ness they are always there more ever present and strangling, holding adults and children in a deterministic idea.
Children [and often adults as well] are sitting inside playing video games, or they are watching some sort of fantastical show. They are living in some other fantasy world, it certainly is a dream world but it isn't a world that is ours, it is something fake and it certainly isn't their dream, it is someone else's dream. It isn't their life as story, it is a made up story that is someone else's at best and a non-existent character at worst. You don't need to retreat into the fantasy world, you don't need to retreat into a virtual dream. You can live your own dream, your own incredible story. The retreat into fantastical tales, observing only. This is an interesting aspect of our time. Our lives are waiting, our story is just waiting to be written, but so many simply remove themselves from the story only to retreat into a fantastical tale of someone else's creation. It is very strange.
Most today, join up with the avalanche and roll down the hill, picking more up along as they go. Swallowing up the individual here and there until one mass movement emerges, more terrifying and formidable than ever. For the those who do mount a defense and somehow continue to evade the avalanche most often only get so far. Because they are still in this dark shadow controlled territory, their ideas, thoughts and reaction and rejection are all framed by the architecture of where they exist. That architecture is the architecture of the hive-mind mass. Life like this is as if living in a terrifying funhouse. They are haunted by trick mirrors and garish images lurking here and there. Perspective distorted, up is down, right is left, no way out. Finding the way through the funhouse seems like life, but it isn't, it is only the closed funhouse. They lose themselves and only become something in response to the thing which they oppose. They are stuck in the world controlled by the low-masses.
There are such few dreams anymore. This techno-reality I believe is only part of the explanation. There are shallower explanations that are a part of the ultimate reason and there are deeper explanations as well. What I believe to be true ultimately is that much of the dreaming has stopped. Everyone marches forward, or rather drifts aimlessly forward toward the future that they seem to believe is inevitable. The only people who dream in our society are people with dark dreams. People who are dreaming nightmares are some of the only ones who dream dreams today. There are only a few of them, most who are a part of their cause are followers and now the dream that some psychopaths dreamt one day earlier, is now reality and it is that snowball, that avalanche rolling over us all.
It doesn't need to be this way. None of it needs to be like this. The future can be anything that we make. We can dream a new future, it is not only the psychopath, the freak, the degenerate who is capable of dreaming the huge dream and bringing it about through themselves, and over long periods, through others, Slowly, through a culture and a way of life. It is not only the lowering forces that will seize the future. Giving up, becoming so ultra-cynical and deterministic - that doesn't make you smart, it makes you a tool of the current mode du jour. It makes you a foot solider of the great march forward into the nightmare of the future. You think you are smart because you don't bother to "care" but you are just a tool. You are a part of the snowball who has deluded himself that he is above it all.
I see this a lot. A lot of guys who think they are "smart", who think they are of the learned class. Everything is unexciting to them. The world is dead. The world is an economy and nothing else. These guys are guys with no spirit of life. They live in a calculator. This is everywhere. The overwhelming majority of "smart" people think like this. There is a limit to what they think may happen, what they think is possible, what they think the power of politics or the power of people and culture can achieve. Sure, there may be a detour here or there, there may be some weaving this way, weaving that way. But in truth, for them the destiny is set and you really can't change much. For most of these people, there is something that you could say that would elicit the response of "that isn't going to happen". This is the kind of thinking that we must reject. I am totally against this kind of approach. It is so boring. This is the dead world. This is a world fixed on the course as directed by someone else. People speak like this and there is almost an implication that the world they live in for the past 3 years, 5 years, 20 years, 50 years etc... was set by God. It was not.
It is hard to figure out how this approach and thought negotiates with history, with the presence of history. I think it essentially either negates history in a sort of strange world-denial or it treats history as something that was, but is not and will not be. It is almost like a theory about the Death of God. The Death of History. For most, they don't think about it too much, it is all just chalked up to being "different back then". For the thinker though, this must be confronted. For the smarter individual they may do some hemming and hawing and may do some qualifications but do they really believe what was, that being life and motion, spirit and world, could be? No, not really.
I am thinking about the denial of the miracle. I am thinking about religiosity, true faith. Really believing in God with all your heart. Believing in the miracle. I am thinking about the abolishment of the miracle and moving toward a world of machine and discussing masquerading as thinking and spirit. Schmitt talks about this. I think he has interesting ideas regarding the abolishment and war against miracle. As people have moved away from true faith, from the God of miracle and moved toward a dead God, a God of machine and predictability, tricking themselves into believing that daily miracles have a "rational explanation" or are just "nature" without the hand of God, we have also moved to a world without dreams. What a boring world! What a deeply untrue world.
Think of the world of the Bible. Think of the miracle. Think of the terrifying flood of the generation of Noach. Think of the revelation at Sinai. Think of creation. Do you believe it or do you have a "natural scientific explanation"? These "natural scientific explanations" explain away the magic, the miracle. It neuters the faith. It kneecaps life and makes it dead. It makes the religious person say "well all those miracles were just stories to teach a lesson, it doesn't matter if they happened, because it is just about teaching the lesson". This is a very convenient way to think but you are losing if you think this way. You are being tricked out of the miracle of life. Has it ever occurred to you that all of the scientific explanations are 100% correct but only correct in one way, in one category, in one shallow description of the world.
This is a crude explanation but bear with me. These kinds of "natural scientific explanations" are like the categorization of motor vehicles as suvs, trucks, motorcycles etc... To call a GMC Yukon a SUV is completely true. It is also very shallow and it only tells the smallest amount of the story. There are so many more details to what that car is. Calling it a SUV is totally true but it is not even close to the truth, it tells us only a very small amount about the car. These dead, boring "natural scientific explanations" are just like that. They tell the smallest amount of truth, the most boring, most life-less amounts of truth. They are true in one way, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. These explanations are actually supposed to fool us, they are like tests that are given to us to lure us away. Faith is not supposed to come easy.
Much of God's wonder is that he cloaks miracles in nature and then gives us the ability to understand nature. He does this all so as to give us eternally the choice of faith. He tempts us with narcissism and self worship. We fail this often. People really are so foolish to think that they really understand creation. We can only understand what is fathomable to our small minds. He is always testing us and hiding from us in ways, but once we open our eyes and look deeper there is such great mystery that lays beneath the surface. What does all this religious talk have to do with dreaming? It is about a direction, a feeling, an acknowledgement of miracle, wonder, possibility. It is about understanding something about the spirit of the world and the miracle of life and story. I believe that this deadness, this anti-dreaming, anti wonder - I believe it can be traced back to this denial of miracle, denial of faith and ultimately denial of God. I don't believe one has to be traditionally religious or devoted to touch these ideas, to consider this. This isn't about strict religious devotion as a necessity to understand this or wonder about this. This is beyond and deeper.
Life appears so predictable to so many that all chance, miracle, unexplainable event fades away. It is all predictable it is all boring, it is all something to be shrugged off, it is all uninteresting. With this also goes music, art, feeling, literature, relationships. All of the very stuff of life is touched by this cold, lifeless perception of a world uninteresting and lifeless, a future unchangeable and pre-determined not by God but by someone else, other than you. You eliminate yourself from the game with this thinking. Your whole world, future and possibility is all created and determined by someone else, not yourself. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would suggest that those who want most control would exacerbate this feeling so as to eliminate potential players in the game. The NPC (non player character meme) is good, and very true. But it doesn't go far enough. The amount of people that are implied as being NPCs is far too small.
People don't dream because of the techno-reality, people don't dream because a lack of belief in miracle and the world of miracle but they also don't dream because they don't dare to feel or be great, even in their own story. We each have our own story and we are all the main character in our story. We should want to feel the most we can. We should embrace our highest highs and our lowest lows. Our lives are our stories and our stories are dramas, they are incredible dramas. We shouldn't seek to minimize them to ourselves. We shouldn't only take the safe way. We shouldn't try to numb it all out with drugs. We shouldn't wage war on life and story. These are gifts from God. We should seek to make the great stories, great tales. Stories of redemption, humor, love and despair, struggle and triumph. When we take ourselves seriously, take our story seriously it doesn't just stop with ourselves, the individual. It expands. When we take ourselves seriously, when we believe in our story, believe in possibility, in miracle, when we believe that we can act in our little world, it expands to others. The spirit of dreaming found in the individual expands to the collective.
The lack of dreaming manifests economically as well. Today many people work faker and faker jobs that contribute nothing, make the worker miserable and are kafka-esque wastes of time. More and more of people's labor seems completely pointless and they are compensated just enough to survive, but never thrive. Their paycheck is stable enough to allow them to coast, but with a ceiling so low that they can never strive. The same is true at the top as well. There are many jobs in America today that pay such obscene amounts of money for the most disgustingly pointless (and often repulsive) work. The workers are unhappy but they are satisfied by the pay. Their lives are so stable, they never dream, they never dare. They have become so accustomed to the fake life that the fake job provides that to dream means to risk. To risk is to live. Best not to think too much. Best to coast, let the film finish after 20 minutes and let the credits roll until the end.
I read lots of books, old books - they remind me of dreams. I read new books as well of course. I read books that many others don't. There is so much to be learned everywhere. I read books from other peoples or nations and there is something that I learn here, there is an expansion that occurs in me. It reminds me of a world of dreaming. It is so easy to get trapped in our dead world. I feel it myself. I can literally feel my mind expand on Saturdays. I feel the horizon stretch. I feel as though I am on an island with no idea what else and who else is on earth. Anything is possible. Reading the dreams of others, ideas that stretch us to imagine, to wonder, to dream. That is my lifeline away from the cynical world of deterministic cog-ship.
The cynic reads what I write and he dismisses it. He laughs at it. He gets back to being a tool of the steamroller. He thinks it foolish, naive. I do not. I am not joking. I am deadly serious. Anything can happen in the future. Think of any great, massive, incredible historical event. Anything that changed civilization, a territory, a people. You have experienced these events in your life even if you can't tell. We all experience massive unpredictable change ourselves, even if it doesn't seem so. It is how you become you, your own personal cataclysmic, life altering events. Something large can always occur, maybe it is happening right now but because you are in it, you can't see it. The present is enveloping you so it is not possible to see.
I will close on a deceptively positive note. Think about the unnatural degeneracy that has wormed it's way in and taken hold of institutions in the west. Think about transsexualism. This is horrific, disgusting, degenerate, evil mutilation. This is so unnatural and sick. Yet, it has been adopted by so many institutions in the West in recent years. While I still believe a great majority of people find this to be horrific, many do go along with it. Think about that. If you can convince people to get on board with something so horrific, so unnatural, so sick and so twisted, you can almost convince them of anything. If this is possible, almost anything is possible. Anything. Now, many will say this is a negative thing, this is something which should give us pause and we should proceed with great trepidation. This is true, there is something very dark to the reality that people could become anything. Jordan Peterson has famously talked about the idea of understanding that you could be a Nazi Concentration Camp guard. He is getting at the idea that you may think you are so impervious, you are so great and moral but in truth you are capable of much more evil than you understand. This is so very true and very important but we didn't create this reality. This is simply reality, we are in it whether we like it or not, we didn't create it, it is true that you are capable of almost anything. The positive note is that just as you are capable of evil, you are also capable of incredible good.
If it is possible to get off the ground and instill in governments, corporations, schools, institutions the sick ideas of transsexualism - if this is possible, almost anything is possible. There is so much good, so much higher thinking and dreaming that people could be roused to imagine. The world could be so much more beautiful, right and Good. If the adoption of such unnatural sickness is possible, just as possible is the adoption of the Good, right and beautiful.
This is something that should inspire us, it should be a positive idea, something to remember. The game is not done, nothing is set in stone. If people can be convinced to believe the most unnatural and misery inducing filth, people can be brought to dream the most right, true and aspirational dreams. Dreaming requires us to understand that history is not over, your life is your story, your story is alive and you write it. Your people have a story and you are a part of it. Anything is possible. Your future belongs to you. The future belongs to those who seize it. The the future belongs to those who show up.
What does this have to do with style? What does this have to do with our style? Well, we who care about this style and this approach, we are dreaming a bit, we are hoping for something which is not currently, we are turning away from what the mass society says "is". Most men don't dress like us today. Most men dress in t-shirts and quasi "athletic" wear. What we see when we envision our style, what image we see of ourselves, of those before us, of man - all of this is something that is not affirmed by the broader society. We are keeping alive a memory, and also dreaming of a flourishing in the future. We are living a bit in a parallel world. It suffices for now, but we all wish it wasn't the way it is. We all wish that most men dressed like us. We all wish that aesthetically our world was beautiful. We all dream of a very different world than we inhabit. We are all, in dressing the way we do, living a bit in that dream, trying to make that dream reality. Rejecting a bit of the oppressive force of the current degraded state and reaching for, acting toward something else.
Our world is alive, our story is alive. We write our story and nothing needs to stay the same, nothing needs to be as it is. Everything can be different. Nothing is set in stone. When we dream, when we wonder, there must be no limitation, there must be no nagging bringing us down. There must be no naysayers. There must be no cynics. Dreaming must be totally sincere and totally heartfelt. Dreaming must be indignant at the thought of pre-deterministic deadness. We all can dream, we all have dreams within us, it is our choice whether we allow them to breathe.
If you will it, it is no dream.