Morality and the War of Invisible Forces (draft)

Material warfare is the elimination of nations in which the inhabitants cannot be destroyed, wherein their being must be elevated to the force of the earth which has taken on a will of its own. From this perspective the anthropocene appears as little more than the footsteps of Persephone, man's tinkering with the minor effects of Dulle Gret's plunder. The old grandmother's switch must become more threatening with the increased appearance of beasts who appear at her steps.

Nature can never be pushed back, this is the great lesson of Roman military territory: where the sacred ground is abandoned nature builds its own walls. Both the city and its surroundings must be given their due, each must hold its landscape. The military technician does not see things this way, all is subject to the order of mobilisation, the deep trenches of Flanders form the borders of the society of nations - the gaze of nature's substratum as the total landscape.

Such borders form an eternal presence, and they appear within the only replicable war. Where the scorched stone is overlooking forever, and nature appears free of all material qualities. Death is the only enemy, hence the immensity of sacrifices with no potential of gain. It is merely a duty, an ethic, power enslaved to functioning.

The fortress that is an impossible territory for men becomes the home of lesser creatures. Poles of the eternal system and the ghost of a flea. City and state abandoned to the will of mercenaries.

Where the technician finds himself within the impenetrable fortress he appears as one of God's creatures. The architecture of evolutionary theory as the bad taste of the mole. Also in this, the moral judgement of Sodom in its transitional phase.

Defeated gods return to monstrous and primordial qualities. A city may choose its god, but with its fall the world is returned to the conflict of gods who will never again find peace. Betrayal threatens as an eternal force, thus the systematic approach of realpolitik.

In lands of mercenaries the king never has to make the patriarchal choice of sacrifice. Thus his kingdom becomes that of a foreign land - death reigns, and war persists as a law of enemy submission. Man becomes sutured to his dying horses, as Machiavelli determined was a law of necessity.

In da Vinci's Neptune and Anghiari the curse of Machiavelli's Chiron begins to appear. The force of the impossible monster - man, the unkillable, and his dominion.

This is what is lost to us in art without festival, all the work that is formed of the age, where stone is formed as if in war rather than worn away by the loss of feeling. Many works must be interpreted if one is to grasp the mysteries of time that are carved through the artist and his being. Thus the forming of monstrous qualities once his art begins to escape him. "Van Gogh as Prometheus." He must imagine himself as a warrior, but the Devil of Cologne never strikes him. Faustian culture can only be seen from the eyes of the owl who takes flight.

Thus art and war form as one. The unkillable takes of his sacrifices, but returns them to heroism. Thus the names of the dogs of Actaeon listed as a catalogue of ships. The impenetrable fortress must become a mobilised territory if it is to survive - the tank as the trojan horse of idyllic castles. Then the endless list of names, where newspapers gave way to the endless taxonomy of death. All is reduced to the abstract memory of what once lived.

The death of the monarchs is prefigured in the architecture. Gothic cathedrals rise from the earth like the jewels and spike's of the king's crown. Yet, there is also a quality of a husk, the old architecture evacuating its dominion. This is clarified when looking at the Sagrada Familia, where the decorated buttresses, the hellish and persephonic extricate, become the entirety of the skeletal formation. Little imagination is needed to see that no gamble with the devil would be needed for the cathedral's return to ruin - or the rising of the Leviathan from the sea. Power has been shed, and Christianity introduces its own forced conversion which will also, eventually, extend to the continents.

The desert appearance of the Cathedral of Ypres and its Cloth Hall is striking, yet this should be situated next to de Maistre's comments on war and nature. Such devastation is a necessity of Christian theology and art, only in ruin is the will to nature complete.