Editor-in-Chief
RSS Feeds
Authors
- Kerry Bolton
- Jonathan Bowden
- Buttercup Dew
- Collin Cleary
- Jef Costello
- F. Roger Devlin
- Julius Evola
- Gregory Hood
- Juleigh Howard-Hobson
- Greg Johnson
- Jason Jorjani
- Ward Kendall
- Anthony M. Ludovici
- Trevor Lynch
- H. L. Mencken
- J. A. Nicholl
- Andy Nowicki
- James J. O'Meara
- Michael O'Meara
- Christopher Pankhurst
- Tito Perdue
- Michael Polignano
- Spencer J. Quinn
- Savitri Devi
- Fenek Solère
- Irmin Vinson
- Leo Yankevich
- Francis Parker Yockey
Archives
- March 2021 (22)
- February 2021 (79)
- January 2021 (81)
- December 2020 (88)
- November 2020 (86)
- October 2020 (131)
- September 2020 (82)
- August 2020 (81)
- July 2020 (88)
- June 2020 (92)
- May 2020 (83)
- April 2020 (82)
- March 2020 (82)
- February 2020 (75)
- January 2020 (80)
- December 2019 (91)
- November 2019 (91)
- October 2019 (89)
- September 2019 (70)
- August 2019 (76)
- July 2019 (74)
- June 2019 (61)
- May 2019 (69)
- April 2019 (72)
- March 2019 (63)
- February 2019 (54)
- January 2019 (78)
- December 2018 (64)
- November 2018 (63)
- October 2018 (70)
- September 2018 (61)
- August 2018 (73)
- July 2018 (58)
- June 2018 (58)
- May 2018 (69)
- April 2018 (60)
- March 2018 (84)
- February 2018 (54)
- January 2018 (76)
- December 2017 (66)
- November 2017 (84)
- October 2017 (79)
- September 2017 (73)
- August 2017 (72)
- July 2017 (61)
- June 2017 (56)
- May 2017 (56)
- April 2017 (54)
- March 2017 (65)
- February 2017 (57)
- January 2017 (59)
- December 2016 (52)
- November 2016 (68)
- October 2016 (61)
- September 2016 (62)
- August 2016 (51)
- July 2016 (63)
- June 2016 (75)
- May 2016 (63)
- April 2016 (65)
- March 2016 (75)
- February 2016 (82)
- January 2016 (82)
- December 2015 (94)
- November 2015 (97)
- October 2015 (75)
- September 2015 (77)
- August 2015 (73)
- July 2015 (66)
- June 2015 (69)
- May 2015 (64)
- April 2015 (72)
- March 2015 (66)
- February 2015 (63)
- January 2015 (81)
- December 2014 (61)
- November 2014 (64)
- October 2014 (79)
- September 2014 (60)
- August 2014 (53)
- July 2014 (72)
- June 2014 (53)
- May 2014 (43)
- April 2014 (51)
- March 2014 (50)
- February 2014 (55)
- January 2014 (64)
- December 2013 (59)
- November 2013 (71)
- October 2013 (64)
- September 2013 (60)
- August 2013 (64)
- July 2013 (51)
- June 2013 (69)
- May 2013 (74)
- April 2013 (76)
- March 2013 (66)
- February 2013 (65)
- January 2013 (78)
- December 2012 (64)
- November 2012 (87)
- October 2012 (76)
- September 2012 (72)
- August 2012 (92)
- July 2012 (71)
- June 2012 (77)
- May 2012 (76)
- April 2012 (78)
- March 2012 (69)
- February 2012 (56)
- January 2012 (72)
- December 2011 (69)
- November 2011 (67)
- October 2011 (98)
- September 2011 (61)
- August 2011 (77)
- July 2011 (67)
- June 2011 (60)
- May 2011 (63)
- April 2011 (66)
- March 2011 (65)
- February 2011 (65)
- January 2011 (84)
- December 2010 (87)
- November 2010 (74)
- October 2010 (78)
- September 2010 (75)
- August 2010 (57)
- July 2010 (71)
- June 2010 (36)
Online texts
- Departments
- Contemporary Authors
- Beau Albrecht
- Michael Bell
- Alain de Benoist
- Kerry Bolton
- Jonathan Bowden
- Buttercup Dew
- Collin Cleary
- Giles Corey
- Jef Costello
- Morris V. de Camp
- F. Roger Devlin
- Bain Dewitt
- Jack Donovan
- Ricardo Duchesne
- Émile Durand
- Guillaume Durocher
- Mark Dyal
- Guillaume Faye
- Fullmoon Ancestry
- Jim Goad
- Tom Goodrich
- Alex Graham
- Andrew Hamilton
- Robert Hampton
- Huntley Haverstock
- Derek Hawthorne
- Gregory Hood
- Juleigh Howard-Hobson
- Richard Houck
- Nicholas R. Jeelvy
- Greg Johnson
- Ruuben Kaalep
- Julian Langness
- Travis LeBlanc
- Patrick Le Brun
- Trevor Lynch
- Kevin MacDonald
- G. A. Malvicini
- John Michael McCloughlin
- Margot Metroland
- Millennial Woes
- John Morgan
- James J. O'Meara
- Michael O'Meara
- Christopher Pankhurst
- Michael Polignano
- J. J. Przybylski
- Spencer J. Quinn
- Quintilian
- Edouard Rix
- C. B. Robertson
- C. F. Robinson
- Hervé Ryssen
- Kathryn S.
- Alan Smithee
- Ann Sterzinger
- Robert Steuckers
- Tomislav Sunić
- Donald Thoresen
- Marian Van Court
- Dominique Venner
- Irmin Vinson
- Michael Walker
- Scott Weisswald
- Leo Yankevich
- Classic Authors
- Maurice Bardèche
- Julius Evola
- Ernst Jünger
- D. H. Lawrence
- Charles Lindbergh
- Jack London
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Anthony M. Ludovici
- Sir Oswald Mosley
- National Vanguard
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Revilo Oliver
- William Pierce
- Ezra Pound
- Saint-Loup
- Savitri Devi
- Carl Schmitt
- Miguel Serrano
- Oswald Spengler
- P. R. Stephensen
- Jean Thiriart
- John Tyndall
- Francis Parker Yockey
Recent Comments
- Memebro on What Culture Are Conservatives Trying To Protect From “Cancel Culture”?
- Memebro on What Culture Are Conservatives Trying To Protect From “Cancel Culture”?
- fenterlairck on White People Need to Start Fucking Again
- Francis XB on What Culture Are Conservatives Trying To Protect From “Cancel Culture”?
- MY FRIEND on What Culture Are Conservatives Trying To Protect From “Cancel Culture”?
- Cicada31 on Will Civilization Collapse?
- Autisticus Spasticus on White People Need to Start Fucking Again
- Vagrant Rightist on Conservatism Against the Avant-Garde
- Vagrant Rightist on What Culture Are Conservatives Trying To Protect From “Cancel Culture”?
- Tomorrow We Live on Folk:A Review
- 12AX7 on White People Need to Start Fucking Again
- Vehmgericht on What Culture Are Conservatives Trying To Protect From “Cancel Culture”?
- Captain John Charity Spring MA on What Culture Are Conservatives Trying To Protect From “Cancel Culture”?
- Reb Kittredge on Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 326 Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson
- Scott Weisswald on White People Need to Start Fucking Again
A Lookout’s Letter
I
All summer long the lookout in his tower
scans the huge green wilderness around him
and if he notes a faint new wisp of smoke,
he sends his warning to a distant crew.
Each day he weighs the moisture in the air
and soil and marks the wind’s velocity;
from spring till fall he spends his time alone,
anticipating fire and lightning storm.
Should he suspect a hidden snag within,
he has time enough to check his alidade,
although his private smoke may prove a false
alarm. Yet even if he finds that he
has set himself on fire, whom could he call?
(He’d better write a note to warn himself.)
II
So, perched on Bald Mountain in a cage on stilts,
a thousand valleys running from my feet
towards the groves and canyons of the forest,
I may address myself in confidence:
“Dear You (who are myself), how shall I start?
No need to gloss the fact that we are one—
The soul’s charade here lacks an audience—
the mask removed we meet our mirrored self.
Between the distant forces of birth and death,
there’s time to write an honest line or two;
Though men forge birthday odes and epitaphs,
poor fact itself can be more fabulous.
So trace while you have time a truthful note
and tell your self the news you’d like to hear.
III
No random letter for the world’s sharp eyes,
composed in lofty scorn or secret rage
(sealed with a sidewise glance toward the distant dead
and mailed with fond hope to the fit though few),
Say what you will in any way you like;
Discard all rhyme, invent new songs or psalms,
devise a dozen happy epitaphs:
the news you serve must please your self alone.
Let public men who lie in private rooms
give public versions of their secret dreams.
Your only guide to correspondence need be:
Should you survive to three score years and ten,
will what you witnessed two score years before
satisfy you as a true report?
IV
Before I took an inventory
of the town, its blazing shops and streets,
and said goodbye to all the ghosts I met:
The eyeless multitudes that haunt the night,
dog-souled fellows, mute with hope and world-fear,
pale bloated lads who float in second-hand dreams,
the lean and the lame who yearn for soul-warmed beds—
all yesterday’s poor masterless young heroes.
Trapped by time they drift downstream and bear
their cramps, erections, nerves, stigmata, scars,
ever in search of a mothering womb
and tremulous with fear of a second birth.
Before I left time’s overcrowded banks,
I said goodbye to all the ghosts I met.
V
To step with an adieu out of the tower
and fix the fatal accident of birth?
Wingless, to fly for one ecstatic moment,
and then rejoin an indifferent earth?
Were that no wiser than to watch all night
the far bright sparks of a blind world machine
trace the same eternal formulas
across the mute blackboard of space and time?
My eyes are glazed by the cold glittering riddle
of the heavens, the zodiac, the galaxies,
and our little moon—pale schizophrenic guide
to millions of habitable stars—
high signs from a lost fortune-teller’s book
whose meaning no one knows and none may learn.
VI
I saw the flash from the first secret test
from my perch on Bald Mountain on a midsummer night
when the black sky around me was suddenly splintered
by dazzling rays that crisscrossed in all directions
as if the dome of heavens had cracked and a hand
furiously scribbled letters of fire in the sky.
I could not understand the strange signs of the time:
Three weeks later, even the stones spoke in Hiroshima.*
“Lo, I have become Death, destroyer of worlds,”
The chief tester at Yucca Flat quoted the Vedas…
How would man use his new prize? I asked myself.
Too steep the step before him, by a thousand years.
Too much has he learned, yet too little for wisdom.
Too early, too soon, our lad’s not yet ripe for it.
VII
I did not know what I was witnessing,
alone on a midsummer night in the wilderness:
Whom could I warn in a tardy lookout’s report?
Now everyone knows yet few seem to understand.
Now men are chained to the new idols they built
and forge the future by old altars of fear,
transmuting the strange power in the elements
but never transmuting the stranger heart of man.
They learned to steal the fire that burns in the sun;
they can teach a lump of clay to bury a city.
But which of them can build a blade of grass,
invent a bird, or teach the unraveling atoms
to clothe a valley of radiant bones in flesh
and raise dead children to walk a green earth again?
VIII
Who may decode our letter in times to come
and ken the fading clues in our alphabet?
Who will find and forward our petition,
signed by the young and the old in our lost towns?
“We the living who would not die by fire,
hurled from the sky by robot rocketeers,
we call to our envoys in the house of nations
and their masters who hold the secrets of power:
Make chain reactions of new enlightenment
to spread to all the living in a healing stream,
before the eyeless are stoned by the blind.
Do not split the atom to give each a share of death;
divide it so each may share the earth and sky,
and a portion of life, sweeter than any yet known . . .”
IX
My glass house trembles in an autumn gale,
forked lightning jabs a black and angry sky;
I disconnect the tower’s aerials
and wait to hear the thunder’s grinding laughter.
Whom could I signal in the troubled air?
Whom could I warn from a dark mountain-top?
To entertain my ruminating self,
I sharpen my blunt pencils to a point.
Yet who will read the small charred letters left
by fire-seekers who ignored the lightning?
Vessels of fact or vassals to great fictions,
lost lookouts in a tower, blind like my self,
Time’s thunder-clap has turned them back to dust,
and all their words are less than last year’s smoke.
X
Now that the rains have come I find myself
ruminating on the simplest things:
Why should sweet water fall from the darkened sky
instead of particles of dust or stars?
Where do the deer hide in a thunderstorm?
Do they find a mothering rock by the lightning bolt?
When the angry earth itself dissolves in darkness,
do old green dreams of spring still glow in their eyes?
Could I have turned my glass house on Bald Mountain
into a shelter from the closing fire season?
Saved one bright branch from time’s eroding eyes?
Built a wall against the autumnals of the heart,
against the weather which undoes the flesh,
the knots within, the final lightning fires?
XI
They’ve done their worst to spill me from the tower,
the raging winds and rains and thunder-storms;
the huge green wilderness is wet again—
my season’s done, it’s time for me to leave.
Hail and farewell, enduring Sierra peak
and transient cage on stilts of steel and wire;
Farewell, my hundred-foot ladder; pulley and bucket
that brought both bread and cheese to a spy of smokes.
Adieu, old landmarks that befriended me.
Gray Eagle, Bunker Hill, the Rubicon,
Robb’s Peak, Bald Mountain, Plymouth, Pino Grande,
the thousand hills of El Dorado Forest.
For one brief season I have marked your smokes:
Our dust will drift and meet and meld in time.
XII
Although I wrote these lines to warn my self
to set no world on fire by chance or choice
for entertainment in the lull between
a mortal fire-season’s lesser smokes,
I’d like to send a message to Jehovah,
if he were listed in the local Who’s Who,
to entertain him in his longer season,
his First Day Fumings and his Judgment Days.
Or, if I had an envelope to hold
the warning needed by my many selves,
I’d mark it with two billion names and send
each late survivor my condolences;
I’d post my letter in the nearest fire,
addressed to you, in care of anyone . . .
Note
* The first atom bomb was detonated at Yucca Flat, Nevada on July 16, 1945, and its refractions reached across the Sierra Nevadas as far as Bald Mountain and beyond; on August 6, an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing 100,000 men, women, and children.