So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning of the fact -- which can only be disputed by vain phrases -- that the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects -- they had religious laws governing godward relations as they had other laws governing human relations, but there was no specifically Roman saga of gods -- was something which was not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul -- Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization.

Personal Politics

[ Perhaps, Americans made mistakes, but as Lenin liked to say "The only ones who do not mistakes are the ones who do nothing." Every war America fought in the last and already the new one was fought in good faith... ]
It will take a century or two to see XX century.
At the times of libertarians, it's coming, the politics, like faith, must be personal -- and therefore, private. Like love.
Anatoly.

Nov. 5, 2002. I didn't vote today for the first time since I got my citizenship. I couldn't force myself to vote for the libertarians; I read the Alaska voting brochure with the profiles of the candidates -- what a collection of losers! Most of them even without education and real job! No more money for LP, but I can continue my own personal libertarian politics! [Atomic, daily politics -- century 21]

Do I have to have this (new) directory? Don't I have enough work with my pages? I have to, if I am not about to vote.

Why not at least consider republicans? For the same reasons as I will never be able to vote for democrats. No to any form of socialist ideology. Enough of those ten years of my membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I had to ran away from myself, to defect. Thanks a lot.

... How difficult it is to be on the right side.

"Maybe, I am lucky, or simply smart..." I think about it since 9/11 2001 of the American Age. I am in the right place at the right time. And God indeed blessed America giving her this test of big history. Maybe, now the country can cure itself from this soft communism, maybe the world can see what a gift to all was this American Century.

...

Humans are social by definition, i.e. political. If you read my nonfiction you know that I understand politics in postmoderm traditions. Pomo Politics must be personal, no less than sex and religion. I defected in 1980 following my own needs -- could it be seen as a political statement? Yes, everything is a message (see semiotics). In acting theory we call it "motivation" -- why a character does what he does. Or even better to recall Stanislavsky's formula for Method Acting -- Private in Public.

What does it mean? Look at my webpages. I try to express myself and do it on commercial servers (I paid for it), not on the "free" for faculty University of Alaska supercomputer. I have my own ideology, which I do not want to mix with any other group ideology. I belong to my time with its limitation and this embedded cultural values and mistakes are more than enough for me.

Yes, I try to bring together my different web-projects, books and textbooks, research and teaching, writing and reading, but I want the pages have intellectual, not cyber-links. If you travel to Film600 directory you see that finally the metaphysics by Anatoly are getting in touch with my classes. Film with Theatre, Theory with Directing and etc.

I don't see the future of this new direction (end of 2002), but why not to form this big narrative, which is nothing short of my own life?

Film Directing Analysis Theory Glossary Concept Montage FilmMaking Film600 Classes Mining Film Film Books Acting One BioMechanics Method for Directors StageMatrix: Directing Script Analysis

(Spengler) A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; upstream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle, downstream, a future even so dark and timeless -- such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these differ in creative Power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, Bantu's are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of this order. But over this surface, too, the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, lessen again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came up for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came up for the Trade Unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Trade Unionist. Then they came up for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, by the time no one was left to speak up.
Martin Niemoller. A German theologian, W.W.II

In Russia, they came first for the nobles, and I did not speak because I was not an aristocrat. Then they came up for anarchists I didn't speak up, because I was not an anarchist. They came up for Christians, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Christian.

In China, they first came for the rich, and I wasn't. Then they came up for non-communists, then -- for the college graduates, then for people with glasses. Twenty millions died.

In America, when they came up for the internet porno users, and I did not speak up because I wasn't. Then they came up for the drug users, and I didn't speak -- I wasn't a drug user. Then they came up for the hunters, I didn't hunt. Then they came for the smokers, and there were no one left to speak up.

"I. That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights..." (Virginia Constitution). Free and independent.

...of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

That was two centuries ago. In another country.

We should re-write our constitution, there are many models already tried; all we need is to learn from the great teachers -- Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

HamletDreams 2001

No, we do not need Swift, we have our press and TV....

Read nonfiction files, while this directory grows. Some of the books-in-progress are in the links of this new mini-popup window "Thinkers" (from Plato to Pomo). Sorry, folks, I don't know when I will get back to this directory. I live on the level of aesthetics, not ethics, never mind the politics.
Nevertheless, I am a political animal -- and I have children -- and I am still alive. So, I write about politics. The Old Europe betrayed herself in the last century (20th) and it is expected that she betray the world... Maybe there is another Europe, which can appreciate Europe. And the world.
I was Soviet, Russian, European... Maybe I should say "East European" since Europe is the past. "Sunset of the East" (American title) originally had a different name "Sunset of Europe" ... sad, sad, sad.

The List: The Canadians (#3 visitors -- Your anti-American stand during the Spring 2003 made me rethink the "Anti-American" trend, its nature).
And Turkey (which was protected for decades from the Soviets) -- way down on the list of surfers to my webpages.
And the Ukraine -- way down on the list!

BTW, you can open the cqcounter (at the bottom) on my film pages and see for yourself who is visiting filmstudy.net.
Sorry, I don't have it on theatre pages.... (Spengler) A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfillment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained -- the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual -- the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egyptianism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like a worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the East of light and air.

This -- the inward and outward fulfillment, the finality, that awaits every living Culture -- is the purport of all the historic “declines,” amongst them that decline of the Classical world which we know so well and fully, and another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us today -- the decline of the West. Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age....

It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop Bernward. The spring wind blows over it. "In the works of the old-German architecture," says Goethe, "one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing." Childhood speaks to us also -- and in the same tones -- out of early-Homeric Doric, out of early-Christian (which is really early-Arabian) art and out of the works of the Old Kingdom in Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. There a mythic world-consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against all the dark and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself for the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last achieve and know.

The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning and fears -- witness the ornament of Romanesque-Gothic church porches of Saxony and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the Dipylon vases.

But there is now the full consciousness of ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidae, in the age of Justinian, in that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvelous in its ease and self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfillment suggested itself in such moments were created the head of Amenemhet III (the so-called "Hyksos Sphinx" of Tanis), the domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of Titian. Still later, tender to the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart.

At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave. The spell of a "second religiousness" comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun -- those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.

In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a history-less mankind slowly nests itself.... Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it -- but so it is.

The 'contemporary' English-American politics have created through the press a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted to him, so that he must think, will, and act as a ruling personality somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit.... Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of this monstrous drama.... The idealist of the early democracy regarded popular education as enlightenment pure and simple -- but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the coming Caesars of the world-press. The last century [the 19th] was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this century blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them. Life will descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism, and the world will be better for it....

Next: pomo : U.S. or us

Let me repeat myself (from Film600 and script.vtheatre.net):

Where teaching and studying (research) meet --

Theme-thought, according to different playwrights (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and so on) and directors (Fillini, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Bergman pages).

Connections with other themes (list): family, gender and sex...

Finally, my own practical investigations: shows.vtheatre.net (only recently I began to make themes pages, Don Juan 2003, for example).

And the nonfiction (writing), of course: HIM, Father-Russia, PostAmeriKa, Self, POV, Tech (gatepages are in WRITE directory).

Yeah, yeah, there is more -- "philo" pages, metaphysics: in theatre theory directory, for instance (topics-bar: space, time and etc.)
Plus, Virtual Theatre and Book of Spectator!

Web? Oh, this is just medium. Like stage, screen, writing...

...

(Spengler) In all history, so far, there is no second example of one Culture paying to another Culture long extinguished such reverence and submission in matters of science as ours has paid to the Classical. It was very long before we found courage to think our proper thought.... The history of Western knowledge is thus one of progressive emancipation from Classical thought, an emancipation never willed but enforced in the depths of the unconscious. And so the development of the new mathematics consists of a long, secret and finally victorious battle against the notion of magnitude.

The separate sciences -- epistemology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy -- are approaching one another with acceleration, converging towards a complete identity of results. The issue will be a fusion of the form-worlds, which will present on the one hand a system of numbers, functional in nature and reduced to a few ground-formulae, and on the other a small group theories, denominators to those numerators, which in the end will be seen to be myths of the springtime under modern veils....

The final issue to which the Faustian wisdom tends -- though it is only in the highest moments that it has seen it -- is the dissolution of all knowledge into a vast system of morphological relationships.... The uniting of the several scientific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space ... is the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore. And then, weary after its striving, the Western science returns to its spiritual home.

The sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of physical theory, about the meaning of the energy-principle, the concepts of mass, space, absolute time, and causality-laws generally... it is a doubt affecting the very possibility of a Nature-science. To take one instance alone, what a depth of unconscious Skepsis there is in the rapidly increasing use of enumerative and statistical methods, which aim only at probability of results and forgo in advance the absolute scientific exactitude that was a creed to the hopeful earlier generations....

Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment forever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the machine, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made "perpetuum mobile" the Promethus-idea of the Western intellect. For us, the first thing is ever the working hypothesis -- the very kind of thought-product that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the Faustian....

The Second Religiousness

Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban countryside, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect and closes with a finale of materialism in the world-cities. But even these last chords are strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically. The belief is belief in force and matter, even if the words used are "God" and "world," "Providence" and "man."

Unique and self-contained is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfillment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it -- this is what distinguishes our particular "return to Nature" from all others. That "Knowledge is Virtue" Confucius also believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, but "Knowledge is Power" is a phrase that possess meaning only within the European-American Civilization. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the centre of the system; the Will is an albumen-process; and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism and what not are elevated into the fitness-moral which is the beacon of American businessmen, British politicians and German progress-Philistines alike -- and turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by faith.

Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul's health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that ... the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) -- then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.

In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword. First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical role is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to "second religiousness," which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.

Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest. But the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.

...

This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything. (So far as the Western Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are still many generations short of that point.) The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political constitution of Late Civilization.... Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself -- it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness -- only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the springtime become visible and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.

It is perhaps possible for us to make some guess already as to these forms, which (it is self evident) must lead back to certain elements of Gothic Christianity. But be this as it may, what is quite certain is that they will not be the product of any literary taste for Late-Indian or Late-Chinese speculation, but something of the type, for example, of Adventism and suchlike sects.

But with the coming of the emperor-cults there begins at once, in each of the two, an attempt to bring the Second Religiousness into fixed organizations, which, however named -- sects, orders, Churches -- are always stiff re-constructions of what had been living forms of the springtime, and bear the same relation to these as 'caste' bears to 'status.'

Liberty is always unfinished business. --anonymous | my.telegraph.co.uk/anatolant [politics/write]

2004 & After projects: Demons: Dostoevsky, Camus & Me -- War of Terror texts: HIM web-biography in focus: filmmaking 101 reading: The Decline of the West, two volumes, 1922 and 1926 Links Millenium Manifesto : youtube

... reading (and re-reading) his books since I was 15.