The Ancient Flame

Civilisation, memory, and my problematic haircut

Dante’s Dream at the time of the death of Beatrice - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1856

I have been described in rather invidious terms for my haircut, of all things, and so here is an essay about the significance of historical memory to the understanding of the State we are in.

It also contains an explanation for my hairstyle.

---

Statue of King Alfred the Great, Winchester

Memory and civilisation

Civilisation is a habit which can be forgotten. At times, it has been. Many of us are beginning to realise we live in such a time now.

The subtraction of the memory of our civilisation, what it was, how it was founded, what it meant and who made it, and how this erasure and replacement has remade us - is fundamental to the political technique of the 20th Century.

This means they take so much from you that you forget it was there in the first place. You forget what was, what we were, and all the beliefs supplied in the place of our shared tradition and identity are all that remains to believe in.

Many of us do not know what we have lost. The scale of this loss is breathtaking. To begin to investigate it is to open an inquiry into a crime so vast it has no name.

This crime is called “progress”. It is the reason for the morally inverted pseudo reality which we inhabit today, and which has been created to manufacture belief in a political economy which is in fact a weapon of mass destruction.

This is delivering us into a sort of hell on earth. Our condition in this progress to damnation can be described as purgatorial. Yet there is a way out of purgatory, and it goes up, not down. I will recommend here that looking back and remembering is a means of looking beyond the midst of modern life.

Today I will speak of the recivilising power of memory.

---

Some terrible person captured on camera by The Lotus Eaters.

The Shocking Sight of an Englishman

To bring this to the personal level, this is why the sight of an Englishman is so shocking - and even offensive - to many people today.

To accommodate this appalling sight into some framework of meaning requires an equally shocking frame. I have been compared to and attached to Adolf Hitler for my problematic haircut and counter-Liberal views.

One of many comments saying this about me. Do not be beastly to these people, please. They cannot help it. They see with the eyes they have been supplied. We must help them to see beyond that product line.

The Hitlerisation of anyone who objects to the politics of national suicide is a familiar trope. Where would these people be without Hitler? It is absurd, but also effective, as this prism has been supplied to refract a poisonous death ray into the image of anyone who dares to disagree with the prophets of “progress”.

I would like to offer an explanation for my haircut which does not fit into this insidious, malicious and rather hysterically directed device.

My haircut is that of an Englishman.

---

Lt. Col. Alfred Daniel Wintle MC

“I get down on my knees every night and thank God for making me an Englishman.

It is the greatest honour He could bestow.”

So said Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC, devout Christian, fierce patriot, and unquestionable hero of both the First and Second Great Unpleasantness.

The men he commanded in the trenches of the Great War had undercuts like mine, to keep the lice off. You can see these haircuts in “Peaky Blinders”. They are English haircuts, mainly for the ranks¹.

The chap on the left has a haircut rather like mine. Image from the National Archive of New Zealand.

AD was a cavalry officer in two terrible wars.

I was a reservist in the infantry and as a part time soldier have no right to stand beside his outstanding example of gallantry and invincible Englishness.

AD was a valiant Christian soldier and the last officer to be locked up in the Tower of London.

AD did not escape controversy in his time.

AD’s life is an improbable record of extraordinary events which have secured his reputation as one of the greatest Englishmen of modern times, and perhaps ever to have lived.

Here is a picture of him with his wife, later in life. His hair has grown out a bit, but it is shaven at the sides and is parted in a manner likely to trigger the conditioned responses of the differently-saned².

Why is the sight of a traditional Englishman so terrifying to these people?

We are not dead, for a start, though dear AD has indeed joined the majority.

It is alarming to the mad revolutionaries that we are still here, that we can remember who we are and recall the glorious deeds and exceptional character of the men who came before us.

It shakes them that we are not ashamed to be English. And Irish, and Welsh - and Scotch³.

In fact, we thank God that we are. Just like AD did.

---

The Pisan Cantos - hard going, but what an adventure.

WHERE IS MEMORY TO BE FOUND?

Civilisation is a matter of vigilance. Good needs its soldiers, too.

Not all battles are fought with bullets, however. The war on our civilisation requires a sort of soldiering which speaks to the centre of our selves, to what is in us yet outside of time.

The duty to defend our civilisation is a matter of remembering against a current which washes us into nothing.

The imagist poet Ezra Pound wrote a line about this in his insuperable Cantos.

Fragment from Canto LXXVI

“Dove sta’ memoria” asks Pound. Where is memory to be found?

The line recalls a love poem from the 13th century.

That poem is “Donna me prega” - “The Lady Asks Me”, by Guido Cavalcanti⁴.

Six Tuscan Poets - Giorgio Vasari, Italy, 1544

It is beautiful. It is a song across time which pierces the heart.

In doing so, it sings beyond it, spearing our longing for love and meaning into the avenues of time, which was our time and our memory of it, to whisper of something timeless.

If you read that poem alongside another poem by Pound, you can see how he weaves the memory of our European civilisation into the making of his Cantos.

Pound’s Canto about memory and where it is to be found is also an account of corruption in a State of war.

The deliberate annihilation of our memory of who we are, of what we were, and of the fact there is a meaning to our being beyond the times we now inhabit and their degrading standards is a crime against the soul of our people.

---

Saint Michael, Archangel. Note the balance in his hands, and the remedy in the other. That is the sword of Truth.

REBALANCING OUR TIMES

This crime cannot be corrected with hatred. Injustice is an imbalance at heart, and to rebalance these times so out of joint requires a love beyond that of the self.

It is a love beyond the moment, a passion which is agonising as it is exquisite to suffer. It is the love of what has been taken from us all. It is this we must remember, so our civilisation can be restored.

Much of it is gone, but it is not forgotten. In this time of universal subtraction, simply and firmly refuse to go down. Stand up and raise your gaze beyond the mire. We were better than this rotten State, we still are. The reason we are so demoralised is because demoralisation is a part of how we are ruled.

When morale dies so does the effort.

Get up. Get out of the mud and look up. Never falter, do not be afraid.

Never give up, and never forget.

Together, we will remember our civilisation, and we shall not let the light go out in our time.

---

“The lady chid me: “Why dost thou burn only so with affection for the living lights, and dost not look at what comes after them?” - Dante, Purgatorio, XXX

‘Conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma’

“I know the sign of the ancient flame ”

Dante Alighieri -Purgatorio XXX

---

1. If you would like to know what I think about war, and why I am not a fan despite my love of the British Army, you can read my views about that here.

THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD

2. See also Noel Coward, George Formby, and many of our soldiers past and present.

3. I know. “Scotch”. I do this on purpose and refuse to elaborate beyond the amusing reason supplied by AJP Taylor.

4. “Donna me prega” is obviously a song, which is explained in this essay from the Ezra Pound Society.

Pound shows in his “ABC of Reading” that poetry is song, image, and the additional enchantment of the selection and arrangement of words. His book is an education in a precious sort of beauty.