Uncivilisation

The Dark Mountain Project recently published a paperback edition of their 2009 Manifesto.  You can order a copy here or read it on-line.  (I bought the paperback.)  In case you’re not inclined to follow the link, I’ll post sections over the coming days and weeks.   It starts with a poem:

Rearmament

 

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935