A New Iconic Image

I'm always impatient with intellectual discourse, it leaves me cold, and when I attempt to construct one, it doesn't feel authentic. It's just not my kind of thing. Yes, I like to determine which ideas and formulas are valid, and useful, and which are not, but I'm a romantic, and so I like to numenize them, make them into potent symbols, images, slogans, full of magic, mystery, mysticism. My mind generates these readily, whereas discursive writing is laborious, and impossible if I don't feel it, but writing either goes or it doesn't, while making a decent drawing of an image, and from that into a finished object for display, well, that's torture, and takes forever. But here, I will write about an image-- though some day, I'll probably make a display-object of it-- I'll add it to the list of images to process.

Recently, it came to me to put the man-figure which the German Romantic artist Fidus used to symbolize Man as the conveyer of cosmic Geist (vital spirit-energy), inside the ecology symbol (eco-logo, Edhlifrith takn or bind-ring). This man-figure, which I described in "The Drygand as a Tree", now would represent the Drygand, or anyone like him, upholding the Edhli-- the Biosphere-- on the one hand, and being joined to it in harmony, on the other, this being the necessary, ideal relationship of Man to Nature-- not just 'one with Nature', which notion can easily become 'I am Nature, so I can do whatever is natural to me (i.e., whatever I want), and not 'apart from Nature', like a steward (an external manager), but rather a subtle relationship with Nature which includes both our naturalness, and also our alienness, those aspects of us that make us very dangerous to Nature. In short, of a monster who turns his powers to good purpose, which is the best we can do, and not easy of accomplishment.

Unfortunately, as long as we exist, we will be monsters capable of ultimate evil, and yet also of great good. Time will reveal whether the good in us can stably control the evil in us, our power over Nature. We need to go all-out and see if we can do this, instead of, like many do, just give up before we've even tried our darndest. This is the Age of Ecology we're living in, after all-- 40 A. E. now-- and that is what is required of us, to organize as a species to save this planet from our monstrous selves. This, then, is the reality-movie of our time, and we must not be merely spectators and critics of it, but its academy award-winning performers-- or vanish forthwith from the screen forever! A great movie with a happy ending, or the death of cinema? It's up to us!