|
As a dead poet it is quite an honor to be composing this dedication
for The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com, a novel written by my good friend,
band-mate, and colleague, Dr. Elliot McGucken. And it is an even
greater honor to be dedicating it to all of you, the stalwart
crewmembers of jollyroger.com. I'm up here in Boone right now, setting
up our third Classicals Caf? in the North Carolina mountains, and I
hope to have all of ye over in the near future. The other night I was
testing out the sound system in front of a few friends, and here's an
MP3 of my reading the introductory sonnets from The After Dark Field
Book. To tell the truth, I'm not all that much into poetry readings, as
I've always thought that words are far more intimate when they're read
in silence--ye can print all the sonnets out from here. But if words
must be read within the Jollyroger.com Classicals Caf?s, then I say
they shall be endowed with rhyme and meter, and they shall mean things.
Just like how Guns 'n' Roses' words always did.
How my name ended up in the title The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com, and how
my semblance ended up as a character in the book is a good story in
itself. During the heights of the fleeting grunge era, our obligatory
Chapel Hill band was called Drake's Raft. Around that time, Elliot
wrote a story about the Great-Books secret society that we three
Midwesterners from fly-over country had founded at Princeton, and he
kind of infused the narrative with some cool events from a summer's
East-coast tour which landed us back on the Princeton campus, where we
played our final gig in McCarter Theater. During the tour I started
writing sonnets--I could get a lot more down in fourteen lines of
iambic pentameter than I could in a typical grunge ballad, and I found
the sonnet to offer a far more profound vessel for a poet's
thoughts--it made people think, whereas our songs had only ever made
them feel or something. And there's no quicker way to a girl's heart
than through her mind.
One night in Vermont, Elliot came across the notebook with the sonnets
that I had been keeping to myself, all four hundred of which are
published here. At first glance he had thought they were song lyrics.
Then, while reading them, he got this idea for a plot centered about a
Princeton student who is called upon to avenge the Greats. The story
was called The Drake Raft Field Trip, and it eventually evolved into an
epic based on Hamlet, wherein the Great Books had been murdered and
villainous kings in the form of fringe feminists and duplicitous
postmodernists had come to inhabit Princeton's cultural thrones. And it
was I, Drake Raft, who had been called upon to avenge the brutal murder
of the Greats. Elliot had probably chosen me because I'd been lead
singer in Drake's Raft.
As a cultural flagship of the greater society, and with a rich
scholarly heritage and great gothic architecture haunted by reputable
ghosts including those of Fitzgerald, Einstein, Feynman, Joseph Henry,
"T.S. Eliot", "Salinger," and Madison, Princeton provided an ideal
setting for such a novel. A major battle in the revolutionary war had
been fought just down the road from the main campus, and an American
canon ball is lodged in the stone walls of Nassau Hall--it was fired by
the rebel troops when the Redcoats had temporarily occupied the
building during the battle of Princeton, just like the postmodernists
are now temporarily occupying it. Couple the rich heritage with the
pristine campus and all the majestic spires and sinister gargoyles, and
Princeton becomes the ideal stage for a contemporary tragedy, as
tragedy must always have a most noble backdrop.
To personify the murder of the Great Books, the character of Uncle Walt
was brought in. Uncle Walt is based upon a distinguished, traditional
scholar who was ousted while we were at Princeton--he was more of a
soldier than a philosopher, and Princeton's postmodernists defeated him
and his noble vision via their typical underhanded demagoguery, aided
by their anonymous accomplices in the liberal press. In the novel, the
Nobel-prize winning, villainous Elizabeth Sycorax has murdered Uncle
Walt and replaced him at the helm of Princeton's English department,
which she has transformed into the Cultural Studies and Creative
Writing department. My character, Drake Raft, is a senior at Princeton,
and he is called upon by Uncle Walt's ghost to avenge his murder.
Knowing that the Princeton establishment would be watching my every
move, I feigned suicide and set up a website, drakeraft.com, while
contemplating the method and motivation of my vengeance. This is the
simple premise that lights the blazing glory of the book, and Elliot's
tome proceeds to encompass the center and circumference of the eternal
verities in the language of our generation-- a generation which the
boomer marketing elite have branded generation-x and generation-y or
whatever, but which I prefer to call the renaissance generation.
It would be difficult to compose a classic within the ever-shifting
context offered by the popular culture which is relentlessly
dumbed-down, idolaterized, and commodified by the dominant postmodern
media and academic institutions. All the fleeting brands trumpeted by
the "savvy" postmodern lawyers, accountants, vulture capitalists, and
marketing executives would already be long gone by the time the book
was published--at least ten blockbuster movies would have been raved
about and forgotten by the time it made it into print. Thus Elliot took
care to root The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com in the eternal context that
we are today building at jollyroger.com. This deeper context, defined
by the likes of Shakespeare, Jefferson, Moses, Salinger, and Twain,
shall always form the popular culture of the community of eternal
souls, and those who wish to join it must begin by honoring it. As a
dead poet myself, I have overheard a few truths spoken in this
heretofore undiscovered country--those poets who honor the Greats shall
in turn be honored by them, and those who forget the Greats shall be
forgotten.
As jollyroger.com's noble context naturally alienated the aging
literary elite who momentarily benefited in the wake of the Great's
desecration and deconstruction, we are fortunate to have the internet.
For without the WWW, it would have taken a much longer time to
circumnavigate the postmodern literati's waterlogged fleet so as to
sign aboard a vast, global audience. Even now, the elites' postmodern
disciples of opinionated mediocrity, who received their basic training
in the debilitating creative writing workshops, are blindly rushing
forth to become the officers aboard the sinking publishing houses and
within the government ministries of literature. And they would rather
continue sinking into the void of their vapid popular-porn-culture
while publishing their own profitless, meaningless, esoteric literature
than honestly profit by publishing and promoting our exalting
words--for the postmodernist truly believes that God is dead, and that
there are no higher laws, and that all is politics, and thus that their
nihilism can be equal to classical literature, just as long as they
party with the appropriate critics. But as Huckleberry Finn once said,
you can't pray a lie.
Because they saw no beauty in Shakespeare, because they were blind to
God's greater glory, it was easy for them to adopt their pseudo-
scientific view that literature is a political and economic entity
rather than an aesthetic one. In their debased, vitiated arena, where
they prophesized that all is politics and that words could hold no
intrinsic meaning, it became true for their own literature. And thus
there is no reason for us, nor for our children, to read their fading
fads. Instead, from this day forth, we shall take care to point the
kids towards Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn.
As an artistic rendering of contemporary truths, The Tragedy of
Drakeraft.com pays full homage to the wild romance of lighting a fire
in postmodernism's infinite night. It's been an awesome rush launching
jollyroger.com and building the Classicals Cafes, while Windy and her
friends in architecture school up at MIT decorate them with all the
cool nautical stuff--personally I'm more into literature than
furniture. But just when it's getting dark out in the mountains on
these late November evenings, and I'm left alone with some old copies
of Shakespeare and Aristotle and Plato and some makeshift tables and
second-hand lamps in this run-down mountain mill, all of a sudden all
the old, mismatched furniture and rusty anchors and frayed ropes
transform themselves into classical antiques, and I find myself within
a castle. We just got our first shipment of coffee, and the aroma has
enhanced the late-night, lonely mystique, which haunts these words as I
set them down on my laptop, my fingers numb from the lack of heat. As
the shop is yet to open, she now exists in the perfect silent splendor
of a dream. This is the quiet before the show, and I almost fear to
touch it, but touch it we must. For we fall into love--we never rise
into it. If ye would like to run a Classicals Caf? of yer own, drop
me a line at drake@jollyroger.com! We have been called upon to avenge
the deaths of our proverbial fathers embodied by the Great Books, and
our most wicked vengeance shall be a renaissance.
But as is often the case, for a fire to be lit, the match itself must
be spent. History hath shown that a cultural renaissance is never born
without revolutionary thinkers, and revolutionaries run great risks as
they go up against the aging power structure which cares nothing for
right nor wrong, but only for power itself. And thus there's the darker
side to all our lofty pursuits, but the most sublime romance hath
always been tinged with inherent danger. And that's why I, Drake Raft,
must meet my death within The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com. For I had set
out following those ultimate truths which lie somewhere beyond the
entrepreneur's commerce and the soldier's duty. I had set out for the
White Whale.
I've always thought that perhaps the word tragedy in the title of
Elliot's novel refers to a generation being denied its classical
heritage and a literature of its own--a heritage and literature
censored not by physical force, but by subtle postmodern subterfuge and
desecration. Censorship may be accomplished by refraining from
publishing a work, and too, it may be accomplished by desecrating the
context that would surround the work, by which the work would take root
in and grow, and too, as the postmodern elite have shown, both methods
might be employed. For they removed the classics from the elementary
schools and high schools while appointing their nihilistic officers at
the cultural helms, and in the glare of PowerPoint presentations on the
merits of raising the bottom line by lowering the higher ideals, a most
effective censorship followed, wherein many of the children who have
become this generation don't even notice that the deeper, classical
context is missing. And the infrastructure that would have once
published and promoted meaningful literature, like the New Yorker and
the publishing houses, hath been demolished and replaced with feminized
magazines and content websites that exist primarily follow TV's
superficial lead, and make some bankers wealthy during an ponzi-IPO.
So many have grown accustomed to defining rebellion as agreeing with
aging marketing executives. We're all familiar with abortions, and
cynicism, and divorce, and the duplicitous artistic lies that the
secular boomers excuse as mere irony--what yesterday would have been a
moral atrocity is today commonly accepted when it is not honored and
revered. The leaders of Silicon Valley are blind to vast wealth to be
made by passing eternity's judgement, and thus the wealth shall belong
to those on Poetry Mountain. The postmodernists often sanctify decline
by allowing and encouraging women to participate in it--pure politics
and base profiteering at the expense of ideals is fine as long as it
can be demonstrated that a woman benefits monetarily. They make a show
about skirts in the courtroom, and then idiots are allowed to believe
themselves to be refined and enlightened by embracing the trite
plot--pretending to hold it in higher regard than the crucial sex, and
should ye criticize the general vapidness, it is because you're
intimidated by intelligent women. Children are denied their innocence,
and having lost their soul, adults are allowed to stay adolescents
forever. Postmodernists have a way of reducing everything to sex and
politics, and then when you criticize their methods and means, they
accuse you of only talking about sex and politics. As Hamlet said,
"They make their ignorance their wantonness." And the only way to
defeat them is not to argue with them, but to defund them while
exalting in the Greatest that has ever been thought and written. Let
them come for me, Drake Raft, as I am already dead--I shall teach them
things about their place in eternity that they should fear to know.
Without the Greats' context within the institutions that were built for
the sole purpose of transferring the Greats' context from one
generation to the next, so many of my peers pass through both the
church and the university without even knowing that there is a nobler
way. So it is that in a Godless context, a generation may be denied its
literature in the name of free speech as the First Amendment might be
used to defend pornography, Southpark might be considered "savvy" and
"intelligent," and Good Will Hunting might become the peak of
intellectual achievement, just short of Dogma. Those who grow up never
knowing what the true source of light is shall forever believe the
shadows to be the reality. And as shadows are layered upon shadows and
the fog rolls in, it becomes dark--so dark that the blind don't even
know they're blind, and forgive them we must, for the blind know not
what they do. They'll pass through this world without ever having seen
God's greater light--they'll live without ever having lived at all. It
would be prudent to fear a generation with no sense of the eternal
Word, and even more prudent to take every opportunity to introduce them
to it. For I, Drake Raft, am dead, and too many in this generation
don't even know it. But they shall soon find out, within the pages of
The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com.
II.
It is oft stated that the internet has been revolutionizing the world's
economy, and as a medium of the printed word, it makes sense that the
internet would allow entrepreneurial poets to revolutionize literature.
The simple purpose of all businesses is to serve the people with some
life-enhancing entity, and we felt that with the shortage of rhyming,
metered poetry and the scarcity of profound novels and rich literature
with strong plots and noble characters, we could quickly corner the
market and make a decent living by publishing and promoting such
timeless entities. We could marry our passions to our professions, make
our avocations our vocations, and serve the world with a renaissance.
Basic research in physics had lead to quantum mechanics, which when
applied to the silicon lattice lead to the engineering of the
fundamental component of the modern economy--the transistor. The
organization of transistors lead to the integrated circuit, the
grouping of integrated circuits led to computers, and the need to
govern computer operations ushered in the development of software. As
local computers were networked together via standardized hardware and
software, the internet was born. Then came the whole development of
content and commerce sites, including internet portals and shopping
destinations, and behold, jollyroger.com entered its own unique time
and place in the entrepreneurial progression of technology, as the
flagship of the WWW RenaissanceTM. And now the center of innovation has
progressed beyond the software and to the soul, and the latest
innovation is a classical oasis wherein the timeless aesthetic truths
are buoyed by science and technology. The internet is the ocean, our
serve is our hull, we stand at the helm with our programming abilities,
but that higher purpose is governed by our vision, and we fly the flag
of classical poetry. Innovation hath moved from Sand Hill Road in San
Franscisco to Boone, North Carolina--from the medium to the message,
from Silicon Valley to Poetry Mountain.
From physics, which has its roots in philosophy and religion, to
quantum mechanics, to the transistor, to the integrated circuit, to
hardware, to software, to the internet, to culture, to poetry. And all
of a sudden, the "New New" thing, the latest innovation in technology,
is the world's classical portal. For the first time in all of history,
there exists a corner upon this watery globe, accessible from all
latitudes, devoted to the higher ideals and eternal truths that keep us
free. The eternal is forever new, and thus while so often forgotten or
obscured in humanity's daily pursuits, the eternal marks both the
beginning and end of all innovations. Religion, science, then
technology, and on the web poetry's been set free.
And what better time than this for technology to allow traditional
poets to triumph in the literary arena? The infrastructure to support
contemporary classical literature had been eroded by the postmodern
ideology and its diverse manifestations throughout the greater culture.
Science and technology, which enabled the mass media based on sound and
video, amplified the more superficial, Dionysian, idolatrous aspects of
mankind, and when coupled with the postmodern theories which were
fostered by the misapplication of science to the soul, the written Word
was assaulted on all fronts. People read less in the popular culture,
and reading meant less within the academy. And yet, they still had this
marvelous potential and will to know their eternal soul. Hence the
cynicism and irony and apathy which afflicts this generation, which
shall never be satiated by the fleeting Dionysian alone--we long for
the eternal, and eternity is only known by thoughts, and thoughts are
only known by words. The deconstruction and desecration hath cleared
the field of our imaginations for a renaissance.
At first glance, it may seem ironic that as creative writing workshops
proliferated, the quality and profundity of the literature declined,
but upon closer scrutiny, this makes sense. To begin with, creative
writing cannot be taught, and thus the classes were most often lead by
dishonest hucksters and politicians. And the students who majored in
it, who were by definition blind to the irony, went on to become the
postmodern agents, editors, and literary government officials so as to
subsidize their ambitions. For it was generally the narrow-minded and
dull-witted who actually believed that creative writing was to be
learned from a fringe feminist rather than divinely inspired upon the
open ocean of human endeavor, and thus the postmodern conformers
flattered the feminist politician-poets, and they received the key
recommendations which landed them jobs in the presently sinking
literary industry.
While modern marketing gurus are promoting the fragmentation of
literary demographics and publishing and promoting more superficial,
celebrity-oriented work, we have shoved off in the opposite direction
with the vision of serving everyone with the timeless truths. Our goal
has never been to be all things to all people--but it has been to be
the best to everyone.
Throughout jollyroger.com's formative years, we gave agents and editors
ample opportunities to join us in venturing forth aboard the flagship
of the WWW Renaissance, and while some stated that they were delighted
in what we were doing, and while we signed with a couple prominent
agencies, we could find no editors at prominent houses who had the
courage, nor foresight, to sign their souls aboard. Many of them are
just now learning how to check their email. Because of indifference,
ignorance, and arrogance, they simply refused to believe that the good
people were ready for a renaissance, and as technophobe humanists, they
failed to see the vast potential of the internet to deliver this
cultural commodity. Because they sought to serve their egos rather than
the people, they foresook both their duty and their profitability. And
they left the WWW Renaissance for the physicists and poets.
It is no secret that a rather large contingent had boarded
postmodernism's sinking literary ships believing that God was dead, and
it has always been the tyrannical tendency of the postmodernist to
project their prejudices upon all things. Fresh out of creative writing
class, with their ambitions overshadowing their talents, many had gone
into the literary business for the sole purpose of negation--to tear
down that which was greater than themselves, for that was the trade
that they had been taught in postmodern academia. They were interested
in neither art nor commerce, but only in power, nihilism, and empty
prestige. And while the latter traits may work fine on a college
campus, where nobody takes anything too seriously except for their own
opinions, but out here, where eternity's wind blows, opinions do not
matter. Only the Truth can survive. Petty politics is no match for
honesty married to technology, and for "Oak planks of reason, riveted
with rhyme, designed to voyage across all of time."
There is a just symmetry underlying all existence, and the result of
the postmodern establishment's prejudices and apprehensions has been
that they have missed the boat--the WWW RenaissanceTM has been ours to
define and defend, to build and promote upon this wondrous new medium.
As is so often the case, the postmodernists' prejudices became their
prison. Only in their degraded, deconstructed context could they
pretend to be poets, but a poet is only as good as the higher Truths
that they pen. Neither wit, wisdom, nor poetry can be bought by
politics, nor pedantry, nor money.
In a free country, freedom belongs to the open minds and the free
spirits. The nihilism and pedantical politics, which is substituted for
the rhyming truth in the modern academy, cannot survive in the free
market. Only words which serve the noble heart and soul--the sublime
sentiments of the good, honest people of the world--ever survive in the
form of classics.
Reflecting upon the nature of our classical portal, it is easy to see
what the internet has done. It has removed the middlemen from standing
in-between the Greats and the people. And by middlemen I mean the
postmodern agents, editors, professors, reviewers, critics, and MBA's
who are taught to focus on the bottom line while ignoring the higher
ideals. As Chuck D. of Public Enemy said,
The majors are going to have to share the marketplace with the
public and with the artist. The Internet won't wipe them out, but no
longer will the majors make a 300 percent profit on CDs; no longer will
middlemen determine what the price of a CD will be or how the public
will view an artist. Because of the Internet, artists will bypass
retail, marketing, and promotional outlets and go directly to the
public. The middlemen and retail outfits will have to adjust.
For the Greats were the world's greatest communicators, and as J.D.
Salinger said about The Catcher in The Rye, they need no middlemen
critics--they market themselves, they publish themselves, they promote
themselves, and they signify themselves. There is nothing more intimate
than reading words, for when ye pick up a Great Book, nobody and
nothing stand between yer soul and the author's. Perhaps the most
beautiful thing about the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence were that they were written for the people, and one
doesn't have to go to Princeton, nor Harvard, nor Yale to understand
their sublime eloquence. One doesn't have to become a lawyer nor earn a
Ph.D. in public policy. All one has to do is read them, think about
them, and talk about them. A republic's freedom is staked upon an
educated people; and what better way to educate oneself than to read
the Greats, and what better way to inspire others to read them than a
renaissance?
There are few greater sins than standing between children and their
potential, and that is what the aging postmodern liberals are best at.
For only in a darkened context can they reign supreme, and thus they
delight in popularizing a thousand, thousand temptations while
deconstructing the context within which we are even able to define
temptation so as to defend the better angels of our nature. But now,
with the internet and the new millennium, their stonewalling, and
tenure, and petty power pyramids are fading fast in the cultural
context. In the deconstructed cultural context they attempted to foist
upon us, some might have lost the ability to judge their degraded
culture as offensive, but there is no denying that it is boring. And I
say that this rising generation refuses to be bored.
The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com can be read on its own, in the
contemporary pop- culture context, but unlike Dawson's Creek, it shall
offer the reader far greater enjoyment and profundity if it is read
within a classical context. We hope that the book becomes a portal out
to greater things. I would advise ye to read Hamlet, then read The
Catcher in The Rye, and then read Hamlet again. Read Moby *****, and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the Gospels, and Revelations. Read
the Founding Father's letters and their noble documents of State, and
then come back and read these words again. For the literature of the
WWW Renaissance must be read in the greater context of the Great Books.
And I promise ye this--within that noble context, life's greater,
eternal riches do reside, which neither time may tarnish nor moth
corrupt. Aye, aye then, me merry maties: as the postmodern fog clears,
we'll be navigating by God's greater beacons as we sail this
renaissance on home.
Drake Raft, The End of The Millenium, 1999
Just another poet back from the dead for a renaissance.
.
|
