Dude, Where’s My Van?

Chapter 1: The Romance of Revolt

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” 

In the original Greek, the term used was “Logos,” which does not actually mean “word,” though it can mean “words,” as in speech. Taken in that sense, “In the beginning were the words” may refer to the commands uttered in the cosmic void by the Almighty to initiate His creation.

To revere Logos is to revere the perfectly articulated and expertly executed design of a higher knowledge.

Just in case you were wondering, this article isn’t about God or religion in a conventional sense.

If anything, this is about the Devil.

The anti-Logos, if you will. It’s about the spirit of rebellion and revolt, and specifically, it’s about the first wave of artists to separate themselves from mainstream society to form a vanguard of sorts to try to lead the larger culture into awakening and revolution.

In my series about Tarot Cards from Renaissance Italy, I talked a bit about the early seeds of the Enlightenment, which was a period of technological, intellectual, artistic, and political expansion in Western Europe that blossomed from around 1600 to 1800. Look to the major artists and philosophers from this time, and you will see that Logos reigned supreme.

Take for instance, the visual arts.

Starting from the Renaissance, painters used their oil and canvas to render scenes with astoundingly realistic visual details.

As for their content, the paintings became markedly less spiritual, and more materialistic: the Enlightenment era is most known for its photo-realistic still life paintings showing off impressive bounties, and its portraits of nobility donning jewels and furs and other treasures. This was an early era of bling, of opulence intended to demonstrate the natural order of the world, specifically the people naturally endowed to subjugate, plunder, and rule over it.

The American Revolution of 1776 was the first major challenge to that prevailing narrative of Enlightenment as manifest destiny, or at least was a major complication of it.

The principles of humanism that inspired America’s founding fathers came straight from the Enlightenment, so their founding of a government of, by, and for the people (with the potential to expand on who actually counted as “the people”) could arguably be seen as the culmination of the era’s philosophical ideals.

Still, this was a devastating disruption to imperial powers who assumed that their rule truly reflected the natural order of the world, as designed by the Almighty.

And it was around this time that a man in Britain began to independently publish writings and artwork in order to articulate and exalt the power of revolt. This man praised America’s revolution over his native empire, and he encouraged the people of France to similarly topple their ruling powers.

This man was William Blake, and he was pretty much a personal embodiment of the radical bohemian sentiment that would soon take hold of artists and writers throughout Europe, those we now call Romantics.

You could say that he was a walking contradiction, but he would simply say that he was a fully balanced human. Consistency and order, after all, is only half of the story.

In his 1793 work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake made his outlook clear. Blake did not see the world as divided between forces of good and evil.

In accordance with tradition, Blake depicts Jesus as the Logos made flesh, the perfect manifestation of divine rationale for the sake of cosmic order. But while Logos is an essential part of who we are, so is anti-Logos. Thus Blake also exalts Satan, the first rebel according to the lore of his time, as an equally essential component of God’s nature, and of ours.

Contention, conflict, and even violent revolt are sometimes necessary for God’s true will to unfold within a society, which constantly struggles to reconcile its dual urges for order and for progress, for stability and for transformation.

In the decades that followed, more writers and artists followed in Blake’s footsteps.

There were Byron, Goya, Wordsworth, Radcliffe, Coleridge, and later on: Hugo, Bronte, and Baudelaire, among others. These people centered their works on irrational passions rather than on order or human reason. They elevated awe for the supernatural over knowledge used to strip the world of its mysteries.

They venerated rogues, rebels, and openly flawed humans whose main virtue was the exercise of their liberty, or simply speaking truth to power. Rather than calm or uplift the public with works of pleasing beauty, the Romantics sought to shake audiences out of their complacency.

The role of artists was not to placate or to pander, it was to challenge, to wake people up and tune them into the raw, incomprehensible, transcendently beautiful messiness of life.

I mentioned the term “vanguard” earlier.

(Or maybe you prefer avant garde, you French elitist, you,) which is a military term implying a forward march, wherein a small band of brave souls situated at the front of the pack leads the way ahead.

Given their disdain for rampant materialistic exploitation, I doubt that the Romantics would have thought of themselves as a vanguard per se. If anything, they wished to shake society out of its forward march rather than lead the way ahead.

So, the vanguard of the vanguard? Probably not the legacy that they were hoping for, but the engines of progress churn on with or without us and do what they will.

Coming to these works some two hundred years later, we won’t find them nearly as radical as they were originally seen.

Still, their impacts on our culture were deep, and are felt even today.

Maybe some overt displays of sex, drugs, and rebellious decadence? Or maybe just some clamorous musical movements to add drama to whatever it is you’re watching.

For any and all of these, be sure to give thanks to the dark lord Satan, and the anti-Logos he represents.

Or, at the very least, maybe raise a glass of absinthe and give a toast to the Romantics, whose libidinal, brave, revolting, and darkly beautific passions still churn through us today.

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