CYCLE TWENTY-NINE
1. What puts cricket beneath the Gaelic Irish
pale, morally speaking, is the centrifugal freedom which permits the batsman to
strike the ball at any angle around the ground.
2. It is precisely because of its centrifugal
freedom in regard to batting strokes ... that cricket could never be an Irish
game, but, on the contrary, one reflecting the British, and in particular
English, openness to alpha-stemming aggression.
3. If cricket is fundamentally immoral on
account of its openness to alpha-stemming aggression of an overly objective and
centrifugal character, it is arguably less immoral than, say, baseball, which
is bereft of stumps and therefore effectively more naturalistic than
materialistic, reflecting the American tendency, in particular, towards stellar
and/or solar rather than lunar criteria.
4. Baseball is thus, in a
sense, more extreme than cricket, just as the sun is more extreme than the
moon, and barbarism more extreme than civilization.
5. Baseball, in which the ball can be hit in
virtually any frontal direction, would be no-less morally unattractive from,
say, a Catholic Irish standpoint than cricket, given its centrifugal freedoms.
6. When the Irish use a bat or, rather, stick,
as in Hurling, it is in the focused manner of one who aims to score pints
between the posts of a goal.
7. There is a sense in which sport is a feminine
form of war no less than dance a feminine form of sex.
8. War and sex are
masculine activities, sport and dance, by contrast, feminine ones.
9. It is tempting to see America as barbarous
where Britain is simply civilized decadence; but, in point of fact,
10. It was perhaps the fact of its cosmic
civilization, so often characterized by Neo-Orientalism,
which made - and I would guess continues to make - America especially sensitive
to Bolshevik barbarism, as though in Jehovahesque recoil from a Satanic 'fall'.
11. The 'light' of America feared the 'fire' of
Bolshevism/Sovietism, even given the considerable
amount of its own fiery culture and the threat to pagan civilization which this
necessarily poses.
12. Television against
computers would be a realistic equivalent of the Satanic threat to Jehovah,
whereas the naturalistic one is probably cinema against virtual reality.
13. Magazines against comic books would be a
materialistic equivalent of the satanic threat to Jehovah, whereas the
idealistic one is probably cocaine, or other such chemical drugs, against
light-centred meditation.
14. My hunch is that the idealistic context ... of
cocaine against meditation is what most accords with a barbarous threat to
American civilization from within itself, since naturalism, materialism, and
realism are effectively peripheral to cosmic civilization.
15. Sovietism will
always be the sun from which the American stars recoiled in horror of a 'fall'
into barbarism, just as Socialism is the earth from which the lunar
civilization of Britain recoils in fear of a 'fall' into nature.
16. It is as though sport fears war and sex fears
dance ... where these two dominating types of Western civilization are
concerned.
17. For, of course,
barbarism is a threat to culture, even negative culture, no less than nature to
civilization.
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