The Fabulous Pursuit of Power

Let the beauty we love be what we do. ~ Rumi

Irish seer A. E., also known as George Russell, in his essay “Power” found in the important Irish Renaissance work The Candle of Vision, lauds power over both beauty and intellect, equating power with strength and will, and professing that the one who cultivates power over the auxiliary ideals of intellect and beauty is the same who becomes the teacher of peace, having “attained mastery of the Fire.” Given these thoughts of A. E., might we not ask Rumi, that wise seeker of beauty, if the beauty that we love might be something other than a cultivation of beauty itself? Perhaps he answers us with a word regarding selflessness to we who would cultivate power:

“Dwell at My door and be homeless.

Don’t pretend to be a candle, be a moth,

so you may taste the savor of Life

and know the power hidden in serving.”

~ from Mathnawi V

Truly, if we divorce power from serving, we disfigure the sacred ideal of strength, and bring it to nil. Many petty tyrants throughout history have cultivated their wills, and have become strong, and formidable, destroying all in their path in their vain attempts to find peace. But, alas, they have not allied their wills with both beauty and intellect; a necessary alliance according to A. E.; and they lie with Ozymandias in the sand. “This rousing of the fire is full of peril;” Russell continues, “and woe to him who awakens it before he has purified his being into selflessness, for it will turn downward and vitalize his darker passions and awaken strange frenzies and inextinguishable desires.”

The beauty that I love is not the pursuit of beauty, as with many dear friends of mine; nor is my beauty intellect, as it is with others whom I love. I desire beauty as I desire intellect; as a hungry and homeless man desires food and shelter. But if he is also thirsty, he desires water above all, and my water is power; the strength of my will.

With A. E. I declare that without “power we are as nothing. We shall never scale the Heavens, and religions, be they ever so holy, will never open the gates to us, unless we are able mightily to open them for ourselves and enter as the strong spirit who cannot be denied.” The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence, Jesus teaches us, and it is to this godly ferocity that, in the spirit of love, I give my heartfelt allegiance. For if I cannot fellwalk the perilous paths and clandestinely scale the walls of this pernicious poleis we call Babylon, then I am not the humanitian that I have been trained to be, and which I profess to be; and I, not unlike Ozymandias, bellow to the world a self-aggrandizing philosophy of triumph over the enemies of humankind when I fail to realize that I build my house on shifting, unforgiving sands.

A humanist is a servant first, and then whatever else after. He or she follows in the footsteps of the Christ, freely receiving and then freely giving, that all sentience, regardless of origin or color or creed, might find, as did the seer William Blake, that, in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, all religions are one. As a humanitian, a shepherd of the lost and hungry and cold of strange and disparate places and abodes, my foundation for existence and for experience is the cultivation of my will, ever aided by intellect and beauty, my rod and my staff…

One of my most loved films is the recent Troy directed by Wolfgang Petersen. This work touches me profoundly, for in the pivotal scene I watch Achilles in all of his power, and bathed in the praise and glory which has come to him because of its cultivation, kneel and fall over the dead body of the equally valorous Hector, as if to shelter him from any more pain or humiliation. In deep travail the nearly indomitable Hellenic hero lies mourning not only over the loss of a peer, but over his own flagrant and egregious profaning of the corpse which would have been allowed a heroes’ burial were it not for his own hubris. Here in these saddening moments, and with copious tears, the broken heart of Achilles beckons knowledge and, in a sense, also invites beauty into his perception; the beauty that was the dynamic Hector, perhaps, but living memory can be sweet. Tempered by his wrenching anguish, the renowned Greek warrior becomes a whole person imprinted not only with strength of will, but with both knowledge and beauty revealing to him a place transcending his former experience; a place unmistakably marked with the ideal of sanctity of life… an ideal not easily heard, and easily forgotten, when quest for power is undertaken by the soul not tempered first by love; by serving.

As a child I began my experience by garnering intellect. I gathered much knowledge, but found no place to apply it, and so, gravely disappointed, I lay my arduous study aside and consciously set myself apart from intellect, making learning an ideal that I would seek and yet not find. As I moved into the days of my youth, beauty then became my comfort, and I strove for delicious solitude in sunlit fields and beneath the shades of old trees. But I soon tired of the enchanting tranquility, for my soul still burned for something truly succoring. It was then that I discovered the absence of power in my life, and so I set out, determined to find it.

The beauty that I love is empowerment, but am aware that beauty and intellect are required to check my will; to see that I never fall into illusion, but that I continue in disillusionment with all things save love in, and for, the world.

________

Skadi meic Beorh