Sunday eve remarks in August

The sudden appearance of Donald Trump has been a pleasure to watch. I attach no hopes to him but I certainly enjoy watching him break the rules, discomfit the enemy and continue to surge in the polls.
He was asked what he would do with families who were partly here illegally. He said he'd keep them all together and send them all back home together. I feel like genuflecting.

Wandering through YouTube, I found a stirring video of part of a Russian Orthodox liturgy. Very masculine, grandly hierarchical and majestically hieratic, entirely chanted, both monodically and polyphonically.

Whenever I see an Orthodox liturgy, I feel that the rites of the West, even Rome at her best, suffer by comparison. Two things related things stand out: the Western addiction to books and booklets, and the presence in solemn liturgies of a Master of Ceremonies, a kind of director who runs around and makes sure everyone is doing the right thing at the right time. In the East, they have no such interloper; everyone knows the script and the choreography without being shepherded around like idiot children who have to turn the page to find out what to say or do next. A real ritual is known mostly by heart, both in gesture and in word, like a tribal dance or a royal court event or even an opera. It possesses the performers and is possessed by them. Anything else suggests an unengaged lack of seriousness.

It's high summer and I am still enjoying the afterglow of our week in the Sierras. So I am trying to focus more on the future religious paths open to a post-imperial White West and pay less attention to the politics.  Been ruminating and writing about that a bit.

The spiritual traditions of the West, like the West itself, are unruly and restless: the tensions between Plato and Aristotle, Athens and Jerusalem, the Mediterranean and the North continue everywhere. I am trying to see what will emerge from me if I set myself the task of laying the outlines of a religion for the sons of Europa, one that combines the ancestral, prophetic and sapiential dimensions, both incorporating and transcending Christendom, one both mythically rich and intellectually coherent. An arrogant project, of course, but as much self-discovery and respite as anything else. After all, as a Gnostic, I've already re-edited and re-written the Bible...