The art of being ruled Book

Art of ruling is no treatise upon statesmanship, nor is it an affirmative hoorah of our (European) current state of affairs.
The book acts as a whip, a whip cracked upon Wyndham Lewis's enemies. Who are these enemies? Well, everyone.
A book of screaming jabs, of many jabs that still ring true to this day.

What and who is Lewis? You won't be able to tell. You will be arguing with his work the whole way through. Is it satire? Is it sincere? Who knows, probably both though...
Lewis is no futurist and he'll make sure you know. The love of fast FAST machines Lewis did not share. Nor those of a robot man. But he liked their style and those asethetic turbines.
He also appears as Nietzschian in his maunevers and force. But he's not. I think.
For now I will hit upon a few salient points made throughout the book. They will be made briefly so as to represent the quick manner of Lewis's 3 page chapters.


Warning !!! Spoilers below !!!


1.
Art is the context of a life oriented upwards. Of a narration one feels within ones society. A man within a larger epic. This meaning and contextualization of man need only come about by the plastic arts, novels, music, imagery, religion. Lewis loathed the relegation of the arts to mere consumption. In this way so did Ezra pound, who believed that a minority of the artists deserved to be more then mere culture bearers relegated to a dark and lonely corner begging the rushing and working crowds for not just a coin, but rather for a moment of storytelling, a moment of art. To often they pass by to work, awaiting the night after work of hypnotic drooling amongst alcohol and digital screens.


2.
Freedom. Freedom was too Lewis a virile quality that required man to suffer greatly for a goal he had to fight for. The freedom of our age was a lie, a joke, a stinking inversion to Lewis. To be free in our age means to be greatly dependent and too have ones freedom propped up by others. In other words: freedom is the addiction not to self-reliance but an addiction to reliance upon others. The most slackened and decaying freedom, where you want man seperated from all responsibility so that he can enjoy his crumbs and cushions handed to him by charity. Yet, Who is this charity? Who is suffering so that man can have this dependent "freedom"?


3.
Lewis especially loathed the feminised and deracinated creatures of Europe. Sulking around in a fuming cloud of self-hatred. Begging a congo warlord to let him join in their drumming group and allow him to have some wild and foreign girls. A rimbaud of pity.
To take Wyndhams loathsome spectacle even further: the European man has begun to emulate woman, as unto a modern tranny. A tranny being a man trying his hardest to emulate a superficial image of woman, a corrupted and fallen simulacrum. A man timid and tamed, fetishising what a women only is in the movies (only the old movies) and in his desperate mind. Emulating what he himself can't find. Lewis does not blame women for feminism, but rather blames the effeminate man trannies.

Lewis also prophetically announced that feminism and the liberation of women would be just another nail in the coffin of the family unit. That the entrance and pushing of women into the workforce would only make women generally more miserable, another misery of our times labeled"liberation". Though his view on the family unit is too complicated for me too understand, or perhaps I did understand it...


4.
And what does Lewis say of democrazy? Well, what a jolly good hoot that whole show is.
Lewis didn't chalk up the corruption of art, standards, morals, and general culture of Europeans on the flux and time of Bergsonian Herr Spengler. Lewis believed our problems were crafted by the hands of a minority. A minority that hid behind such ideas as representing the masses. The voting of democrazy was too Lewis a way of blaming the people for their supposed mistakes, when in reality the mistakes were planned and in schedule and the votes had nearly no part too play upon the schedule.

Those four bursts were but a taste of Lewis.
Take the chance and spend the pretty penny on Wyndham Lewis's work of weaponry: "The Art Of Being Ruled" .
For in summary this book is flippant and fast, a bitting book of notes slipped sharply into your back.