Reflections in the Wilderness of New Atlantis is a repository for essays and articles.

What the name of this site means can be intuited by breaking down it’s constitutive parts and reassembling it. A reflection is quite literally, a bending (flection) back (re). What’s bending back is what it flects in the first place. Just as a mirror reflects an image produced by a thing, the reflection contains within it an alternative emphasis on the initial thing causing the reflection. This emphasis brings to mind new aspects of the meaning of that thing, which may not be as easily accessible at first consideration.

Wilderness came to mind while writing a review of the movie Black Narcissus (1948). In the movie, a group of Anglican nuns, led by Sister Clodagh, attempts to establish a convent in a remote Himalayan palace. However, the isolation starts to unravel their discipline, and in some cases sanity, leading to a crisis of faith. My review of the movie asked a key question about a detail in the film. What was the significance of the Himalayan setting? It’s significance lies in its role as a psychological and spiritual wilderness. It functions on one level as the “Orient” critiqued by Edward Said; it exists as a Western projection of the exotic and primal, placing the Occident, or the West, as the subject, and the Orient, or the “East”, as the object (never mind that Said overlooks the fact that the East has a subjectivity, or a substance). On another level, this “wilderness” is the same wilderness found in Daoism. It’s a space where one encounters the raw, unconditioned, the divine directly, and many others, without the buffers of civilization. More specifically, without the parts of identity one holds that are sourced from civilization. The unmediated encounter, akin to finding the Dao without distortion, can be profoundly dangerous. It dismantles the nun’s constructed identities and faith, which is exactly why the story could not play out in the ordered landscape of Britain. The backdrop of a country near the close of colonial rule is the perfect vehicle to let the story play out. The wilderness is not a physical place, it’s more like a catalyst that strips away the civilizational persona. All the accrued layers of ritual and doctrine dissolve and force a confrontation with the non-negotiable core of the self and the divine. The result can be a total destruction and unravelling, since the very structures of mediation are shown to be a weak pretense in the face of the real. Do not mistake this as an anti-government/organization position, it is fully possible that this real is constituted by the real state of ordered and mediated human interaction called government.

A still from Black Narcissus

This brings us, in a roundabout way, to the New Atlantis. If the wilderness is a space of unmediated encounter where you reflect and find some opportunity or enlightenment, then the New Atlantis is both the initial and implict striving, and the ideal sanctioned result of this encounter. Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis evokes a utopia governed by a type of coherence almost never before seen. So foreign to the conduct of man that it arose from an unknown sea. Symbolically, this was a precursor to America, conceived as a deliberate construction of a new world order, it’s rational refuge from the old world’s wildernesses that offered a world-historical freedom in the future that, like all other world-historical events, would change the world’s social and spiritual substance. Taking this into consideration, let us recall America as consciously adopting Rome’s foundational mythos: novus ordo seclorum— a new order of the ages. This motto appears on the Great Seal of the US as well as the dollar as vindication of its importance. The founding fathers, being so steeped in classical Republicanism (as well as Freemasonry, which deserves it’s own dedicated post), saw the Roman Republic as an inspirational ideal. Thus America is the New Rome as well as the New Atlantis. The New Rome is America in active confrontation with the Wilderness. We saw ourselves as inheriting the renewal of Western civilization’s highest ideals. This is in contrast to the New Atlantis, the utopian (and technological, but technology is not limited to external tools, it is also the techniques one develops internally!) dimension of the American project. Yet, here lies a central tension and open question. Rome fell. To be the “New Rome” is to not only inherit it’s mission, but also it’s cycle. Will this active confrontation result in the decline all over again, or will America persevere and become the New Atlantis Bacon envisioned?

Putting it all together, Reflections in the Wilderness of New Atlantis describes the act of consideration in the Wilderness of New Atlantis, in the Wilderness as the directly encountered being-there of America, and of everything including this Wilderness itself. This “wild west” known as America, where a new subjectivity was pioneered, and is still being pioneered, a subjectivity which changed and is still in the process of changing, the Spirit of the world. There are untamed interiors where the self and the real must be confronted directly. These essays are expeditions into that interiority. Contemplations on this site will not be reactionary, nor will they be invoking the empty domain of referentless symbolism. These are writings within the unresolved, and forever resolving, fertile ground of the future.