the iconoclast's descending

SAN FRANCISCO, SEPTEMBER 9, 2020  I. Apocalypse Harbored  Remember skyfall, that end of summer still-born dawn?  That sky—once looked to for rainbows—  cast a crucible, birdless and ominous, forged by wildfires—  carboniferous vampires—and  like before a hurricane—flag-limp space.   This sunset:  a prospect blanched, never greening, resonating  but faded to scorched amber.  Damp, sticky miasma smears like grease  to grass-hosted palms holding the pen  that attends this drama of dying shop  running emp(l)aced. In ebbing ticks,  we by cloud castles of whipped sand construct  diversions for hollowed-out courage.  So clocks, in this narcotic smokescape,  ever fade from sense.   II. Sunfreeze  2–1/2 hours after sunrise,  a still dimming sky. Under the cloaking soot from up north,  marine fogs may stay saddled to us,  bridling this apocalypse—  leaving us panting, as  under ...

  The Lamb’s Victory: Spectacle or Repair? Status Confessionis and the  Kinesthetic Ethics of Poiesis   Douglas Blake Olds September 9, 2025 [updated September 22; October 9, 2025] Status Confessionis: Memoria or Brand? The Lamb’s victory is not analogical, aesthetic, or dramatic, but ethical , kinesthetic , and accountable . The Church is now in Status Confessionis , between supplicating covenant and apostate spectacle. The time for spectatorship is over; the eschaton is now . The claim of Jesus provoked resistance unto crucifixion: not because it was unclear, but because it was ethically absolute: the Golden Law of Love was a duty as well as an expansion of freedom.  His victory on the Cross is not a static drama but an ethical rupture —an expressive moment that awakens responsibility. It demands not aesthetic accommodation to a standing image of glory but to ongoing moral repair: will we choose to mend what we've broken, for the witness and good of others?...

  Four Political Theories and the Metaphysics of World-Making:  A Letter to My Son in College --Douglas Blake Olds (September 5, 2025) ABSTRACT Four political theologies, four world-makings. Schmitt’s state of exception says power is born in rupture: the sovereign suspends law and names enemies. Madisonian liberalism wagers on divided powers and consent to restrain the will. Marxism reads history as class struggle and entrusts a vanguard to midwife a classless order. Duginist revanchism rejects both liberalism and Marxism to enthrone mythic identity and sacred soil in the vanquished past. Different as they are, each presumes that most people sleep and a few must steer. My hope for you is a fifth way: eschatological accountability —a politics of ethical covenant, where Christian virtue trains consciences in repair, and public life is measured not by spectacle or growth but by justice for neighbor and earth.  Schmittian Sovereignty: Authority emerges through rupture—a sov...