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]  [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL : If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html] 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 bec...

  Four Political Theories and the Metaphysics of World-Making:  A Letter to My Son in College --Douglas Blake Olds (September 5, 2025)  [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL : If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html] 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...