An Iconoclast’s Poietic Apocatastasis: 

Literary Merit and Metaphysical Fracture Riding the Eschaton

Douglas Blake Olds,

March 30, 2026

 [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]

A persistent error in “modern” literary judgment treats formal intensity as spiritually and metaphysically neutral if not hidebound. Fragmentary pressure, charged incompletion, montage, suggestiveness, interruption, tonal instability, and aphorism (or avoidance of which) count as marks of high literary merit without adequate interrogation of the metaphysical assumptions they carry. Yet form never remains final in effect. A literary method habituates perception. It trains attention toward certain ends, licenses certain omissions, and confers dignity on particular relations among word, world, history, and neighbor. Thus what passes as stylistic excellence can already register as damaged ontologies of statuaries of figures ending in suicide. You know the pantheon of their names.

This matters most where metaphysical fracture or disgust is mistaken for profundity. Critical culture elevates modes that refuse teleology, distrust covenantal continuity, aestheticize interruption, and prefer constellation over accountable declaration. In such a regime, montage is favored over witness, rupture more advanced intelligence than repair, and historical splintering by adumbrative genealogy more truthful than language that binds itself to constructive moral ends. The prestige of fracture then confirms itself. What cannot or will not gather becomes “subtle”; what refuses ethical sequence becomes “open”; what withholds metaphysical commitment becomes “deep.” These judgments are not innocent. They arise from, and reinforce, a disciplinary taste shaped by secularism’s mistrust of teleology, repentance, and accountable continuity.

Literary merit therefore may not be severed from metaphysical critique. If a writer’s governing ontology of history, language, redemption, or subjecthood is disordered, one cannot abstract compositional habits from those commitments and enthrone them as neutral standards. Fragmentation does not automatically outrank sequence; charged truncation does not automatically outrank cumulative unfolding; suggestive incompletion does not automatically outrank ethical declaration. A style may be brilliant and still answer to a dirty metaphysics. Some of the most celebrated modern literary forms derive their authority from making metaphysical disorder feel like higher lucidity.

For that reason, a deadening canonical figure remains useful for historical contrast, diagnostic foil, or example of immense pressure under civilizational collapse and still remain unfit as a normative summit for constructive theological poietics.

Walter Benjamin is a harbinger case. His prose achieves pressure through montage, interruption, constellated and concealing juxtaposition, and charged historical, fragmented esotericism. For that reason, criticism formed by secularism’s broken tribunal has repeatedly treated him as a summit of literary intelligence. Yet that prestige cannot be detached from the metaphysical disorder his work stages and sanctifies: historical rupture without covenantal repair, messianic charge without vectors of teleology and accountability, redemption imagined through interruption and time unbearing as waiting in place of accountable continuance, and linguistic intensity severed from a fully neighbor-bearing metaphysics. Benjamin remains a diagnostic writer of civilizational fracture. He does not serve as a neutral or ultimate benchmark for literary merit where the governing question concerns pressure and truth, brilliance and metaphysical accountability.

To compare a covenantal, teleological, neighbor-bearing, Christopoietic letters with a writer whose prestige depends on montage, interruption, and historical fracture is not yet to compare like with like. The comparison already grants authority to the wrong tribunal. If the axis includes metaphysical soundness of ethical teleology and accountable relation between form and truth, literary distinction may no longer be measured simply by the sorting through fragmentation’s sequins.

Secularism’s evaluative habits conceal this problem by rewarding efficiency, compression, fracture, indirection, and terminative wryness of tone dressed through ironies as though these were universally valid excellences. Such habits are historically situated in the admosphere o administration. They align with elite institutional taste and with a broader managerial culture that prefers destabilized nihilistics destining over truths that bind ethics. A discourse shaped by such priors repeatedly valorizes forms that do not commit, that remain immobilizing, that keep conclusions provisional, and heighten pressure without demanding accountability to Mosaic Law. Literary criticism thus becomes the aesthetic wing of administrative secularity, celebrating mantid intelligence as spirit, that route perception by transaction while refusing accountability for arrogated ends ever couched in lesser evils.

Literary merit, however, is not exhausted by surface compression, montage, or aphoristic voltage. Other mode sof achievement exists: cumulative metaphysical unfolding, torquing ethical language, architectonic gathering of multiple registers—perhaps most necessary, iconoclasm--into accountable witness. Such methods appear less elegant to a culture trained to prefer the spare that comforts the fractured and complicity. They refuse the prestige of brokenness when brokenness no longer serves diagnosis and instead serves hegemonies of politized therapeutics and diversionary spectacle. They refuse to make ruin into style that eternally sits at gravesides. They insist on vectoral poiesis that gets up from these seats to add pressure toward what is unfolding toward the possibility of repair, even if it initially takes the jolt of grotesquery and parody.

The issue, then, concerns more than whether fragmentary writing can possess greatness. It does what systemic completion cannot. It launches accountability and moves awareness into consciousness. The issue is however whether criticism has treated metaphysical fracture as a presumptive badge of greatness and constructive kinesthesis as aesthetically suspect. Once that presumption is exposed, the time field changes. A literary work must be judged by force, compression, memorability, the truth of the world it discloses, the ethical habits it trains, and the metaphysical order it serves or corrodes. On those terms, imagistic brilliance or tribal cohesion is insufficient. A text can dazzle and still deform. Conversely, a work that expands, accumulates time for others, and bears truth under strain necessarily possesses the surpassing merit that a culture pursuing fracture is not-yet willing to admit.

The real question therefore exceeds whether a work is “secular” enough in its instability or achieves sufficient intensity by interruption. The question is whether its form participates in metaphysical accountability. Does it gather perception toward covenant, toward neighbor, toward repair, toward a truer bearing of time? Or does it aestheticize dislocation, making tasteful disgust feel inevitable and sublime? Literary merit cannot finally be separated from how language answers that question.

 

The mantid register of priors

Force by which arrives as intent,
or gets diagrammed by friction toward ends,
surface smoothing priors,
lubrication for evasion,
reversing the diver back up out of the pool
and back onto the board
as a swan dies.

Beating incessant gavels by dirt,
grimy with spark without invention,
speech becoming buffed by audit
and trained through
criminal definitions
until assortative compliance artifacts its reversal:

A spark absenting new
that Reboots by untorquing life
from bearing time:

“Cleanly,” “control,” “authority,”
“legibility,” “managed,” “tightened”

And hits the landing
in a ditch of quicksand
doggerel poop.

What mommy is there to drag the bot-raptoring out

And tissue its nosy frame?