The old Gael wrote about a simpler time, and even then he said that everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned. He didn't say in what, but I imagine he meant blood. Today, innocence drowns before it emerges in the oceans that are the comments, linking, and displaying, until all values sink in the storms of information.

He also wrote that all things people esteem endure but a moment or a day. He didn't foresee the time when nothing was esteemed, only valued for its contribution to commercial or social power. More than a handful of social critics have claimed that values or excellence are merely the tools of the elite, used to reinforce the existing structure—or in the case of revolutionaries, to overthrow it.

Is there such a thing as objective excellence?

It's hard for me to believe that there could not be such, not when I have seen an endless objective universe, governed by unalterable law.…

The Octagonal Raven - chapter:61

The words of poets distill truth, though their lines may be terse or florid, short or long, aqnd those lines left in dusty tomes, few of which have ever been converted to electrons and bright screen images. For, after all, all they offer is the truth of the past, and the future differs from the past. It must, must it not?

And yet …

Is a great disorder an order? One poet claimed such, but few read his words a generation beyond his death.

Another claimed that old violence was not too aged to lead to a new order.

Yet another claimed that men are hollow, and proved he was more so then most, while fretting about the intolerable wrestling of words and meaning.

A soldier poet insisted that death made foreign fields a corner of home…forever Anglian…forever revered.

Then there were the lines of a ridiculed poet, for he was a militarist, who pointed out all too accurately that our end comes not from staves nor swords, but through the power of small corroding words.

Yet another claimed that time was indifferent to all physical achievements, but worships language.…

For all their truths, truths that continue to apply, observations that will outlast dusty tomes, forgotten on archive shelves, why are all the great poets forgotten, unread, unheard?

Because words alone offer truth, a truth betrayed by images flashed upon a million eyes a moment? Because truth takes more than an image and a moment?

The Octagonal Raven - chapter:64

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