If the Logos of America is Pragmatism ("It works"), then America's Assignment with Destiny may, after all, be its role in a phoenix rebirth of myth. As H.T. Hansen writes in his forward to Julius Evola's Mystery of the Grail, "[I]f, as Jung says, reality is that which is effective, then myths are also reality." Thinkers like Aleksei Losev have independently argued myth's status as the truest arbiter of reality on the human scale. For Evola, myth is the supreme signifier of truth. Science and history are valuable only insofar as they carry a mythic content (in contradiction to the modern idea that the study of myth is only justified by the historical data it may hold). This is that to which Evola refers as the "traditional method." With respect to art, mere aesthesis and fantasy does not rise to the status of art as a "gay science" - a drunken communion with the gods. In his opening to The Mystery of the Grail, Evola writes, "[E]ven in cases in which spontaneous, poetic, or fantastic compositions appear to be in the forefront, such elements nonetheless have the value of a contingent covering or vehicle of expression, at which only a superficial reader may stop. Some authors intended simply to engage in artistic compositions and were indeed successful at that so much so that their productions are enjoyed by those who know about and care for the aesthetic perspective only. This does not mean that these people, in their 'artistic productions' and in their spontaneity, have not also done something else; they have either preserved and transmitted or activated a higher content, which a trained eye will always be able to recognize. Some authors would undoubtedly be shocked if they were clearly shown that this is indeed what has happened in their works." What Evola here describes could finally explain the obsession contemporary esotericists have with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. It reinstates the reality of myth in literature. It resurrects the corpse of "literature" and reminds it of its true face: myth. This is precisely the same conception of "literary art" which Yuri Mamleev calls "Metaphysical Realism." It is a literature easily mistaken for surrealism, which itself is a form of sacred writing that his been doused in the waters of the Lethe. Out of the apogee of forgetfulness comes the stark gaze of "aletheia," Metaphysical Realism, myth. The westernmost lands suddenly become the easternmost. America is an unlikely, unwarranted cradle for the rebirth of myth because all that matters here is that "it works." This is the land of "effective reality" which transcends the humus of the technocapital corpse. Mamleev arrived to our shores as a herald of this fact. His New York "Ithaca" was his exile. He was the crier in our wilderness. Only by studying the Mamleevan corpus can we begin to discern the contours of the "rough beast," to pick out the kinetic gyre of his "slouching." Then, perhaps, we will find out which of our Bethlehems are slated to be his birthplace.
