Watchers at the Strait Gate
Kirk, Russell
WATCHERS AT THE STRAIT GATE Russell Kirk/Arkham House Publishers/! 14.95 T. John Jamieson The "strait gate" of the title is, of course, the difficult passage into etering told that two terms...
...The style, in fact, lulls one into a receptiveness to the idea of ghosts who suggest themselves not by appearances but by touch, voice, odor, or traces of their work...
...They are also myths which play upon our sense of the lingering presence of human personalities, in order to reveal to us the Eternal Social Contract...
...Thus Kirk is not a Gnostic but a Christian metaphysician...
...Some earlier metaphysicians, the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, sought to counter modern science's materialist dogma with the evidence of ghost-sightings and things that go bump in the night...
...That's why captive audiences of students and employees become only mildly excited when shown propaganda films on free enterprise with men in chicken suits...
...Wherever we are, we are there by the grace of previous human and divine effort...
...Russell Kirk apparently comes from a family of them...
...Consequently, Kirk got a standing ovation at the beginning but not at the end of his speech.' Notwithstanding that, the Kirk enterprise to revive the moral imagination still proceeds, and at many levels...
...The defrocked priest who led the cult intended all the time only to deliver souls to the Devil...
...Kirk himself knows that there is no science to the spirit, but rather that spirituality erupts mysteriously in human thoughts and actions, in dreams, visions, desires, and fears...
...The better part of conservatism consists not of economic theories but of a philosophy of the soul...
...There is some confusion among conservatives about exotic persons Eric Voegelin called Gnostics...
...These stories of horror and mystery tell of benign as well as vengeful ghosts...
...Men have souls...
...the settings are places he has known...
...mystical theosophists, who imagine themselves surrounded by gods and daimons of all sorts, are another...
...The latter kind seek to recover the transcendent truths of religion by a perverse route, but they are seekers nonetheless...
...The world of the spirit, of the ideal, of the bonds connecting generations, is real...
...you need symbols, myths, allegories, to feed this imagination...
...That's the gist of Russell Kirk's presidential address to the Philadelphia Society in 1984...
...Kirk's novel, Lord of the Hollow Dark, told of a strange cult (its politics radical, its religion Gnostic) which ended in a Satanic orgy of mass self-murder...
...As an allegory, Lord of the Hollow Dark explained the reality of evil as rebellion against God and hatred of His creation...
...Now there are many kinds of Gnostics: millenarian revolutionaries, who would make the Marxist New Man their only god, are one kind...
...by maintaining our consciousness of it, we may preserve the accomplishments of the past and add something of our own to bequeath to posterity.eath to posterity...
...But, strangely, such myths have a way of becoming literally true...
...The characters are apparently facets of Kirk's own self, family, and acquaintances...
...One of the charming things about Kirk's style is the way his mind casts up rags and echoes from the immense volume of his reading...
...The latest is a further assault on the "myth and allegory" front, a new book of short stories called Watchers at the Strait Gate...
...A great civilization at once encourages the cultivation of the spirit and is the product of that cultivation...
...Often strange, eccentric mad, or misunderstood persons, their spirits come back with clear purpose...
...We do not normally see ghosts because, after all, they are supposed to be elsewhere: They come back from the strait gate (or fail to get through it on the first pass) because of something wrong that the events of the ghost story will work out for them...
...And so do human beings leave traces of themselves to be found hereafter-at least for the imaginative and historically minded: like Kirk's dead book collector whose personality could be known by the underlined favorite passages in his books...
...Kirk's ghosts all have some unfinished business to attend to, or someone to help in time of need...
...My favorite individualists in the book are the traditional priests who preserve the old religion in obscure parishes...
...This palimpsest or tapestry of literary quotation (the stylistic principle of Eliot's poetry and Burke's prose) is itself evidence of immortality and evokes a sense of communion with dead writers who live forever in our language...
...But the returning spirits become watchers on earth, reminding us that we are not alone, and that mortal affairs have some importance even to those who now live beyond time in transcendental realms...
...They didn't like benal life of Matthew 7:14...
...You can only go so far in praising the splendors of capitalism: Human beings sense that there is more to life than "enlightened self-interest...
...Kirk's forebears, who held seances at Piety Hill, and even had a Spiritualist Church in Mecosta, were Gnostics of this relatively harmless breed...
...14.95 T. John Jamieson The "strait gate" of the title is, of course, the difficult passage into etering told that two terms of Reagan would not restore all order, authority, and virtue...
...That is one strategy, ultimately futile because it violates the transcendence of the transcendent...
...The conservatives didn't like being scolded for nearly letting their most important intellectual quarterly go broke...
...men perceive it through the imagination...
...They appear in familiar places to familiar people...
...In one story, I encountered all sorts of Burke and Eliot allusions, but also a reference to the Hindu doctrine of maya or illusion (which probably comes from Paul Elmer More's essay on a decadent poet...
...then we suddenly heard of Jonestown...
...it seems, therefore, that they appear only to the well-rooted, not to the New Class-to quaint, thoughtful individualists left behind in decayed neighborhoods by the march of urban regress, and not to bland, ambitious conformists who live by new technologies and people new bureaucracies...
...Kirk announces that he has many more weapons in store for a "new campaign against present dominations and powers...
...morally ambiguous in life, they return to death as agents of poetic justice...
...The dust jacket reminds us that Kirk lives in a haunted house (Piety Hill), so we may also conclude that the ghosts in the book are composites of ghosts Kirk has known...
...If one chooses not to work through the difficult language of a philosophy of transcendence, then one must take the route of myth...
...The "watchers" are mysterious keepers of the gate, fearsome to the spirits who try to pass...
...I believe these stories are to be taken as fables which show the reality of evil, in all its horror, as well as the power of the justice which will ultimately triumph over it...
...Yet all of Kirk's books are haunted, after a fashton, by literary ghosts...
Vol. 18 • February 1985 • No. 2
