It’s a sad state of affairs.
The truth is, our Culture and Heritage is slipping away faster than ever.
As our older generations enter into the Twilight of their years, the world before our devil modern world is fast becoming a fading memory, lost to the sands of time.
But not around here.
That’s because at Pulp Fiction Renaissance, we have a Magic Mirror that you can look into the past with…
And gaze into that wondrous Web of Wyrd that will show you the secrets of our Ancestors’ Heroic past!
A VERITABLE GHOST TOWN
On January 15, 2023, I was on a sojourn to old Virginia…the home of John Carter who rescued the Princess of Mars, and my stomping grounds, too!
I lived in Northern Virginia from 2012-2016, from the time I was 16 to the time I was 20.
During my final years in that “State for Lovers”, I attended the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg Virginia.
And on that blustery winter day in 2023, I was visiting my old Alma Mater to take care of a reckoning.
Nobody was there that day…and though everything was open, the campus was pretty well deserted, a veritable ghost town.
That was fine.
The solitude suited me perfectly.
WHAT’S IN THE CUP?
Down the cobblestone thoroughfares I tread, past the Neo-Georgian edifices holding classrooms and offices within their hallowed halls, clad in brick of scarlet and set in trim of an alabaster hue.
I had traversed that thoroughfare many times from the years of 2014-2016…often grudgingly.
For behind the edifices honoring our past preached prophets of darkness dishonoring our heroes.
It was a veritable case of the outside of the cup being clean, but the inside being dirty.
Man looks on the outside, but God looks at the heart, says the Lord.
But today, in those early days of the Spring Semester of 2023, where everything was deserted…
I was alone.
THE ELVEN TOWER
It was then that beneath a tunnel of brick and concrete did I reach my destination…
The Simpson Library.
The name had always comforted me, as it was the last name of one of my earliest of childhood crushes, Jessica Simpson…
That venerable Elven Princess who had made hearts melt with her cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking!”
And in a place of Postmodern devilry, whose prophets pounded the podiums preaching Gender War and Sex Hate…
A Tower of Wisdom named after the latter-day Daisy Duke was the perfect refuge.
REFUGE YET AGAIN
Indeed was the Simpson Library my Fortress of Solitude during my dark days at UMW in the 2010s.
For it was there that I could be alone, away from the world, and gaze into the tomes that could explain my present plight, and God pray, offer me the secret to my escape.
I had not been to this place in seven years.
And in that time, much more devilry had struck, more than I could have imagined.
The Postmodern Philosophy spewed by the school pulpit’s prophets had become the reigning culture of the land since 2020, escaping its cavernous academic lair to reveal its true colors to all the world in all its satanic glory.
The War in Afghanistan had been lost…surrendered more like it.
And the War on Cops had been won…by the Criminals that is.
But worst of all, my dearly beloved Mother, nearly a year before, had passed on from this world…
And so, as I had sought this library as a refuge seven years past, on this day in 2023, I sought it as a refuge yet again.
THE ASCENT
Through the heavy glass doors I trod, through the dimly lit vestibule, low set and broad and built in that modernly square and yet antiquated brick style so common of edifices built the year that the Berlin Wall came down.
Up the stairs I ascended, straight in their middle, my head held high and my carriage erect…
I was going to meet my destiny.
To the left I went first…and there it was.
That smell, that antiquated book smell.
The scent of the thing wafted into my nose and filled me with content.
I felt as if I was home.
For here, I could master the chaos of the world.
STILL MARKING THE PAGES
There to the left were a number of wonderful things I remembered.
The WWI propaganda posters were still hanging from the walls that always filled me with delight, honoring the Allied Heroes who won that Great War that I had chronicled in the months prior to my arrival at UMW in 2014.
There was the desk where I had first read the secrets of Greek Mythology from an old Soviet refugee, Dr. Olga Arans, my beloved Mythology Teacher.
There was Shona ba Shona: Professional Reflections of U.S. Officers in Afghanistan…the book chronicling the exploits of our modern day Lawrence of Arabias fighting the good fight with our Afghan Allies.
And there within its pages, was my own handwriting…notes that I had penned in mechanical pencil still marking the pages seven years on!
But it was not to the Left where my destiny would find me…
It would be to the Right.
WITHIN ITS PAGES
And so onward I tread, across that second story by its horizontal axis, past the glass cabinets harkening to the memories of UWM alumni of long long ago, through its heavy oaken doors with its oblong cloistered slit of a window…
And into the Art and Literature section of those hallowed halls.
There again was the old desk where I had where I had read the secrets of the 4 Act Story Structure, that venerable art of how to hang a tale together…
And the chairs cloistered around it in which I read David Bordwell’s colossus tome, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, chronicling Aristotle’s influence on all of the Western and War movies made up to 1960 that I so desperately loved.
And there around the corner, just where I had left it seven years ago, was exactly what I was looking for.
The British Pre-Raphaelite Art Shelf.
And there upon its mantlepiece, high above the floor, was the treatise to which destiny had called me…
Masculinities in Victorian Paintings by Joseph A. Kestner.
Within its pages lie the secrets that I sought…
The Secrets of the Sacred Words.
MAGICAL HEROES IN THE WEB OF WYRD
It began on page 92, in Chapter 3 entitled “The Gallant Knight”.
It was there that Joseph A. Kestner himself quoted Paul Fussel’s opus magnus, The Great War in Modern Memory.
He spoke of how British Soldiers who marched into the fray of the Great War in 1914 were consciously inspired by the legends of Medieval Knights of Old.
They saw themselves as the Arthurian Knights, sallying forth unto war to slay the Dragon and save the Princess…by Order of the King.[1]
In those days, Kestner quotes Fussel, “Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant”.[2]
They knew these things because of a special set of Sacred Words that had been passed down by a handful of Magical Heroes, who had woven the Web of Wyrd to ennoble the 19th and 20th Century Warrior Caste with the Spirit of their Medieval Ancestors.
These Magical Heroes, Fussel explained, passed down their Wisdom in “the boys’ books of George Alfred Henty; the male-romances of Rider Haggard; the poems of Robert Bridges; and especially the Arthurian poems of Tennyson and the pseudo-medieval romances of William Morris.”[3]
Just what were these Sacred Words passed down by these Magical Heroes?
Lucky for us, Kestner reproduced Fussel’s compilation…
And I have reproduced them for you here.
THE SECRETS OF THE SACRED WORDS
Below are the Secrets of the Sacred Words, as Paul Fussel compiled them, and Joseph A. Krestner recollected them, with mere minor grammatical changes for clarity of reading:
- “A friend is a…comrade
- “Friendship is…comradeship or fellowship
- “A horse is a…steed, or charger
- “The enemy is…the foe, or the host
- “Danger is…peril
- “To conquer is to…vanquish
- “To attack is to…assail
- “To be earnestly brave is to be…gallant
- “To be cheerfully brave is to be…plucky
- “To be stolidly brave is to be…staunch
- “Bravery considered after the fact is…valour
- “The dead on the battlefield are…the fallen
- “To be nobly enthusiastic is to be…ardent
- “To be unpretentiously enthusiastic is to be…keen
- “The front is…the field
- “Obedient soldiers are…the brave
- “Warfare is…strife
- “Actions are…deeds
- “To die is to…perish
- “To show cowardice is to…swerve
- “The draft-notice is…the summons
- “To enlist is to…join the colours
- “Cowardice results in…dishonour
- “Not to complain is to be…manly
- “To move quickly is to be…swift
- “Nothing is…naught
- “Nothing but is…naught, save
- “To win is to…conquer
- “One’s chest is one’s…breast
- “Sleep is…slumber
- “The objective of an attack is…the goal
- “A soldier is a…warrior
- “One’s death is one’s…fate
- “The sky is…the heavens
- “Things that glow or shine are…radiant
- “The army as whole is…the legion
- “What is contemptible is…base
- “The legs and arms of young men are…limbs
- “Dead bodies constitute…ashes, or dust
- “The blood of young men is… ‘The Sweet Red Wine of Youth’-[as penned by] R[upert] Brooke.”[4]
THE SECRETS ARE NOW YOURS
“Words are what men live by,” that Aryan Mystic John Wayne said, “Words they say and mean.”
And to the English-speaking Allied Heroes of the Great War, these words meant everything.
They protected, ennobled, and envigored their Spirits to carry forth their very Flesh and Blood to deeds of Daring and Heroism eternal and long-dreamed.
And in doing so, won their adherents a uniquely Spiritual Victory that will last forever, long after their physical deaths.
The men who lived and died by these words were men…just like me and you.
And that means that if they can do it, we can do it.
So answer the Summons and take part unto the Strife.
Sally forth Swiftly unto the Field and Vanquish the Foe.
The Secrets of the Sacred Words are now yours…
Valour and Radiant Heavens await!
Sincerely,
Richard Barrett
04-25-2025
Written at 8:44 PM, somewhere in the USA…
Penned to “The Carnival of the Animals IVII Aquarium”
Sources Cited
[1] For further reading on this, see Baynes, John. Morale: A Study of Men and Courage. Avery Publishing Group: Garden City Park, NY, 1967, 1988.
[2] Kestner, Joseph A. Masculinities in Victorian Paintings. Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, 1995. Pg. 92.
[3] Ibid. Pg. 92.
[4] Ibid. Pgs. 92-93.
PULP FICTION RENAISSANCE 