That Dreadful Word!
“It's dripping with groosh”. “No it isn't offensive in the usual sense, but it’s so grooshy.” How often have you heard such phrases? It depends how often you have mixed with Aristasians!
Groosh, for all its slangy informality is a key concept in everyday Aristasian aesthetic sensibility. It denotes the soft underbelly of the Pit; the awkward, left-handed sentimentality of an anti-romantic culture. The word is acknowledged to be horrible, but as one Aristasian put it: “It sounds so much like the thing it describes, it is practically onomatopoeic”. There is actually a more formal term: laxanimity. But groosh is the word that has taken hold.
But what does it mean? There’s the rub. It expresses something that needs to be said and understood, but because the Pit has been in charge of the mass-media and academia for the past three decades or so, it has held a monopoly of the creation of new words. Thus the vocabulary used to describe new things favours the Pit’s way of seeing the world. It is the subtlest and most effective form of mind-control. Ensuring that only the things the Pit wants said can be said, because there are no words to tackle the Brave New World from any viewpoint but its own.
Groosh is one of the words that have grown up among Aristasians to fill that verbal-conceptual vacuum: to make it possible to discuss the Pit from the outside.
But although the concept is familiar, it is hard to define. “Groosh began with the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper L.P.” “Carly Simon and David Frost typify early groosh.” The newcomer hears such statements and says “Yes, but what is groosh?”
There have been a few attempts to define it, but although people who are about people who use the word quickly pick up its nuance (that is, after all, how we learn the complexities of most of the words we know), definition in cold print has proved difficult.
Then, rather curiously, in the course of a discussion on religious art in the Aristasian Spirituality Group, one of the members just upped and gave a perfect definition of groosh. We reproduce the whole thing. If you aren't interested in spirituality or religious art, do read on anyway! This quickly becomes one of the best interpretations and analyses of groosh that we have ever heard. It will add a new dimension to your intellectual/aesthetic horizons!
Q. Miss Annalinde, you recently referred to: “a perfectly serious and purportedly “spiritual” site on the subject of “restoring the Goddess”, complete with the usual sentimental post-hippie New-Age graphics.”
Does this mean that you consider sentimentality in spiritual and religious art a bad thing?
A. Not at all. We are living near the end of Kali Yuga, when intellectuality is at its lowest and sentimentality it its highest. The emotional path is right for most people in this age. That is why bhakti is so important in Kali Yuga, and especially at its end.
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In many 19th-century Catholic religious pictures and statues, as well as many modern Hindu pictures, we see a sentimentality that is absent from earlier iconographic works. These have been criticised as “sentimental” both by traditionalists who deplore their lack of intellectual content and by modern “realistic” rationalists who dislike “prettiness” and prefer the dark and stark as part of their inverted aesthetic. Once again we see the Law of Tamasic Inversion — both the Sattwic and the Tamasic mentality attack Rajasic sentimentality, one from above and the other from below.
Now clearly the traditionalists are right and the modernists are wrong. But what we must reply to the traditionalists is simply that this is the latter end of Kali Yuga. The majority of people are ruled by sentiments and it is important to direct those sentiments upward rather than downward.
To say that sentimental religious pictures are devoid of intellectuality is true on one level. But one must also remember that it is intellectuality that discriminates. Intellectuality that decides whether to direct our sentimentality toward images of Dea or (as almost every modern women’s magazine seems to do) toward images of sexuality and impure thoughts.
In my view, as a modern, sentimental person, I find sentimental religious art attractive. I like to see pictures of my loving Mother looking sweet and beautiful. I have on my shrine a very pretty picture of Sri Lakshmi that even has little bits of glitter. I also have more traditional icons. I understand that some people genuinely do not like the more sentimental pictures for reasons that are traditional or artistic rather than modernist and cynical. They have more sophisticated tastes than I have. That is quite all right.
What should be remembered is that such sentimental images, for those who do appreciate them, serve only good purposes. They are there to direct the heart upwards, toward Dea. In short, they are Good.
So why did we criticise the sentimental New-Age picture? The intention was not to say it was bad because it was sentimental, but because it was of the New Age.
Let me describe the picture a little. It was in that air-brushed “fantasy” style that became popular in the late '60s. It depicted “the Goddess” as pretty, rather wild-and-free in a sort of post-hippie feministy way. I think you know the sort of thing I mean.
Now, we could put two images side by side — a sentimental Rajasic-era religious picture and a sentimental Tamasic-era New Age picture. We could examine many details such as the use of clouds — in the first case they are presented as elements of a stable and ordered universe, reflecting Sai Raya’s light and reminding us of traditional ideas such as “clouds of glory”; in the second case they are wild and windswept, not in recognition of “the Spirit that bloweth where It listeth”, but of modern “individual freedom” and the inverted-romantic hatred of order and fixity. We could point to the feminist-independence and individualism of the face of “the Goddess” in the New Age representation as opposed to the tenderness and motherliness in what the new-ager would disparagingly call the “conventionally-religious” one.
As we say, we could analyse individual pictures closely and this might be very instructive on another occasion, but for the present we shall make a more general and important point. The New-Age “spiritual” picture belongs to a particular category of sentimentality that Aristasians call by the informal term “groosh“. Its more formal name is laxanimity or looseness-of-soul.
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Laxanimity, or “groosh”, is a new sensibility that did not exist — and could not have existed — much before the 1960s. Some people say that it was first introduced into the popular consciousness by a British musical group known as the Beatles in their middle phase (that is, when they stopped making “pop” music and became pretentious). However, even if laxanimity was born in Britain, it grew up in California. It is perhaps most typified in its earlier phases by the Californian Wailing Women of the late 60s and early 70s of the last century — Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell et al. The growth of the sensibility was deeply entangled with the Californian “alternative psychotherapy” movements and the cult of “gedding in touch with yrr feelings”.
Why did this new sensibility develop at the time it did? Essentially, because human nature — especially in the Kali Yuga — is inherently sentimental. However at the time in question, a huge campaign was launched to destroy all the bases of traditional sentimentality. The family, traditional romance, “conventional religion”, patriotism, and most of the other things to which human sentiment normally attaches — especially during the Rajasic era in the West — were under attack from the New Left, the “satire movement” and the mass-media in general. We are getting into a much wider arena here, and we must avoid talking about such things as the way in which the Vietnam War was used by the mass-media to undermine traditional values and create a disaffected youth softened-up for a continual assault on all that it would normally have held dear. That is another story.
All we need to realise for now is that all the bases of traditional sentimentality were being systematically undermined. But sentimentality still needed to be expressed. Sentimental feelings were being denied on every front in which they had formerly manifested: which is why people suddenly felt the need to “get in touch” with them. A revival of traditional sentimentality, however, was impossible — certainly impossible for people conditioned by the new régime, and impossible to be expressed through the mass media and music industry controlled by that régime. So a new sentimentality had to develop. A sentimentality that bore much the same relation to genuine sentiment that Esperanto bears to real languages. A sanitised, revolutionary “politically correct” sentimentality, purged of tradition, free from morality, wholly deracinated. A sentimentality built like a Frankenstein out of the bits and pieces that were still permitted to the New Pit Citizen. While its exponents would often wax sentimental about “nature”, their own sensibility was about as natural as a plastic tree.
Vaguely conservative types often complain about the aggressiveness, violence and raw sexuality of much modern music. What they fail to notice is that most of that which is not violent is laxanimous. True sentiment has been largely extirpated from Western culture (at least those parts of it that are permitted public air-time) and has been replaced by that ersatz sensibility which Aristasians call groosh. An ugly word, perhaps, but one that, as one Aristasian commented is “almost onomatopoeic”. It sounds like the thing it describes.
Pit conservatives fail to notice this — or if they notice it generally do not progress beyond a vague and undefined feeling of unease — precisely because language is so vital to our thought, and the Pit’s mass-media and academic establishment monopolise the creation of the new language needed to describe and analyse their Brave New World. In other words, most people are unable to discuss the Pit except in the terms, and with the concepts, that the Pit wants them to use.
That again is another story, but it perhaps illustrates how a spiritual philosophy that can protect us from the Pit is inseparable from a wider understanding of the philosophical issues involved.
In any case, I hope it leaves you clearer about what we did and did not mean by condemning New-Age sentimental “spiritual art”. If we could have used the term laxanimous (or grooshy) instead of “sentimental”, it would have been much quicker!
