Storytime is the Art War

by Kilts Khalfan

We live in a planetary Art War. Want proof? Look at what is paraded in front of children in the name of Art in 2023. I am talking of course about the Drag Queens that have invaded public libraries across the Western Hemisphere. Why is this concept of drag queen “story time” so important to sexual revolutionaries? They seem to want to turn public spaces into the kindergartens of an androgynous cult. And it is a cult, as Russell Kirk would have defined it. Kirk outlined that the central cult practice of any group creates its culture, as worship informs the destiny of culture and civilization. For Apostolic Catholics, the central cult practice is the eucharistic liturgy as given by Saint Mark the Levite. We face the altar as Israelites and receive the story of our salvation in Christ, otherwise known as the Gospel. Yet the West has abandoned this Storytime for another cult promising its own good news of absolute freedom of expression.

Readers may recall my article ‘Talking our Way out of Rocky Horror’. In that piece, I wanted to mark the importance of language on the formation of our identity as human beings. Language develops around cult practice, and it is the key to ethnic identity. Language is the music of the tongue, the only instrument of the heart that Christ warned us to reign in. We are to “bridle our tongues”. But what does this mean? Is it self-censorship or is this bridle something like the one that Alexander the Great had to pass across the wild face of Bucephalus? The legendary horse was afraid of its own shadow, and under the genius horsemanship of the Macedonian prince, it was reined to become one of the most legendary horses the world has ever known. This is what I think bridling the tongue really means: reigning the undisciplined tongue with mastery over its own speech. The culture is inside the mouth. Christ called for a language fit for the imperial ambitions of the King of kings. So how do we bridle such a tongue?

Dragon Common Room has been in the shadows since 2020 crafting our stories, under the wise direction of RFB better known as Professor Rachel Fulton Brown. (See her work here). It was in the summer of 2020 that the Professor decided that we were all going to learn iambic pentameter. An odd hobby to take up in the middle of a global crisis. And yet that’s what we were doing: learning to scan. As RFB put it, English culture has nothing to offer that isn’t really borrowed from other people except its poetry. English as an identity is a commercial creole that lost its own art, except for Iambic Pentameter (think William Shakespeare’s to be or not to be). Iambic Pentameter is the heartbeat of the English World; it’s the pirate speech of England made beautiful in meter and rhyme. And so, amid mandates and global hysteria, the Dragon Common Room began rhyming and writing fairy stories together to transcend the terrors of COVID-19.

It was in writing these fairy tales that we began to understand the power of narrative over the imagination. Our focus was redirected from the fear of cases and crisis to our stories. And inside the stories we found ourselves orientated towards Truth, Goodness, and Beauty despite the diabolic media promoting despair all around us. It was in reading the media guru Marshall McLuhan that we began to understand the power of the media working on us, and what was happening inside the web of the internet during the pandemic as our attention was suddenly globalized. The human story had become electric: it was everywhere all at once, without sensory filter between time zones and national borders and cultures. There were only cases and mandates. In COVID we entered All Time. Mass culture was pivoted to the hope of pharmacological salvation from the plague around us. The alchemical desire of mankind for healing was amplified as the entire internet became a maelstrom of medical debate. And yet we found our healing in our story time, where Art became our focus. Art was our immunity to the fear. It was also the way for us to craft our own narrative within the chaos of lockdowns. And as we created this narrative, we began to understand the power of telling stories that orientated our focus away from fear and towards the only Serpent who cures all: the Brazen Serpent of Numbers 21:4-9.

It was in considering the totemic power of this ancient Hebrew icon that we began to understand the power of symbols directing the culture of mankind. Where attention flows, the cult begins. As the Hebrews once looked upon the Brazen Serpent for healing, we now look upon Christ’s Holy Body as the medium for our own cure. The God of Israel knew that what we look at heals us or destroys us. The attention of children is symbolically powerful to those who think with Israelitish symbolism, as Hebrews were told that a mere glance of the Brazen Serpent would cure the snake bites. Our attention is the beginning of cult, which is the beginning of culture. If you want to know what your civilization’s actual cult is, you need only consider what your children’s attention is being directed on. Ancient people like Aesop, Homer, and Virgil understood the power of storytelling in allowing a people to re-enter the mythology of their own culture. Storytime is the real cult of any people as the attention of children is the life or death of any culture and civilization. Identity is forged in fable: stories tell us who we are and who we desire to become. Storytime for the ancient Greeks was an ArtWar against barbaric oblivion. As Christ said, “life and death are in the tongue”. Our civilization is so uncultivated that Aeneas fleeing the flaming ruins of Troy would look at it in greater horror. We need a poetic resurrection in the West.

In this spirit, Dragon Common Room is about to release part one of our five-act electric fairy tale DRACO ALCHEMICUS. We are now crowdfunding through Kickstarter and inviting you to join us in cultivating our attention and bridling the English tongue in poetry, fully illustrated with dragons. Be brazen: join the ArtWar.

A troll who started rhyming, Kilts is a Medieval thinker, poet, and co-author of two books (and counting) published by the Dragon Common Room. She co-hosts the Mosaic Ark podcast with her friend and DCR mastermind, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown.

Kilts is currently working with the DCR team on the five-volume epic, Draco Alchemicus. She regularly muses on her Telegram channel The Sandwhich Press, a digital liberal arts project that feeds into DCR’s work. The Sandwhiches have inspired both devotional piano composition and hate mail.

The H in Sandwhich is on purpose