Let simple Wordsworth chime his childish verse,
And brother Coleridge lull the babe in nurse.

                           Lord Byron… [GL QUOTE]

The popularity of both William Wordsworth, the Romantic English poet, and the Avatar franchise — in their respective eras — indicates a steady decline to destruction, writes Jonathan Cook.

Watching Avatar 2: The Way of Water, I was reminded that there is nothing new under the sun, ours or Pandora’s. James Cameron’s three hour-plus epic tells us little more than The Tables Turned, a short poem written more than 200 years earlier by William Wordsworth. One verse observes:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-
We murder to dissect.

Another [verse] points out:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

But while Cameron and Wordsworth share a pressing concern that we are losing our connection to — murdering — Nature, including our own natures, their visions differ on what it is to actually be a modern human.

With two centuries of additional historical experience to draw on, Cameron’s view is much bleaker than Wordsworth’s.

On Pandora, humans don’t just murder through their compulsion to understand and master their surroundings (Wordsworth’s “dissection”). They murder to make money, they murder in the pursuit of vanity, they murder simply because they can. Power has no higher purpose than its own self-promotion.

Wordsworth’s Romanticism did not halt, or even temper, the Industrial Revolution’s appetite for material dissection: the relentless ransacking of the planet’s resources, the prioritisation of endless economic growth over everything else, the promotion of a hollow rationalism that stripped out the wonder, the spiritualism that had been at the core of human existence even before mankind emerged from the cave.

 GUS QUOTES:

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a “bad” man.

Then he became “good”, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles [became a tory], and wrote bad poetry.

                             Bertrand Russell

JONATHAN COOK CONTINUES:

There is no evidence that Cameron’s Avatars, 1 or 2, will have any greater effect on rethinking our relationship with Nature two centuries on, or end our slash-and-burn approach to our planet. We have gained no greater insight, even as the harm we have inflicted on the environment, and science’s ability to measure that harm, have grown exponentially.

Diseased Agenda

In Avatar, the diseased intellects that have turned Earth into a dying shell send their forward-party spaceships to Pandora with exactly the same diseased agenda of domination and pillage. It is clear that no lessons have been learnt, and that, with humans in charge, Pandora’s fate will be identical to Earth’s.

It is not just the military — represented by the crew-cut, machine-like Col. Miles Quaritch — that kills everything it touches on Pandora. It is business leaders, bureaucrats and scientists.

Cameron’s metaphors are not subtle. The peaceable whale-creatures that inhabit Pandora’s oceans are more intelligent and creative than the “Sky People” — the human invaders. But lacking the humans’ offensive technical capabilities, they are freely hunted for a highly profitable brain extract that can end the natural aging process. Once looted of this elixir, the whales’ giant carcasses are left to rot on the high seas.

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/04/the-murder-of-nature/

THOUGH WORDSWORTH HAD ADMIRERS, HIS CRITICS WERE FIERCE...

What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth … 

                         Percy Bysshe Shelley

LIKE WORDSWORTH, MOST HUMANS (HE WAS ONE OF US) CAN HAVE IDEALS OF FREEDOM, PURITY OF THE “SOUL” AND LOVE OF NATURE FOR A WHILE THEN, WE TURN TO GREED AS A LIFE SUPPORT. HE BECAME ONE OF “THEM”… CAN WE SAVE OURSELVES FROM GREED. AFRAID NOT….

GL.