Joshua,

I would like to bring attention to Yeats' Leda and the Swan, specifically to those unable to grapple with your premise:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

This is a troubling poem, and we live in troubling times. If we are, as some suggest, as helpless as Leda, we have really nothing better to be doing, arguably even a duty, to muse on the impact of this 'inevitability'.
I understand a major gripe is that you aren't convinced Joshua's premise is true, and to that I say dispute it in your own post! We'd be happy to discuss. But for the record even biting into the low hanging fruit paint a pretty clear picture: climate change (!), the rise of the right wing, the commodification of art and virtue etc.; even though our economic position is steadfast, it is apparent that we are quickly falling or have recently impacted at the bottom of a Stygian well whose nature is hard to pinpoint. One of the reasons why I with genuine good faith in mind am actively encouraging you to dispute us elsewhere is that Joshua's goal has been lost to the this conflating mist of people who disagree, while offering little counter-evidence. I'm glad you're living in summer, but for those of us who aren't this kind of discussion is nothing but invalidating and to be frank, pointless.

Plus, even if it turns out Joshua and myself and countless others live in total delusion, what is lost besides engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas? Is it not better to at least humor Joshua's thoughts even if it doesn't flow through you intuitively? I'd also like to hazard against believing the world we live in is somehow different from how it has been so far lest we enact the same mistakes our ancestors did in the past ~100 years alone; denoting thoughts not as invalid simply because you are not privy to them does little besides keep you in the pleasant shade of irony.

Anyway Joshua, back to your idea. To me, the most potent aspect of our collapse is the aforementioned commodification of art (broadly, of course). Art used to have this air about it, that whether hung on the master's easel or erupting from the rhapsodes throat, sang the grievances of the populace in relation to the time, while penetrating beyond acceptable social and political and moral barriers. This has since been lost in the mainstream as art has turned into a way to flaunts ones intellect, uniqueness, and ironically, social class, therefore being forced to stay within these bounds, with any counter-cultural movements themselves becoming a furthering of these bounds, rather than a rejection or expansion beyond of them. The forces art would push against have reworked the culture to turn art into a furthering of these very forces. The natural rebuke is that art in the past was quite literally a symbol of class status, but I feel that it was rather that these large commissions and mantle-pieces (largely confined to fine-art, mind you), used class as medium to exist rather than a depiction of that medium, and even then, they were rarely purely laudatory. I am open to thoughts on this, as frankly I hope I'm totally wrong, but I think we'll find cold prophesy in the death of art and spirit of it's time.

Therefore, I think much can be learned from the modernists. Both in pictorial, literary, musical form the way they handled the shattering of the 'Classical' human. Having seen both ends lends insight into a position I'd wager isn't that different from ours, beyond the expansion arguably the same forces therefrom, their plight and journey and reconciliation may bear hearty logs to stoke the flames. To this, I recommend imagist poets, i.e. Cookson, Doolittle, Pound, Williams, maybe Hemingway. When I am lacking inspiration for whatever reason, I generally return to a recognized source, and I think a return to 'purer' form may lend itself to a purer, or perhaps more immortal philosophy, one adequate for our newfound night.

Following this, it's implied then that we've lost something. I would agree with this idea. Something we knew about, revealed by the sun, has since rendered back into the Plutonian shore from whence it came and so my hope is that our growing campfire may not necessarily reveal to us an absolute answer immediately, but perhaps reveal richer forests. For this I recommend the Romanticists.

I'm not crazy about simple movement-hopping, but I think this return to essence in the above schools of thought may be a good staging point for our lumberjacks to harvest.

Again, I'm open to any ideas or disagreements, I just hope they advance the point of Joshua's original post rather than question, nay reject it's current validity in response to a winter you are sheltered from.

I wish you all the best.