The Muses Clio, Euterpe and Thalia (detail),
Eustache Le Sueur (1617-1655), French Baroque painter
This painting and its companion piece depicting Melpomene, Erato and Polyhymnia
were used to decorate the Cabinet of the Muses of the
Hotel Lambert in Paris
The Louvre, Paris
The muses are the goddesses of creative inspiration in poetry, song and other arts, they are the companions of Apollo. They were the daughters of Jupiter and the Titaness Mnemosyne (memory) who had lain together for nine consecutive nights. The muses were originally nymphs who presided over springs that had the power to give inspiration, especially Aganippe and Hippocrene on Mount Helicon and the Castilian spring on Mount Parnassus. The nine muses and their usual attributions are the following.More on the muses hereMore on the muses here.
- Clio, the muse of history (book, scroll or tablet and stylus)
- Euterpe, the muse of music, lyric poetry (flute, trumpet or other instrument)
- Thalia, the muse of comedy, pastoral poetry (scroll, small viol, masks)
- Melpomene, the muse of tragedy (horn, tragic masks, sword or dagger, crown held in hand, sceptres lying at feet)
- Terpsichore, the muse of dancing and song (viol, lyre, or other stringed instrument, harp, crowned with flowers)
- Erato, the muse of lyric and love poetry (tambourine, lyre, swan, a putto at her feet)
- Urania, the muse of astronomy (globe and compasses, crowned with a circle of stars)
- Calliope, the muse of epic poetry (trumpet, tablet and stylus, books, holds laurel crow
- Polyhymnia (or Polymnia), the muse of heroic hymns (portative organ/, lute or other instrument)
[Source: Web Gallery of Art]
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Multiculturalism and the War against White America
Speech at the American Renaissance Conference on May 29, 1994
By: Lawrence Auster
[Multiculturalism and its] Impact on American Life (Excerpt)
While the “delegitimizing” impact of unassimilable immigrants can be seen in many areas of American life, in no other field is it more obvious than in the arts. Cultural institutions in cities with large third-world populations are rapidly abandoning the Western high culture tradition in favor of third-world folk cultures. According to music critic Edward Rothstein writing in the New Republic, the new immigrants simply aren’t interested in Western music:
“[S]trikingly in a city like New York, [classical music culture] is largely a racially stratified culture as well: there are almost no black or immigrant faces (aside from Asians) to be seen in concert halls... My neighborhood arts organization, like many others around the country, has been unsuccessful in marketing Western art music to the new racial and international communities in the area. So instead they’ve begun presenting the folk musics of immigrant and black cultures.”
The same applies to the theater. “The reason that Broadway appeals less to New Yorkers these days,” writes theater critic Thomas Disch, “isn’t just that Broadway has changed: so have New Yorkers... [A] glance around the lobby at any Broadway show reveals who isn’t there: any of the city’s readily identifiable minorities — blacks, Hispanics, Asians ...”
Theatrical companies have tried to address the problem by introducing multiracial casts into Western plays, but have been disturbed to find that the audiences for such multiracial productions are still almost exclusively white. Evidently, third-worlders are simply not attracted to Western theater, even when it has lots of nonwhites in the cast. Since changing the cast doesn’t work, the only solution will be to give up the plays themselves. The irony is that these problems, are not seen as the result of nonwhites’ lack of interest in Western culture, and therefore as proof of their non-assimilability; rather, Western culture itself is blamed for not appealing to nonwhites.
Artistic images of American history are also coming under attack. Rush Limbaugh recently noted that the state of Oregon, after commissioning a beautiful bronze statue of a 19th century pioneer family, had rejected the completed statue because the image of a white pioneer family was considered “racist” and “noninclusive.” While Rush was unusually upset about this incident, it didn’t seem to occur to him that it had anything to do with demographic change — i.e., that it is our society’s increasingly nonwhite character that is making any “all-white” image seem unrepresentative and therefore illegitimate.
In 1993 there was an angry protest by black and Hispanic students at the University of Massachusetts who wanted the school to dump its official symbol, the Minuteman. The image of a “white man carrying a gun,” they charged, was racist. For the time being the school has resisted this demand. But for how long? As the university’s white population continues to decline, can we expect the Chinese and Pakistani students and administrators of the future to care enough about the image of the Minuteman to defend it against intimidating black and Hispanic protesters? Who will preserve the symbols of our Anglo-European national heritage after whites are gone?
Indeed, who will defend that heritage even now, while whites are still the majority? On Long Island this past Spring, a school production of Peter Pan was canceled at the last minute, after six weeks of rehearsals, because the town’s American Indian minority felt that the play’s portrayal of Indians (which, remember, is simply a childlike fantasy taking place in Never-Never Land) was insulting to them. So, to accommodate multiracial America, this classic play that we all remember with fondness from our childhood is to be proscribed. The most significant thing about the incident was that no one in the town, including the parents whose children had their play taken away from them, seriously protested this outrage.
In an even more horrifying example of white surrender, an elite private school in New England was considering hiring a well-known multicultural curriculum consultant when it was discovered that the consultant — a Caribbean-born black woman based in Toronto — had admitted in a published interview that her approach would make white children feel intimidated and guilty. After some discussion, the school’s board of trustees went ahead and hired her anyway.
These are examples of what is happening to our entire country and culture. As America becomes more and more nonwhite, everything we think of as the American culture and identity will be either censored, squeezed out or transformed into something else.
The response of establishment conservatives to these concerns is to say that such problems are created not by immigrants but by alienated white elites, as well as by the general moral decay of our society. “It is true that radical and liberal elites in education, government, and media appear to be doing everything they can to destroy whatever is left of traditional America, and they might well be doing so even if there were no immigrants at all.” But we must understand that even if there were no “cultural revolution” going on in this country, the kind of massive demographic change we are experiencing as a result of immigration would still be enough, by itself, to destabilize and ultimately destroy our culture.