01/07/2026
How to Stop Entropy
The Message of the Scandinavian Myth of Ymir Through the Ages
How can entropy be stopped?
Perhaps not by holding the world in an iron hand, but by ceasing, first of all, to imagine it as a heap of scattered parts. Disintegration does not begin when walls collapse. It begins earlier, in the gaze itself: at the moment when a living whole is seen as material, resource, object of analysis, playing field, or a set of fragments that may be endlessly rearranged.
The Scandinavian myth of Ymir speaks of this more quietly, and more terribly, than any modern theory.
To recall it briefly for those unfamiliar with the old northern cosmogony: Ymir was the primordial being, the giant, the living beginning of the world. From his body the earth was made; from his blood, the waters; from his bones, the mountains; from his skull, the sky; from his hair, the forests. The later Edda tells us that three divine brothers, Odin, Vili and Vé, killed Ymir and fashioned the world from him. In our mythological language, they become three Demiurges: the one who takes; the one who makes what has been taken call itself consent; and the one who sanctifies the taking, turning the knife into law.
Thus the world is born through the dismemberment of the living.
But if we hear this myth not as a triumphant legend of creation, but as a warning, it opens into another depth. The world is not dead. It was not assembled from empty matter. It grew from a living body. And therefore every civilization that continues to dismember the living repeats the first gesture of the Demiurges. It may call this progress, governance, security, analysis, liberation, deconstruction or optimization. Yet if the action begins with the loss of reverence before Essence, then the knife enters Ymir once again.
This ancient image lies with startling precision over our own time.
We, too, live in a world of strata. There are those who possess more money, power, education, status, access to decisions, and command of the language in which those decisions are explained. There are those who produce, serve, heal, teach, repair, raise children, grow tired, sign contracts, pay debts, and increasingly feel that their lives are necessary to the system, while their voices are barely heard within it. There are elites, middle layers, vulnerable lower classes, invisible people, and those who are formally free yet practically deprived of any meaningful refusal.
But in the new world, another stratum becomes more and more visible: the priests.
Not necessarily in the religious sense. These are priests of protocol, language, access, expert interpretation, digital ritual, norm, algorithm, correct formulation, permitted meaning. They do not always own land or factories. Sometimes they own what is allowed to count as reality. They explain which words may be spoken, which feelings are legitimate, which pain is recognized, which memory is dangerous, which beauty is suspect, and which Essence must be dismantled into social functions, psychological symptoms or political constructions.
Thus society is governed more and more not only by force and capital, but by interpretation.
And here postmodernism played its great and dangerous role.
It was born as a just suspicion of empty form. It approached the classics with a question: is there still life behind the marble? Is there Essence behind the golden frame? Has beauty become a screen for power, tradition a display window, high style a mask, and canon a magnificent shell around emptiness?
This was its truth.
But postmodernism did not stop where it should have stopped. It opened the form and, having seen the living, continued to cut. It began to dismantle not the lie, but the very tissue of Essence. Love became a scheme of power. Faith became a function. Beauty became a construction of the gaze. The hero became a set of masks. The human being became an intersection of discourses. The world became a text without a living body.
And at that point, deconstruction ceased to be purification.
It became a new form of entropy.
For Essence cannot be known by killing it. Essence is not a mechanism, not a quotation, not a social role, and not an effect of language. Essence is the living part of Ymir’s matter, the place where the world can still say: I am alive.
That is why postmodernism has no time left.
It has done its work: it exposed empty forms, dead canons, false thrones, rhetoric without fire, beauty without truth. But an age that knows only how to open and dissect cannot become an age of healing. The world is already too wounded to go on admiring the precision of the knife.
Another gesture is needed now.
Not a refusal of complexity. Not a return to naive classicism. Not blind worship of an old form.
What is needed is the moment when the knife stops before the living.
This brings everything together beautifully.
Metabarocco does not diminish the human being. It releases him from the false obligation to be a god, the architect of the entire design, the final judge of form and meaning.
It restores to him a deeper dignity: to be a living Essence, a particle of Ymir, a hero of the Tale, who does not have to see the whole pattern in order to walk his path with honor.
This is where Metabarocco begins.
#Энтропия #СовременнаяКультура