—(The Good Is Diffusive Of Itself.)
—Peter R. Mossback, Athwart Historian, Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists
I go upstream not to reverse history, but to feel its pressure more clearly.
It settles around us. It silts our boots as we stand in it. It buries what it cannot immediately metabolize.
Which is why certain survivals deserve our attention—not as accidents, but as achievements of form.
John St. Evola recently brought to the Council this image above, uncovered not far from the villages of his ancestors: a young woman turned away, gathering flowers not to admire them, not even to keep them, but to carry them elsewhere. The gesture is modest. The implication is not. The Latin phrase he attached to the mural—bonum est diffusivum sui—does not announce itself as doctrine. It behaves instead like gravity.
The good spreads.
Beauty migrates.
I am not Italian, and therefore I approach this image as a historian rather than a descendant. John approaches it differently. For him, the distance between the woman in the mural and his own bloodline collapses—not sentimentally, but structurally. Gesture is inheritance. Posture is memory. One recognizes one’s people not by faces alone, but by how they move through the world.
As the Irish song has it —
and as old Italian stoops knew, with Irish blood folded quietly into the line.
The woman’s yellow garment matters. It is not ornament. It is function. Congealed sunlight, worn plainly, for work. The Council’s color, before it was ever called that. This suggests—quietly but firmly—that the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists did not begin as an institution. It began as a practice: carrying what matters away from where it would otherwise be lost.
I was reminded of this recently by a short circulating video—one of those odd demonstrations the modern world produces unintentionally. A spiraled staff placed in a downward flow of water appears to climb against the current. At first glance it feels like a parlor trick. On closer inspection, it is something subtler: the object does not resist the river. It recruits it. Its form converts descent into ascent.
Call it hocus-pocus if you like.
Purpose still bends the current.
Focus decides what survives.
This is how beauty survives history.
Not by standing athwart the current in defiance—that is my job—but by shaping itself so that the forces working against it become the very means of its continuation. The mural does not oppose time. It lets time do the carrying. The woman does not hoard beauty. She disperses it. The Council does not freeze meaning. It sends it downstream in a shape that knows how to travel back.
This woman is a past member of the Council, she is one of the oldest. She conserved not by enclosure, but by diffusion. She understood that preservation is not the enemy of movement, but its refinement.
Some things move upstream not because they are stronger than the river, but because they were designed—long ago—to let the river pull them where they need to go.
Stamped, as ever, in yellow.
Pete’s Bio: HERE
An early member of the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists, remembered here practicing her principle: beauty does not remain where it blooms. It moves, upstream if necessary, and teaches others to carry it on.
******* *******
Council Footnote:
(Filed by the Backward Scholar[B.S.], with Mossback’s reluctant approval)
On the Spiral Staff and Alleged Defiance of the Current
Yes, something like the spiral staff can move upstream in flowing water.
No, most viral examples are not as pure as they appear.
The effect relies on basic fluid dynamics: a helical shape converts linear flow into rotational torque, which can translate into axial motion—sometimes opposite the direction of the flow. This is a cousin to the Archimedean screw, operating in reverse. Crucially, the object usually depends on constraints: channels, rails, angles, or friction that the camera politely avoids mentioning.
In other words:
the river does the work.
the shape decides the direction.
Which is precisely why the metaphor was allowed to stand.
—Filed under: Motion Against Entropy, Qualified
—Cross-referenced with: Beauty, Diffusion of; Form Over Force; Things That Look Like Miracles Until You Read the Margins
COUNCIL-OF CONCERNED-CONSERVATIONISTS…..Between Jest And Earnest….. 
Leave a comment