cell913blog.com #76

 Attempting to live ‘in the between’ as this scribe put it in the last post, that is between the rawness of nature, ‘life eating life in order to survive,’ and some ephemeral, ineffable, timeless, and indescribable ‘deity’ or ‘transcendence,’ or ‘divinity,’ or ‘ekstasis,’ a Greek work denoting ‘stepping outside the norm,’ ( a satisfaction that goes deeper than feeling good) has been a constant tension in all cultures, religions and philosophies.

One of the most confounding aspects of this tension in a culture locked into a literal, logical, rational, empirical, sensate, language, perception, and ‘reality’ is that “Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under control of reason,” as Karen Armstrong writes in her introduction to her work, The Case for God (p. xiv)

Armstrong continues:

One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, since, like religion at its best, music marks the ‘limits of reason.’ Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be ‘definitively’ rational. It is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts, and skins and reaches ‘resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness.’ (borrowed from George Steiner’s Real Presences: Is There anything in what we say? p.217) But it is also highly cerebral, requiring the balance of intricately complex energies and form-relations, and is intimately connected with mathematics. Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything. A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike, and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience. Like tragedy, it brings intense pleasure and insight. We seem to experience sadness directly in a way that transcends ego, because this is not my sadness but sorrow itself. In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one. (Ibid)

Perhaps the ‘losing oneself’ in a ritual, skill or knack after constant practice might begin to illustrate a similar ‘ekstasis.’ A hunchback who trapped cicadas in the forest with a sticky pole never missed a single one. He had so perfected his powers of concentration that he lost himself in the task, and his hands seemed to move themselves. He had no idea how he did it but knew only that he had acquired the knack after months of practice. This self-forgetfulness (Daoist Zhuangzi) explained, was an ‘ekstasis’ that enabled you to ‘step outside’ the prism of ego and experience the sacred.  

People who acquired this knack discovered a transcendent dimension of life that was not simply an external reality ‘out there’ but was identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality which they have called God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life. But it was impossible to explain it in terms of logos (appeal to logic and rationality). This imprecision was not frustrating, as a modern Western person might imagine, but brought with it an ektasis that lifted practitioners beyond the constricting confines of self. ……Even today, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment.                                                                                                                            op. cit. p. xiii-xiv)

Senator John McCain of Arizona was renowned for exhortation, ‘to dedicate yourself to something larger than yourself’! Probably, in his mind he was attempting to elevate individual Americans’ aspiration, motivation and commitment to a philanthropic, a social need, a project that would entail a significant contribution to the public good. While honourable, worthy, highly ethical and eminently memorable, there is a difference between his exhortation and the kind of transcendence that Armstrong writes of in the contemplation of the insoluble, within the deepest ‘level of being.’ One is not more ethical or moral than the other; the difference seems more akin to an ‘objective project’ larger than self, rather than a subjective ‘spiritual’ kind of experience.

In some way, pedagogy, persuasion, modelling and motivating generate McCain’s version of ‘something larger than self.’ No amount of pedagogy, persuasion, modelling and motivating can engender transcendence.

The bifurcation of reality into modes of perception and thought, one the one hand, rational and literal, and on the other ‘aesthetic, spiritual, poetic, and ‘right brain’ is another of the contemporary tensions in our culture that continue to attract observers. And as the ‘left brain’ rational, literal,  empirical mode of both perception and thought, as well as the interpretation of reality dominates, the implication of this dominance are legion. In medicine, for example, the ‘soul’ of the patient is extraneous to the case history, the diagnosis and the treatment plans that doctors and their staff prepare for their patients.

The rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctly modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as ‘creation science’ that regards the mythos of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. (Ibid, p. xv)

There is a kind of ‘certainty’ and objectivity and clarity to the literal, empirical whereas the poetic and imaginative and transcendent tends to be much more abstract, indefinite, uncertain, ephemeral, and thereby tends to be considered as less ‘real’ and certainly ‘less important.’ What are the facts?’ is a question bandied about in a presidential political campaign in which one candidate seems to depend on ‘alternative facts’…while another champions demonstrable, provable, measurable, literal, empirical data points.

One of the dark sides of the trend to conspiracy theories, in addition to their failure to meet the ‘smell test’ of literal, empirical accuracy, is that they tend to embody deep, highly toxic and even inordinately negative emotions, perceptions, images and the power of those factors, with impunity. How to hold such toxic perceptions, emotions and images to account, and the people who hold and spread their venom in an American culture addicted to the literal, empirical, legal, seems beyond the bounds of the public institutions.

The emotions, whether conscious or unconscious, however, illustrate a very cogent, poignant and visceral notion. In spite of decades or even centuries of training, education, normalizing and cultural embedding of the importance of reason, logic, the literal, empirical denotation of reality, there is always an inescapable ‘connotative’ aspect to reality….And ‘connotative’ exceeds ‘context’ the favourite word of contemporary pundits and reporters.

The dictionary definition of connotative reads: having the power of implying or suggesting something in addition to what is explicit…the subjective associations or feelings a word  (or image) brings to mind beyond the literal…

Ms Armstrong reminds us:

In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each had its own sphere of competence, and it was unwise to mix the two. Logos (‘reason’) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality….Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it had limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or ‘myth’.

Today we live in a society of scientific logos and myth has fallen into disrepute. In popular parlance, a ‘myth’ is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way. Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. Myth has been called a primitive form of psychology. When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, or fighting monsters, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thought and behavior. (Armstrong, The Case for God, p.xi)

 Some might argue that contemporary conspiracy theories, like the one of immigrants from Haiti eating pet cats and dogs, resembles a myth. Actually, it would seem more likely to be a horrific image of fear, exemplified in Greek mythology by the Greek gods Deimos and Phobos, the gods or personified spirits of fear. Deimos represented terror and dread, while his brother Phobos was panic and flight. They were the sons of the war-god Ares who accompanied their father into battle, driving his chariot and spreading fear in his wake. As sons of Aphrodite, goddess of love, the twins also represented fear of loss. (from theoi.com

 The conundrum and perplexity and danger of another trump presidency, far from the danger of literally weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, and mass deportations of allegedly illegal immigrants, lies in the deepest, darkest, images of war, based on fear and panic.

Eliciting and evoking the secret, undisclosed, unaccounted for, unconscious and yet profoundly influential fears of his ‘cult’ as a mirror to/of his own deepest, darkest, undisclosed and unaccounted for and highly influential fears by the Republican candidate and his lackey on the ticket, seems not only deceptively simple and highly radioactive.

Reaching into mythos, as a potential (and certainly not definitive) narrative image that attempts to represent those  matters of logos (reason) that resist containment in and by reason, logic and the literal, may not offer a legal  case for prosecution. The imaginative, poetic way of seeing, however, does attempt  to render a path to contemplation of one of the most vexing insolubles, without having to rely on the medical, psychiatric or clinical psychology professionals.

 Framing rhetoric in terms of war, based on fear and panic, for the purposes of arousing a nation (or a sizeable portion of a nation) by an American candidate for president, while echoing a similar framing by another Russian despot, may offer faux comfort and security to a fragile 78-year-old. It does not and cannot escape the depiction not only of a national, geopolitical, and dangerously imaginal and potential military and political conflict within and without the borders of the  United States.

Looking through the “left-brain-left-eye’ without considering the right brain-eye perspective endangers both the framers and the framed.

 

cell913blog.com #75

 Who among us is not still struggling with headlines of war….in Ukraine, In Gaza, now in Lebanon, and in Israel…in the Sudan and ……?

In the Middle East, particularly, the conflict between Islam and Jews, seems not merely intractable, historic, epic and endless and  deeply rooted in their respective holy writings.

In his outstanding work, Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell, writes a full chapter entitled, ‘Mythologies of War and Peace’.

He writes:

It is for an obvious reason far easier to name example of mythologies of war than mythologies of peace: for not only has conflict between groups been normal to human experience, but there is also the cruel fact to be recognized that killing is the precondition of all living whatsoever: life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist…..(Rather) it has been those who have been reconciled to the nature of life on this earth (who have survived). Plainly and simply: it has been the nations, tribes, and peoples bread to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to descendants. (Campbell, op. cit. p. 174) 

Integral both to his thesis and to his personal biography, are these lines:

One of the first books that I had the privilege of editing was of a Navaho war ceremonial, accompanied by its series of sand paintings (or rather, in this case, ‘pollen’ paintings, made of the pulverized petals of flowers…..The name of the ceremony was ‘Where the Two Came to Their Father.’ It told of the journey of the Navaho twin heroes to the home of the sun, their father, to procure from him the magic and weapons with which to eliminate the monsters that were at that time at large in the world. For it is the basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one’s own people.  (Campbell op. cit. p. 176-177)

While our papers and screens are replete with images of war from Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Israel and Sudan and their collective impact is to churn the intestines and the nervous systems of millions of what were once dubbed, ‘peaceniks,’ ( an often disparaging word to depict an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention, also a pacifist), some people continue to uphold a Greek notion of empathy for the enemy. On the website, romankrznaric.com, in a piece entitled. Empathy with the Enemy, this Australian philosopher writes this:

In the spring of 472 BC the people of Athens queued up to see the latest play written by Aeschylus, the founder of Greek tragedy. The Persians was an unusual production, and not only because it was based on an historical event rather than the usual legends of the gods. What must have really shocked the audience was that it was told through the eyes of their sworn enemy, the Persians, who only eight years earlier had fought the Athenians at the Battle of Salamis…..The audience is encouraged to feel the personal sorrows of their military rivals and to see the battle from the perspective of the vanquished barbarians. Although some Athenians watching the unfolding drama may have been gloating over their victory, Aeschylus was asking them to undertake the radical act of empathizing with the defeated enemy just at their moment of triumph. Even more striking is the fact that Aeschylus himself fought the Persians at the earlier Battle of Marathon, where his own brother had been killed. Perhaps when writing the play he was remembering that while 191 Athenians fell in the conflict, 6,400 Persians lost their lives. The imagined cries of Persian mothers and widows may have been haunting him ever since.

This attitude of empathy for the enemy, however, is very different from the attitude of the major Abrahamic religions to their own wars.

From Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By, we read this:

But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a Thou (to use Martin Buber’s term), but a thing, an ‘It.’  (p. 180-181)

Campbell quotes from Deuteronomy:

When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens up to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites the Cannanites and the Perissites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God had commanded. (Deuteronomy 20:0-18) (Campbell Myths to Live By, p.181-182)

Campbell continues:

And of course…the Arabs have their divinely authorized war mythology too. For they too are a people who, according to their legend, are of the seed of Abraham: the progeny of Ishmael, his first and elder son. Moreover, according to this history, confirmed in the Koran, it was Abraham and Ishmael, before the birth of Isaac, who built in Mecca the sanctuary of the Ka’aba, which is the uniting central symbol and shrine of the entire Arab world and of all Islam. The Aabs revere and derive their beliefs from the same prophets as the Hebrews. They honor Abraham, honor Moses. They greatly honor Solomon. They honor Jesus too, as a prophet. Mohammed, however, is their ultimate prophet, and from him-who was a considerable warrior himself—they have derived their fanatic mythology and unrelenting war in God’s name.

The jihad, the duty of the Holy War, is a concept developed from certain passages of the Koran which, during the period of the Great Conquests (from the seventh to tenth centuries), were interpreted as defining the bounden duty of every Muslim male who is free, of full age, in full possession of his intellectual powers, and physically fit for service. ‘Fighting is prescribed for you,’ we read in the Koran Sura 2, verse 216. ‘True you have an antipathy to it: however, it is possible that your antipathy is to something that is nevertheless good for you. God knows, and you know not,’ ‘To fight in the cause of Truth is one of the highest forms of charity,’ I read in a commentary to this passage. ‘What can you offer that is more precious than your own life?’ All lands not belonging to ‘the territory of Islam’ (dar al-Islam) are to be conquered and are known, therefore as ‘the territory of war’ (dar al-harb). ‘I am commanded,’ the Prophet is reported to have said, ‘to fight until men bear witness, there is no god but God and his Messenger is Mohammed.’ According to the ideal, one campaign a year, at least, must be undertaken by every Moslem prince against unbelievers. However, where this proves to be no longer possible, it suffices if any army, efficiently maintained, is kept trained and ready for the jihad. (Campbell, Myths to Live By, pps. 184-185)

Campbell then proceeds to posit the Jews as the target of Islam.

And the Jews, ‘the People of the Book,….hold a special place in this (Moslem0 thinking, since it was they who first received God’s Word but then -according to Mohammed’s view) repeatedly forsook it, backsliding, rejecting, and even slaying God’s later prophets. In the Koran they are repeatedly addressed and threatened: of which passages I shall cite but one, from Sura 17, verses 4-8 (and wherever the word ‘We’ appears in this text, the reference is to God; where ‘you,’ to the Jews; while the ‘Book’ is the Bible):

And We gave clear warning to the Children of Israel in the Book that twice they do mischief on the earth and be elated with mighty arrogance, and twice they would be punished. When the first warnings came to pass, We sent against you Our servants given to terrible warfare (the Babylonians 685 B.C.): they entered the very inmost parts of your homes; and it was a warning completely fulfilled. Then did we grant you the Return as against them: We gave you increase in resources and sons, and made you the more numerous in manpower. If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil ye did it against yourselves. So when the second of the warnings came to pass, we permitted your enemies to disfigure your faces and to enter your Temple (the Romans 70A.D.) as it had been entered before, and to visit with destruction all that fell into their power. It may be that your Lord may het show Mercy unto you; but if ye ever revert to your sins, we shall revert to Our punishments: and We have made Hell a prison for those who reject the Faith. (Campbell, Myths to Live By, p.185)

Some have argued that the deeply embedded notion, construct, belief and theology of monotheism, the belief in the existence of one god, or in the oneness of God. (Britannica.com), a position held by the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, has contributed to, perhaps even injected ‘steroids’ of discipline, commitment, passion, and morality into devotees of the three faiths. Alternatively, it might be posited that faith ennobles its devotee to aspire to, envision, and strive to attain, and to ‘fight’ for, with, and under the command of, the deity of that faith.

Britannica.com further articulates a social, intellectual, cultural and even psychological minefield in the dichotomy of monotheism and polytheism.

Monotheism and polytheism are often thought of in rather simple terms—e.g. as merely numerical contrast between the one and the many. The history of religions, however, indicates many concepts that should warn against oversimplification in this matter. There is no historical material to prove that one system of belief is older than the other, although many scholars hold that monotheism is a higher form of religion and therefore must be a later development, assuming that what is higher came later. Moreover, it is not the oneness but the uniqueness of God that counts in monotheism; one god is not affirmed as the logical opposite of many gods but as an expression of divine might and power.

Whether in and through a shift from a literal, bilateral, numerical, empirical perception, epistemology and attitude of monotheism to polytheism, at least as a psychological matter, or a more ephemeral and metaphoric notion of monotheism as ‘divine might and power,’ without the historical accretions and barnacles of exclusivity, absolutism, self-righteousness and the need to ‘war’ on behalf of a deity and one’s faith in that deity, we continue to recognize and confront the inescapable notion:  life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist.

There is also an inescapable unifying force in that reality; we are all intimately, intricately and often unconsciously engaged in “life” in which we dwell in the between of literal flora/fauna and all of their respective complexities and the also inescapable image (whether metaphoric and aesthetic or religious) of a force, energy, mystery and numinosity of the divine.

And how, when where and in what  measure we bring, insert, activate or infuse our imaginations into that ‘between’ will tell us much about our relationships to ourselves and all others on the planet we share…there is no PLANET B!

cell913blog.com #74

Inflation is not only a condition of economics!

It is not only in Texas that America thinks ‘big’ and ‘bold’ and exaggerated. And in presidential election campaigns, especially, inflated rhetoric seems to garner even more attention than is normal. (Of course, trump’s inflation of himself and everything he ‘touches’ or speaks about, is injected with ‘the noxious gas’ of his own inferiority, narcissism and self-proclaimed ‘hero’ for all the ills of America and the world. It is no accident and ‘puffery’ and buffoonery’ sound similar: they come from the same Pandora’s Box of troubles and echo each other’s inflation.

Rhetoric is, of course, one of the most obvious victims of presidential campaign inflation, exaggeration, all of it basically insulting to anyone listening with a critical ear. This particular campaign comes in the middle of so much turbulence, globally, that a vortex of dangerous winds swirl around almost all discussions of a political nature. The marriage of ‘existential threat’ and ‘apocalypse’ should either candidate win, casts this election campaign as, at a bare minimum, ‘epic.’ And that kind of rhetoric is ‘out-of-bounds’ and yet, ironically and paradoxically, it seems to be somewhat fitting. For nearly a decade now, the ‘Republican’ candidate has spewed inflammatory words, character assassinating slurs, and depictions of the ‘end of America’ if his opponents, (from both parties beginning with the Republican primary prior to the 2016 election). Projecting his own ‘epic’ grievances against the institutional systems of law, environment, health care, finance, as his way of emulating the dystopian authors of history, in order to position himself as “saviour” (“I alone can fix this!”) has drummed a tune and tone to which many millions have been seduced, while millions more have been disgusted.

Not only is his claim of being able to ‘fix’ all the myriad problems and issues facing the United States and the world specious; it is another of his intrepid and hollow LIES. Rarely, however, is this particular epithet described or interpreted as a lie, per se; it is merely another exaggeration, so outlandish, so despicable and so redolent of his own psychic depravity, need for even gratuitous adulation, and blindness to his own meagre limitations. Exaggerations, however, in a culture drowning in misinformation on social media, with basic impunity for those trafficking in those lies, are neither tolerable nor indicative of a campaign worthy of anyone seeking public office. “It’s just politics,” were the words used by Russell Vought, one of the authors/originators of the Project 2025 policy and planning document in reference to the great leader’s attempts to separate himself and to disavow any knowledge of the project. Lying, mis-informing, distorting, flinging ad hominum attacks at political opponents, claiming the power to ‘end’ intractable wars,’ to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and to deconstruct government departments from their assigned, legislated and budgeted responsibilities by firing hundreds of thousands of professional staff and replacing them with sycophant and loyal political appointments who will discharge all of ‘dear leader’s’ commands seem to be at least a partial portrayal of the political landscape and culture the Americans have both created and permitted. Who needs Cecil B. DeMille?

What is monumental, from the north side of the 49^th parallel, is the ‘Republican’ candidate’s persistence in insulting contempt, disdain, and outright objectifying of the American voter, especially those who have fallen for the entrapment that this human, clearly unfit for any public office, let alone the Oval, has peddled. This steady menu of patronizing, insulting, manipulating, lying that continues, seemingly still, to overtake the 40% of non-college-educated white folks that represent the core of the maga base represents not only an ethical and moral disaster, in human terms, but also a national core of hollowness, emptiness, insouciance and derangement that threatens to capsize the national ship (of state). That there should be even a mere fluctuating 5% difference in current opinion polls, (as opposed to a significant leading margin for Harris/Walz) although the number itself is small, ought to be flagging a nation on a cliff-edge of epic self-sabotage. Characterized by many in the media as ‘anger,’ ‘cynicism,’ ‘vengeance,’ and ‘retribution,’ transferring the candidate’s personal psyche onto the millions of his cult, seems, from afar, to be a relatively facile, and still, a threatening, transference. Separating out, for example, the self-righteousness, the absolute conviction of some, such as the Speaker of the House, that bringing the kingdom of God to the United States, from such a cauldron of hate, so strains of the credulity, the capacity to entertain, and the multiple aspects of the ‘continental divide,’ itself an appropriate  metaphor for the nation, as to entertain a the spectre of a national divorce, based on irreconcilable differences.

One of the most glaring deficits, perhaps defaults, lying within the American democracy, sadly and potentially cancerous, is the national media’s fetish, (or is it a dependency on advertising dollars and ratings?) of transforming the presidential race into a national ‘Kentucky Derby’ (pick your favourite horse race). Perhaps too, this significant attitude, behaviour and persistence by the media is another of the glaring, irreconcilable and perverse insults of the American voter. Opinion polls, cash donations, ‘vibes’ and ‘bursts’ of energy that seem to depict a self-writing movie-script, handy and easily transcribed as a news report, while entertaining, omits, avoids, devalues and even disregards the serious issues facing the nation and the competing candidates ‘address’ of those issues. trump knows intimately, and has contempt for, the superficiality and the malleability of a large portion of the electorate. And whether his approach is the ‘chicken or the egg’ in terms of the national media, perhaps irrelevant, nevertheless, shouts out loud how vacuous is the campaign culture at a time when the world is desperately looking to the United States for statesmanship, leadership, serious and profound public attention to the issues we all face, and to the American commitment to take its place at the global table on against those who would trample not only ‘democracy’ as a political and institutional tradition, but also the kind of collaborative, unified and courageous bastion of defense against wannebe tyrants, chaos-seekers, and disrupters.

In another lifetime, I floundered as a free-lance journalist, without formal formation and education in the profession. One ‘trained’ journalist explained to this rookie, that the audience (reader, viewer, listener) could be considered to be at the grade six level. That level of education was then considered to be the targeted beacon to which the reporter was to write and direct his/her reporting. Innocently, and also irreverently, I found such a premise to be insulting, both of the audience and of the reporters. Clarity, simplicity, accuracy, and coherence, as guide words for reporting, and, of course, the teasing, exciting, often misleading ‘head’ for each story, perhaps. Insultingly patronizing, condescending and demeaning the audience, however, was not OK. There are, certainly, many seasoned, articulate, nuanced, and cogent men and women delivering both news and commentary, on this election as well as on global affairs. It is the profound rise in tabloid journalism, personality assassinations, gotcha-moments, and their magnetism for deep-pocket-donors that, following the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens united, that, together, has unleashed multiple tsunamis of cash into the purchase of the nation’s politics.

This decision, anything but judicial, is another of the tumors that currently infest the American political landscape, along with the application of near total  immunity for the president for all nefarious, illicit, self-serving baronial tipping of the electoral scales or any other act in which the court’s ‘king’ considers necessary. Misty attempts at a medical diagnosis, however glib and reductionistic, continue to miss such national ‘heart-rate’ measures as the DOW, the unemployment rate, the slowing falling inflation rate, the potential lowering of the interest rate by the Federal Reserve, and the helium-infused joy and exuberance that filled the United Center in Chicago as host of the Democratic National Convention.

Are both that joy and exuberance inflated by the imagination of delegates at the prospect of a new head to the ticket, after Biden’s withdrawal? Is the threat allegedly embodied in the Project 2025 document a threat to the nation from within? Is the alleged threat of ‘socialism’ that pours out of the Republican campaign, should the Harris-Walz ticket win in November even worthy of notice? Is it an exaggeration to wonder here if the American preparation for whatever turbulence might ensue should the Republican candidate fail to win and claim to have lost, AGAIN, because of a stolen and fraudulent election? Or, conversely, should he win and wreak havoc for the four-year term, both at home and around the world?

The capacity, willingness, fortitude and spine of the American culture, the anima mundi, to have in place all the needed steps, legal, political, financial, geopolitical and intellectual for either outcome is an issue no one seems either equipped or prepared to answer in the affirmative. Is it another glib and specious exaggeration to ask if the American ‘nation’ can be eroded, atrophied, swamped and decimated from within, should the Republican candidate win on November 5?

If ‘he’ loses, there is no limit to which he and his cabal of thugs will go to forestall the peaceful transfer of power from Biden to the legitimate winner, who, in this case, would be Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They have already ‘placed’ 26 election deniers (those who believe the 2020 election was stolen fraudulently) in 19 states. Election deniers are already on the ballot in some 12 states; 171 election deniers are sitting members of Congress; 171 election deniers are on the ballot for Congress in races being tracked by ElectionDeniers.org from which site this date is drawn.

‘Election denial isn’t a new concept, but it really turned into a political movement in 2020,’ says Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action which started the (ElectionDeniers.org) website. ‘Trump and his allies went state by state and tried to overturn valid election results in order to stay in power. Election denial is about eroding trust in elections. Why? Because that makes it easier to cast doubt on the results alter the fact if the election doesn’t go your way,’ she continues. (from people.com)

There is a kind of campaign strategy on the so-called Republican side that evokes so many moments from the last decade in which the former, twice-impeached, convicted felon stirred up ‘bad trouble’ as his way of keeping the news spotlight on him that also had the impact of distracting many from the real issues to which he and millions of others were giving a blind eye, a deaf ear, and an insouciant attitude….just think, for example, COVID 19!

The Democratic Party has reportedly raised some $540 million since the announcement of the ‘Harris-Walz ticket. Reports today indicate that some $370 million of that are going into an ad-buy for the next 70-odd days remaining in the campaign. Is there a chance that at least $100 million of that $540 million might be allotted to shore up the legal defenses, both for the party and the nation, in preparation for, and to ward against the multiple nefarious legal maneuvres we all know are being drafted by the army of legal acolytes in the Republican camp?

The escalating war in the Middle East, the escalating war in Ukraine, the escalating violence in Sudan, the threat of damaging symptoms of climate change and global warming….and then there are the multiple and almost incapable of being exaggerated threats from within!

cell913blog.com #73

There are moments when, as a Canadian, non-American, that I have to confront some of the most challenging insights of mentor The American, James Hillman.

One such moment arose yesterday, while sitting in the cafeteria of a local hospital, I read this line from Hillman’s essay, ‘Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars’ from Mythic Figures, Spring Publications, 2021, p.128:

We may be a violent people but not a warlike people—and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself.

Why then, this presumptuous Canadian is prompted to ask, has the world witnessed an American history and litany of ‘wars’ to counter the infections of illicit drug consumption, addiction, importation and gangs, along with the tidal wave of weapons and law enforcement initiatives that have morphed what is essentially a social-health-medical-psychological-sociological-political issue? And why, from the evidence available through the public media outlets, have those ‘wars’ almost universally and without exception, failed? Is this paradox, seeming irreconcilable conundrum, as a psychic model, similar to, analogous to, or perhaps even identical to the problem each human being faces, when attempting to reconcile his/her/our ‘dark side’ with our ‘better angels’ as the vernacular would put it?

When political issues, even political campaigns, are imagined, rhetorically debated, strategically planned and tactically executed as “wars” between combatants, political parties which, as exemplified in the recent national elections, have adopted a ‘zero-sum’ approach to their conduct, then war is no longer something merely hated. And war, as incarnated in political campaigns, is no longer the honourable, decent, respectful and honest debate stage that seems to evoke Mars. While there are aesthetically and creatively presented moments of campaign ads and epithets that will live longer than the campaigns in which they have been launched, and there are moments when specific speeches, interviews, editorials, PSA’s (Public Service Announcements) video clips that elevate the spirit of voters and the soul of the nation, there is a foreboding, and a kind of apocalyptic and existential threat to the nation,  and many argue to the survival of democracy itself, as embodied in the American history, law, government and even the books of poetry.

Hillman argues that the American ‘blindness’ to war exemplifies the ‘blindness’ of Mars. Our so-called doublespeak about armaments as ‘peacekeepers’ reflects truly how we think. War is bad, exterminate war and keep peace violently: punitive expeditions, pre-emptive strikes, send in the Marines. More firepower means surer peace. We enact the blind god’s blindness. (Mars Caecus, as the Romans called him and Mars insanus, furibundus, omnipotens) like Grant’s and Lee’s men in the Wilderness, like the bombing of Dresden, overkill as a way to end war…..If in the arms is the god, then arms control requires at least partly, if not ultimately, a religious approach. The statement by the Catholic Bishops is a harbinger of that recognition. We worry about nuclear accident, but what we call accident is the autonomy of the inhuman. Arms as instruments of death, are sacred objects that remind mortals that are we are not athnetos, immortal.

Before we open the relationship between the martial and the nuclear mind-set, or perspective, we need to pause to put this ‘sacred’ notion of arms, instruments of death reminding us that we are not immortal. From a psychological and theological perspective, one can argue that to consider arms as instruments of death and thereby sacred, appears to many as a blatant rationalization, a reconciliation of the theological/sacred to the ‘symbols’ of killing. And this perception, attitude, and conviction may well embody the Achilles Heel of Christianity….And there is a profound psychological, as well as political, ethical, moral and sociological risk in this apparently widely-held perception that war itself can be symbolized, carried in metaphor as a ‘sacred’ act. An extension of this perception would be to consider the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which the Americans dubbed “Little Boy” (how ironic is that?) as a sacred symbol. To put an end to war, as the argument and justification of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tends to be put, itself seems specious today. From waging peace.org, the website of “Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, in a piece entitled ‘Were the Atomic Bombs Necessary?’ by David Kreiger, July 30, 2012, we read:

The US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, even without the use of the atomic bombs, without the Soviet Union entering the war and without an Allied invasion of Japan, the war would have ended before December 31, 1945 and, in al likelihood, before November 1 1945. Prior to the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US was destroying Japanese cities at will with conventional bombs. The Japanese were offering virtually no resistance. The US dropped atomic bombs on a nation that had been largely defeated and some of whose leaders were seeking terms of surrender….Most high ranking Allied  military leaders were appalled by the use of the atomic bombs. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Europe, recognized that Japan was ready to surrender and said, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” General Hap Arnold, commander of the US Army Corps pointed out, “Atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, put it this way: ‘The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated an ready to surrender. In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians of the Dark Ages. Wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. What Truman has described as ‘the greatest thing in history’ was actually, according to his own military leaders, an act of unparalleled cowardice, the mass annihilation of men, women and children. The use of the atomic bombs was the culmination of an air war fought against civilians in Germany and Japan, an air war that showed increasing contempt for the lives of civilians and for the laws of war.

Not only was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary. To consider the bomb a ‘sacred’ thing is a contemptuous miscarriage of not only ethics and truth, but of any theology worthy of the name. And clearly, such a premise is unthinkable, untenable and specious. And that just might be one of the entrapments in which the American psyche, the anima mundi, has been, and continues to be, ‘caught’. While there is a moral aspect to all perceptions, there are limits to the application of mythological figures, voices, gods and goddesses to real events, circumstances and dramas, whether they are personal or political. Hillman’s desire to peer at personal psychic trauma from a ‘wider’ and more metaphoric, poetic lens, with his proposed intervention through the imagination, of these figures in whose patterns we walk, has the significant release from instant, reductionistic, situational and highly constrained morality. That aspect of archetypal psychology seems both relevant and releasing, especially in a binary, black-white, either-or literal perception, belief and language. A question of whether such an application of the mythic figures, even with their alleged blindness, is warranted in the much more epic, geo-political, historic and even meta-historic domain of what are now ‘global wars of existential proportion’ remains open.

 And, Hillman’s notion that religion and psychology are both about the human soul, and over-lap each other in many ways, like the Venn diagram, warrants serious, thoughtful, reflective and imaginative consideration, religion is NOT exclusively a psychological matter. Nor is psychology an exclusively religious matter. Verbal parsing, for the purposes of differentiating, nevertheless, has merit. So too does the serious examination of the intersection of religion and war.

The question of ‘being a ‘violent people but not a warlike people’ warrants some further digging. We know that two premises that are mutually exclusive and contradictory are both equally feasible simultaneously. Nevertheless, in a ‘literal, empirical’ world of culture, language and perceptions, in which we are taught, inculcated into and come to believe that separation of opposites, if at first for differentiation, nevertheless can entrap our perceptions, attitudes and our psyche into a veritable vice. And that vice tends to react instantaneously, impulsively and spontaneously in an act of judging one to the exclusion of the other. In public discourse, for example, one would be thought and regarded as a fool for positing that being violent but not warlike was reasonable, defensible, logical and ethically sustainable. How can ‘violent and warlike,’ even if attributed to the blindness of a mythical god of war, be separated on the street, in the halls of power, and/or in the psyche of human beings? Is it not likely that many would and do generate a link, whether causal or correlative, between violence and war? Gun violence, as enacted daily in mass killings, seems to a ‘generalist’ eye, one that pulsates somewhat feverishly at the instigation, whether in art/drama/domestic violence or on the battlefield, inextricably linked, however speciously, contemptuously and metaphysically, to the motive to go to war.

And yet, the very blindness to war, to the very notion that lies at the heart of the American anima mundi, epitomizes the blindness we each have to the darkness of each and every one of our passionate motivations, convictions, beliefs and conscious ‘stridently held’ dogmas. From a psychological perspective, we each live in that zone of the’muddle’ or ‘the middle’ in the vortex that is created by the tension between our ‘passion’ as a positive impulse, force, motivation and commitment and our ‘innocence, ignorance (unknowing), blindness, unconsciousness’ implicit in the negative impulse, force, power, influence and ‘hold’ in which that blindness ‘grabs us’ like the figures of our dreams, fantasies, myths, legends, gods and goddesses.

In the Hillman essay referred to previously, (Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars), Hillman warns us:

I believe we can never speak sensible of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This special state must be ritualistically entered. We must be ‘inducted,’ and ‘war must be ‘declared’- as one is declared insane, declared married or bankrupt….To know war we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart. (p. 121)

For this scribe, it is as if I have been, in this space, arguing, pushing back, rejecting Hillman’s method, perspective and thesis, by advocating for a typical, innocent, detached, (Canadian), disengaged view of war and violence, and a perspective that is characterized by the proverbial denial, refusal to open to the depth, the force and the deeper psychic influence of the seemingly inescapable hatred of war and violence. Is that denial,  resistance, avoidance, ‘innocent,’ blindness’ the same blindness that I have been unconscious of in most, if not all, of the other areas in my life?

In another of his writings, Emotion found in A Blue Fire, edited by Thomas Moore, Hillman writes:

(E)motion, no matter how bizarre, must be taken in awful earnest before diagnosing it abortive..This refusal to meet the challenge of emotion, this mauvais foi of consciousness if fundamental to our ‘age of anxiety.’ It is characteristic of—even instrumental in—what has been called ‘the contemporary failure of nerve.’ We do not face emotion in honesty and live it consciously. Instead emotion hangs as a negative background shadowing our age with anxiety and erupting in violence. …Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them…Problems sustain us—maybe that’s why they don’t go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless too. There is a secret love hiding in each problem…We are betrayed in the very same close relationships where primal trust is possible. We can be truly betrayed only where we truly trust-by brothers, lovers, wives, husbands not be enemies, not by strangers. The greater the love and loyalty, the involvement and commitment, the greater the betrayal. Trust has in it the seed of betrayal; the serpent was in the garden from the beginning…Trust and the possibility of betrayal come into the world at the same moment. Wherever there us trust in a union, the risk of betrayal becomes a real possibility. And betrayal, as a continual possibility to be lived with, belongs to trust just as doubt belongs to a living faith. (James Hillman, A Blue Fire, pps.274-5-7-8)

Essentially, in a parallel way, my hatred, contempt, and disgust of and for war and violence have had the impact of keeping me separate from, detached from, and willing to avoid any engagement in conflict, violence, and war. Only yesterday, while biking with our three-year-old Portuguese Water Dog, Tasha, she was visciously attacked by a large angry and uncontrolled dog from behind. Tasha and I reacted instantly in fear and  panic, only to be followed by angry words directed to the owner of the attack dog, a sheepish retreat by his owner and the needed assistance of strangers to keep Tasha out of the path of oncoming cars and trucks. Violence erupted in an instant; and my aversion, innocence, unpreparedness and historic aversion to any form of violence, including any I might have inflicted unconsciously, unknowingly, even in the betrayal of others, exaggerated my state of panic.

Becoming familiar with my own blindness, analogously, seems to evoke blindness to the power of violence, war and betrayal.

Troublesome, no doubt; somewhat freeing and releasing too! 

cell913blog.com #72

I, literally, figuratively, metaphorically and philosophically HATE War! And, doubtless so do millions of others. And I find the wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan all gut-wrenchingly horrific. And I have no way either to change the course of those wars nor, seemingly, to ameliorate or filter my own gut-roilings every time I watch another bombed-out apartment building, hospital, school or the body of a wrapped, dead child being carried from the ruins of their home.

What I hate, however, has the potential, simply in compliance with my denial, avoidance and disgust, to exert an even greater influence on my psyche than is heathy or balanced or manageable. There is something to be said for the potential ‘power of avoidance, denial and dissociation.’

James M. Minnifee, decades ago, wrote a book whose title has clung to memory throughout my life. The title is Canada: Peacemaker or Powder-Monkey. Canadian adherence to American foreign policy, as viewed by Minnifee, a Washington-based correspondent for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), warranted critical scrutiny, as has the Canadian relationship with the United States from the beginning.

 From the Canadian Encyclopaedia.ca, in an article by J.I. Granatstein, updated by Tabitha de Bruin, Daniel Panneton, Richard Foot, February 7, 2006, Last Edited: June 24, 2024, we read:

As a result of Lester Pearson’s leadership in the 1956 Suez Crisis and Canada’s ole in the UN Emergency For he helped to create, many Canadians consider peacekeeping part of the country’s identity. Although Canada’s contribution to peace operations has declined since then, Canadian peacekeepers continue to serve overseas in such places as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In total, more than 125,000 Canadians have served in UN peace operations….In 1956, the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal, which was a vital route for oil travelling to Britain. This concerned Western nations and led Israel to attack Egypt. However, they did so without informing the US, Canada or other NATO allies. Canada wanted to minimize the harm done to the Western alliance by the Anglo-French attack. At this time, Lester Pearson was Canada’s secretary of State for External Affairs. Working with UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, Pearson suggested creating a peacekeeping force to stabilize the situation and to permit the withdrawal of the attacking forces. Pearson also offered a battalion of Canadian troops. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was quickly formed and placed un the command of Canadian Major-General E.L.M.Burns.

And while peacekeeping, in general, has a positive historic record of dampening conflict, reducing casualties, and generally urging combatants toward the negotiating table, wars continue to erupt, seemingly more recently injected with the venomous poison of terrorism or the testosterone-injected autocracy of individuals (men), some with state power, others acting in terrorist and/or gang cells. The penchant for violence and war has been the subject of writers far more deeply and intimately engaged in the passions and the ironies, paradoxes, the loves and the nationalism that often lie at the heart of war. Does war bring people together in a common effort, as witnessed and documented from the stories of World Wars I and II? Is it inherent in human nature, that the choir-boys plane-wrecked on a deserted island in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies will be ‘rescued’ by a battle-ship of war, incarnating the inescapable nature of the human proclivity for violence and war?

Personally, I have never worn a military uniform. Furthermore, I have cynically and skeptically scorned the military and the quasi-military hierarchical system of ‘order’ and ‘discipline’ that has been transferred to many of our civil organizations. I have held the notion, analogous to the hyper hygiene of the operating room being transferred to the private residence, that the exigencies of war and the battlefield are not appropriate parallels from which to organize the work in offices or factories. Indeed, from this perspective, I have noted, with disdain, disappointment and derision the many examples from the workplaces, of extreme and unjust judgements being imposed on ‘unacceptable’ (defiant, deviant, disobedient, and even creative and sensitive) behaviour by those in power, as if in a military court-martial. Making or imitating the military mind-set, in our public square, is not only offensive but actually sabotaging much of what needs to take place in many social aservice dispensaries. Managing workers, too, does not and must not submit to the ‘military’ or quasi-military mode of supervision. And this includes the avowed principle of ‘rehabilitation’ of criminal offenders in our jails and prisons.

Given my total lack of military combat, and even the heightened emotional and psychic ‘high’ of an Olympic Gold Medal, or even of the intensity of adrenalin-rush that must come as one walks across a stage to be hooded with a doctorate in philosophy, I have a psychic blind-spot for such experiences. They remain outside my experience, and thus I come to their encounter as a psychic kindergartner.

And that is how I came to James Hillman’s chapter, ‘Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars’ in his book, Mythic Figures, Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Volume 6: Mythic Figures, 2021 by Margot McLean. Somewhat deliberately shocking, certainly arresting, perplexing and challenging, Hillman requires a significant re-think of war.

Recalling a scene from the movie, Patton, in which ‘(t)he General takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc, and says, ‘I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than life.’ This scene gives focus to my theme-the love of war, the love in war and for war that is more than ‘my’ life, a love that calls up a god, that is helped by a god on a battlefield, a devastated piece of earth that is made sacred by devastation. I believe we can never speak sensibly of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This special state must be ritualistically entered. We much be ‘inducted,’ and war must be ‘declared’-as one is declared insane, declared married or bankrupt. So we shall try now to ‘go to war’ and this because it is a principle of psychological method that any phenomenon to be understood must be emphatically imagined. To know war we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart. (Op. Cit., p.121)

These words have been written by an American MALE archetypal psychologist. And, as in the deep past, when revisiting the multiple mythologies of the origins of various cultures, one finds that the records, the research and the perspective of the scholars, is masculine. So too, are the archives that fill the stacks in the world’s seminaries and ecclesial libraries, authored, for the most part, by men. And this masculine perspective, attitude, rationality, and even creative imagination hangs like a mystical, and often blinding, gauze cloud over Western thought. However Hillman and others may attempt to bridge the literal/empirical with the poetic/mythical, we all reside, see the world from, and embody a perspective of our gender, our race, religion, ethnicity and cultural legacies. To bridge that divide, however, is an honourable, delicate, nuanced and highly challenging pursuit. Hillman has chosen the ‘middle ground’ of the myths, gods and goddesses, in order to give a face and a background to our deepest and most challenging of personal and national issues. His perception and conviction that ‘in critical moments at highest stress and adrenalin,’ rather than begin with the moral judgements that have been ascribed to virtually each and every human act an decision, he prefers to peer through an artistic, comparative, mythic theme as his operating lens, diving deeply into the symptoms of the moment on which to sketch his psychic landscape.

Focussing on Hillman’s deployment of gods such as Mars and Venus, as his entry into the American psychological attitude, perspective and ‘soul’ with respect to war, offers a path to walk in and with the archetypal perspective. It is a path we might choose to walk into and toward any other deep and profoundly challenging moment, symptom and crisis in our life. It is not an exclusive, nor even a ‘best’ or most ‘ethical’ or certainly not a ‘clinical’ or rational approach to the psychological pursuit of soul.

From the perspective of this scribe, Hillman may well be (intentionally and consciously or not) attempting to secure a perspective ‘bridge’ between the right and left brain, in his pursuit of the ‘soul’ of each of us, and of the anima mundi, certainly of his homeland, the U.S. Injecting the artistic ‘objective correlative’ of mythic figures, stories, metaphors and themes as a way of approaching our ‘soul’ from a psychological perspective, borrowing from Blake, Keats and other romantics, he invites us to leave our certainty of the clinical diagnoses especially of what clinical psychology calls ‘abnormal psychology’ and begin to explore a more verdant ‘garden’ of images, as our way both of perceiving and of adjusting to our deepest emotionally challenging moments.

Hillman’s intimate, iconic and somewhat unconventional perspective on the American attitude to war may seem exclusive to his homeland. Nevertheless, his approach seems relevant and applicable to other lands and crisis moments. The United States was birthed at the end of muskets, rifles, bayonets, in their war with Great Britain, America has been raised on a diet of weaponry, military conflict and arms production and sales. The psychological lens through which Hillman perceives differs from this scribe’s psychic lens. As both a Canadian and an ‘innocent’ of war, I see war through a Canadian lens somewhat less dramatically. And that is how and why my imagination is accosted in reading Hillman’s words.

Hillman borrows from Glen Gray’s ‘The Warriors; Reflections on Men in Battle,’ (New York, Harper and Row, 1970, p.44) for his supportive reference:

Glenn Gray writes in the most sensitive account of the war experience that I know, The Warriors:

Veterans who are honest with themselves will admit the experience in battle has been a high point in their lives. Despite the horror, the weariness, the grime, and the hatred, participation with others in the chances of battle had its unforgettable side. For anyone who has not experienced it himself, the feeling is hard to comprehend and for the participant hard to explain to anyone else—that curious combination of earnestness and lightheartedness so often noted of men in battle.

And in his own words, Hillman writes:

(W)ars are not only man-made; they bear witness also to something essentially human that transcends the human, invoking powers more than the human can fully grasp. Not only do gods battle among themselves and against other foreign gods, they sanctify human wars, and they participate in those wars by divine intervention, as when soldiers hear divine voices and see divine visions in the midst of battle. Because of this transcendent infiltration, wars are so difficult to control and understand. What takes place in battle is always to some degree mysterious, therefore unpredictable, never altogether in human hands. Ware s ‘break out.’ Once commanders sought signs in the heavens, from birds. Today we fantasize the origin or war in a computer accident. Fortuna—despite meticulous battle plans and rehearsals, the battle experience is a melee of surprises. We therefore require an account of war that allows for its transcendent moment, an account that roots itself in archia—the Greek word for ‘first principle’-arche, not merely as archaic, a term of historical explanation, but as archetypal, evoking the transhistorical background, that divine epiphanic moment of war. This archetypal approach holds that ever-recurring ubiquitous, highly ritualized and passionate events are governed by fundamental psychic patterning factors. These factors are given with the world as modes of its psychological nature, much as patterns o atomic behavior are given with the physical nature of the world and patterns of instinctual behavior are given with the world’s biological nature. (Mythic Figures, pps. 123-124)

Tutoring this innocent Canadian, in the archetypal psychic and cultural perceptions of war, Hillman writes words that challenge my own ‘blunt, unnuanced, uninformed, and also innocent’ attitude and perception of the American view of war.

Compared with our background in Europe, Americans are idealistic; war has no place. It should not be. War is not glorious, triumphal, creative as to a warrior class in Europe from Rome and the Normans through the Crusades even to the Battle of Britain. We may be a violent people but not a warlike people—and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself. Wanting to put a stop to it was a major cause of the Los Alamos project and Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a bomb to ‘save lives,’ a bomb to end bombs, like the idea of a war to end all wars. ‘The object of war,’ it says on General Sherman’s statue in Washington, ‘is a more perfect peace.’ Our co-called doublespeak about armaments as ‘peacekeepers’ reflects truly how we think. War is bad, exterminate war and keep peace violently: punitive expeditions, pre-emptive strikes, send in the Marines. More firepower means surer peace. We enact the blind god’s blindness (Mars Caecus, as the Romans called him, and Mars insanus, furibundus, omnipotens), like Grant’s and Lee’s men in the Wilderness, like then bombing of Dresden, overkill as a way to end war. (Mythic Figures, p. 128)

“Love and war have traditionally been coupled in the (mythic) figures of Venus and Mars, Aphrodite and Ares. This usual allegory is expressed in usual slogans--make love not war, all’s fair in love and war-and in usual oscillating behaviors-rest, recreation and rehabilitation in the whore house behind the lines, then return to the all-male barracks. Instead of these couplings, which usually separate Mars and Venus into alternatives, there is a Venusian experience within Mars itself. It occurs in the sensate love of life in the midst of battle, in the care for concrete details built into all martial regulations, in the sprucing, prancing and dandying of the cavaliers (now called ‘boys’) on leave. Are they sons of Mars or of Venus? (Mythic Figures, pps:126-7)

 From Hillman, we learn too of the aesthetic aspect of Mars,

And also there a love lies hidden. From the civilian sidelines, military rites and rhetoric seem kitsch and pomposity. But look instead at this language, these procedures in the sensitization by ritual of the physical imagination. Consider how many different kinds of blades, edges, points, metals, sabers, battle-axes, lances, pikes, halberds that have been lovingly honed with the idea for killing. Look at the rewards for killing: Iron Cross, Victoria Cross, Medal of Honor, Croix de Guerre; the accoutrements: Bamboo baton, swagger stick, epaulets, decorated sleeves, ivory-handled pistols. The music: reveille and taps, drums and pipes, fifes and drums, trumpets, bugles, the marching songs and marching brass, brass braid, stripes. (Mythic Figures, p 127)

Given that this is but a prelude to Hillman’s ‘take’ of the U.S. struggle with the psychic implications of war, with more to follow, we can begin to discern that there are more and much more subtle visages to Hillman’s poetic basis of mind, as applied to the highly charged notion/image/concept of war, than that of the literalists, the empiricists, the rational purists. And, by extension, we begin to embrace a ‘way of ‘seeing’ of exploring and of imagining ‘war’ differently than we have previously.

And that is one of the primary challenges of Hillman’s archetypal psychology. 

cell913blog.com #71

There is a tidal wave of cash being fire-hosed into the campaign for House of Representatives, from a little known, and even less named lobby group that goes by the initials, AIPAC.

What is AIPAC?

AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in the U.S. Only recently, AIPAC poured $8.5 million to defeat progressive Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush in her primary in Missouri. Ms Bush’s Achilles Heel, from the AIPAC perspective, was that she championed Palestine justice issues in Congress. The campaign to oust Cori Bush followed a similar political action donation from AIPAC of some $17 million to defeat another Palestine supporter in Congress, Jamal Bowman, in the Democratic primary in New York. From oregonlive.com, in a piece by Jamie Goldberg, entitled: Opaque PAC that spent big attacking Oregon congressional candidate finally discloses donors-a month after election, on June28, 2024, we also read of another similar and successful intervention of this lobbying conglomerate:

An opaque political group that spent $3.5 million to attack congressional candidate, Susheela Jayapal during the May primary….The ‘opaque group,’ Voters for Responsible Government, received its largest donation from an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, federal filings show. The filings also show Voters for Responsive Government also owes the powerful pro-Israel group $20,000 for ‘administrative services.’…The PAC paid for numerous negative ads and mailers calling out Jayapal as primarily responsible for rampant homelessness and open drug use in the Portland area as well as for something that never happened-the county providing drug pipes and other meth-and-fentanyl-related paraphernalia. The incendiary hit pieces attempted to pin the failings of the Multnomah County Commission and its powerful chair on Jayapal alone, when in fact she was one of the five commissioners in charge of county business between 2019 and her resignation in late 2023.

It is not only the ‘big-money’ purchase of selected candidates, whose campaigns are supported by such lobby groups that stings and defames the political system. It is also the depths to which such campaigns stoop, echoing the pattern of ‘assassination’ ads based on lies that trump has championed from the beginning. Senator Bernie Sanders, a Jew, and a leading voice for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, has walked a fine line in the public debate over the Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Wondering out loud, in CNN, how anyone can call for a cease-fire against a terrorist group such as Hamas, on November 5, a mere month after the attack, Sanders received tepid praise from AIPAC. The Times of Israel, November 7, 2023, reports: For a few hours on Sunday, the unthinkable happened on social media: AIPAC promoted a clip of Bernie Sanders talking about Israel…

The Washington Post, back in March 2, 2020, in a piece by Dana Millbank, entitled, Opinion: Bernie Sanders called AIPAC a platform for ‘bigotry.’ The group is proving is point, reports:

Bernie Sanders was right to skip AIPAC. The current front-runner of the Democratic presidential nomination would be the first Jewish president. He once lived in Israel. But he refused to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference this week because, he said, the pro-Israel lobby has become a platform for those who ‘express bigotry and oppose Palestinian rights.’ He added that Benjamin Netanyahu is a ‘reactionary racist.’ As the conference opened in Washington on Sunday, Netanyahu, speaking to the group via satellite on the eve of Israel’s elections, derided the Palestinians as ‘the pampered children of the international community.’ The AIPAC audience applauded.

We also know that many primary voters, primarily in Michigan, but in other states as well, voted ‘uncommitted’ on the Democratic primary, protesting Biden’s unwavering support for Israel. Vice-president Harris, now the official Democratic candidate for the presidency, while bearing some criticism for the Biden administration’s loyalty to Israel, did not attend Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and called for the end to the conflict and for the right of Palestinians to their own country with freedom from assault after she met with him after his address.

The tight-rope that Ms Harris must walk, married to a Jewish be husband, and supportive of Israel’s right to defend herself, nevertheless will be scrutinized, under the glare of many pro-Palestinian voters in battle-ground states. The cozy meet-up of Netanyahu with trump at Mar-a-Lago immediately after his address to Congress reinforces the perception, (belief in some quarters?) that Netanyahu is doing what he can to re-elect trump, including prolonging the conflict with Hamas, and even fomenting additional retribution, revenge and reported threats of assassination of trump by Iran. Hezbollah and Hamas, both proxies and armed and funded agents of Iran are inflamed over the assassinations of two of their respective leaders by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

Let’s not forget or ignore the deep and growing relationship between Putin and Iran, over military and technological exchanges. It does not require a rocket scientist to wonder how these military, geopolitical, racial and ethnic actors on the world stage might be scheming, plotting, formenting, hacking and spreading whatever propaganda misinformation they deem necessary into the American election campaign….and for what purposes?

Characterizing the Republican campaign are dramatic expressions and convictions of misogyny, racism, homophobia, sexism, climate-denial, greed, allegiance to narcissistic and autocratic male leaders, and the red meat of conspiracy theories and lies and deception… all in pursuit of the ‘deconstruction of the American democratic system of government. Aiding and abetting, even fomenting the chaos that would serve such a purpose and goal, Iran, Russia, (Israel?) kim, orban, xi and meduro (bolsonaro?) may be ‘working behind the scenes’ to accomplish at least a weakening of the Biden administration, of which Harris is a significant player. And a weakened Biden administration, in the twilight of Biden’s personal political career, seems a juicy and ready target for ‘attack’ as if Biden’s political blood is already spreading in the political sea of geopolitics.

Characterizing the expression and convictions of many, if not all, of those autocrats (and clearly Netanyahu’s name has to be included in such a list) are a similar list of “values” (pardon the sarcasm and the irony) as we listed describing the trump/vance campaign: misogyny, racism, homophobia, climate-denial, sexism, narcissism, autocracy, and conspiracy theories all delivered on a whirlwind of lies and deceptions….And would the erosion of the American institutional democracy and rule of law not play into the three or four-dimensional chess that the haters of America wish to execute?

Joy, happiness, truth-telling, biographic details disclosed with integrity, and policies that support the middle class, “not only to get by but to get ahead,” as Ms Harris has articulated her primary goal and purpose, are all honourable, timely, ‘good-vibes’ and worthy of pursuit both as campaign rhetoric and as governing policy. Large crowds, flowing contributions from multiple sources, armies of volunteers and a national media that seems smitten by the ‘movement’s momentum’….these are all positive signs for a victory on November 5.

And without foreclosing on an electoral victory, or catastrophizing about the prospect of a “wall” of war, chaos, conflicts, environmental disasters, assassinations, or even global economic turbulence, and or any other seemingly unforeseeable calamity, the Harris campaign must be having serous discussions about the political weather forecast of the next three months at least, as well as immediately after that date.

The euphoria of the build-up, execution and closing of the Paris Olympics, especially as no terror threat impeded, served as an inspirational wave of hope, promise, optimism and collegiality..on a global scale. The athletes gave everything, mind, body, spirit and soul to their training and commitment to their own ‘best’ performances. And such embodiment of excellence, on television in every land, while memorable, and uplifting, even for those hardened, calloused and angry and bitter politicians, can, we hope, have left a glimmer of the sheen, the promise and the aspiration of ordinary people everywhere for new thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, and decisions from those who prefer zero-sum games in order to eliminate all perceived opponents and real enemies.

Two-weeks of ‘positivity,’ like a holiday at a Caribbean resort, cannot be expected to heal a floundering marriage. Nor can it transform nefarious global leaders from cynical tyrant wannabe’s to co-operative, collaborative, thoughtful and self-respecting representatives of their respective nations and people.

However, even a single candle can bring the first glimpse of light into a darkened, curtained, frightened, and desolate basement room.

From too many reports, for too many weeks, days and months, have clouded our shared perceptions and expectations of coming “out” of the multiple messes in which we find ourselves. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz cannot be expected to solve all aspects of each crisis, with some magic American wand.

And that reality, the recognized, acknowledged and owned ‘limited’ responsibility for the state of the world by America, may be the greatest long-term, sustainable contribution that an elected Harris-Walz administration can/might/will bring to the world community. Contributing openly, honestly, courageously and confidently, without bravado, self-congratulation, exaggerated importance and self-inflation, both in its expectations of itself and in how it perceives, regards and respects others, could and would go a long way to easing some of the conundrums and gordion knots that seem to have ensnared the globe. 

cell913blog.com #70

 After each election, there are news reports of the percentage of voters who voted, and while the range of those numbers varies dependent on multiple factors, there is always a rather substantial number of people who did not vote.

ElectionsCanada.ca in a starting graph of figures compiled from 1867 through 2021 documents some remarkable numbers:

From early averages over 70% to more recent numbers in the low 60% range, there is a trend to a lower percentage of eligible voters participating in Canadian federal elections. From the same source, based on a comparison by age group, in Canadian elections between 2011 and 2021,

·      voters between ages 18-24 the average ranges from 38.8% to 57.1%

·      voters between ages 25-34 the average ranges from 45.1% to 58.4%

·      voters between ages 45-54 the average ranges from 63.8% to 68.1%

·      voters between ages 55-64 the average ranges from 68.3% to73.7 %

·      voters between ages 64-74 the average ranges from 74.9% to79.1%

·      voters 75 years and older the average ranges from 60.3% to 68.6%

The trend-lines here seem to suggest that as Canadians age, their voting turn-out rises until they reach 75. Another model of the bell curve indicating that the percentage of turnout is highest among those between 55 and 64.

In various jurisdictions, significant and creative initiatives have been tried to increase voter turn-out, especially among young voters. Presumably, those working to grow and to enhance democracy consider their efforts will have ‘the biggest bang for their buck’ (and effort) with that demographic. Having walked astride student elections in high school, college, university and later in municipal, provincial and federal campaigns, like many others, I have been dismayed at the degree of political engagement among Canadians at all levels, over at least seven decades. Documenting issues, personalities, conflicts, tensions, and rationales for various decisions by all levels of ‘government’ as one way of opening both the curtain of those issues and the eyes (and hopefully the minds) of readers and viewers to both grab their attention and engage their opinions. My generation became ‘politicized’ in the televised inaugural address of the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, on that cold January day in 1961. Robert Frost was the first poet to speak at the inauguration of a president, reciting from memory, ‘The Gift Outright’ when the glare of the sun prevented him from reading. While Kennedy’s ‘ask not what your country can do for you, rather ask what you can do for your country’ is the most well-known line from that day, Frost’s poem is worth recalling:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours

before we were the

land’s

She was our land more

than a hundred years

Before we were her

people. She was ours

in Massachusetts, in

Virginia,

But we were England’s

still colonials,

Possessing what we still

were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we

now no more

possessed.

Something we were

withholding made us

weak

Until we found out that

it was ourselves

We were withholding

From our land of living,

And forthwith found

Salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we

gave ourselves outright

(The deed of gift was

many deeds of war)

To the land vaguely

realizing westward,

But still storied,

artless, unenhanced

Such as she was, such

as she will become.

Not the stuff of high political rhetoric, yet worth pondering all these many decades later. And the initiation of the ‘poet’ into that ceremony has opened the door for the latest young black female poet, Amanda Gorman. (From cnbc.com): The 22-year-old Los Angeles resident, youth poet laureate of Los Angeles, first national youth poet laureate and Harvard graduate was invited to speak at the event by First Lady Jill Biden, who had previously seen the poet do a reading at the Library of Congress.

One highlight line from The Hill We Climb reads:

And yes, we are far from polished

far from pristine,

but that doesn’t mean

we are striving to form

a union that is perfect.

We are striving to

forge our union with

purpose.

To compose a country

committed to all

cultures, colors,

characters, and

conditions of man.

And so we lift our

Gazes not to what

Stands between us,

but what stands before

us.

Poetry is not an exclusive passport into being politicized. Rhetoric, youth, energy and enthusiasm, even a kind of self-possessed confidence and thespian imagination, like that displayed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau when he blazed onto the Canadian political landscape in 1968…these are all triggers, memorable moments that lift both the spirits and the identities of generations to watch, digest, criticize and engage with the political process. Amanda Gorman’s commitment too both expose and to imagine a thaw in race relations illustrates another form of political activism.

Here is another:

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one’s birth, whether one acknowledges it or not. An African child is born in an African Only hospital, taken home in n Africans Only bus, lives in an Africans Only area, and attends Africans Only schools, if he attends school at all.

When he grow up, he can hold Africans Only jobs, rent a house in Africans Only townships, ride Africans Only trains, and be stopped at any time of the day or night and be ordered to produce a pass, failing which he will be arrested and thrown in jail. His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life. This was the reality, and one could deal with it in a myriad of ways.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, and thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people: instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise. (Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, New York, 1994-5, p.95)

In retrospect, what might be termed the ‘gold standard’ of political commitment, integrity, authenticity, and dedication comes from Mandela. And what his biography tells us is that he never wavered from his struggle to free his people. Such dedication, echoed in others like Dr. Martin Luther King, exposes by eclipsing the narcissism of the trump life and campaign. The depth of Mandela’s anger, rebellion and devotion to the liberation of his people suggests a confidence that, with others, he could and would make a significant difference in the lives of South Africans.

Today, there are few who can envision the depth of his anger together with his vision of making a meaningful difference. To politicize young people in 2024, one must acknowledge that too many in many countries, including Canada and the United States, continue to live in conditions which can only be considered intolerable, even unconscionable. Whether the barriers to decency, equality, respect, dignity, honour and opportunity are considered under such terms as ‘classism,’ ‘racism,’ ‘sexism,’ ‘ageism,’ poverty, hunger, disadvanged, or even classified as ‘handicapped’….the capacity and willingness of advanced, affluent, educated and creative nations like both Canada and the United States are both seriously threatened by a right-wing political agenda, and the men and women who espouse that agenda.

This moment, unlike others in that the divide between the have’s and the have-not’s, has grown into a chasm that threatens never to be bridged. Banning books, for example, is a significant agenda item for that political agenda. And the underlying, if unacknowledged, impetus for book banning is fear, the very argument they project onto their opponents.

From The Toronto Star, April 23, 2024, in a piece entitled, If anything should be banned, it’s ignorance, fear, and hatred-not books by Michael Coren we read:

We live in a divided, judgmental and unforgiving age. No ideology is immune—the darkness seems to be wedded to the culture—and extremes of left and right are especially culpable….According to PEN America, between July 2021 and March 2022, alone, there were 1,568 book bans in the U.S. Texas and Florida were among the leaders but it might surprise some to know that Pennsylvania was in second place. Most of the condemned books dealt with LGBTQIA issues, or the origins and problems of racism…..Book Banning is usually the step before people banning, just as book burning comes before people burning…

Rigid, intransigent, fundamental, binary and autocratic self-righteousness, in all forms and faces, leaves no room for poetry, the imagination, the aspirations and the dreams of not only children but people of all ages. Setting mind-fences up, analogous to and evocative of that monstrosity trump was erecting on the border, not only suggests, but actually exposes, a profound fear, contempt, hatred and animus toward anything and anyone, including any idea, ‘they’ cannot control.

 Whether the barriers to decency, equality, respect, dignity, honour and opportunity are considered under such terms as ‘classism,’ ‘racism,’ ‘sexism,’ ‘ageism,’ poverty, hunger, disadvanged, or even classified as ‘handicapped’….the capacity and willingness of advanced, affluent, educated and creative nations like both Canada and the United States are both seriously threatened by a right-wing political agenda, and the men and women who espouse that agenda.

While Mandela was committed to the liberation of his people, a different kind and degree of liberation is needed today. This liberation is from the enslavement to personality cults, and to the mind-control that those personality cults seek to impose.

Mandela knew both who his opponents in the white supremacy regime were, what they believed, and how he and his cohorts might strategize, plan and execute, even predict how they might respond to specific acts and strategies of the ‘freedom-fighters.’

Freeing the next generations of children, of all races, ethnicities, cultures and beliefs from the straight-jacket, and the prison cell of ignorance and duplicity, into which the cult leaders, the megalomaniacal terrorist-leaders (think trump, putin, netanyahu, xi, kim, orban) would have us live, is a global problem. And both its definitions and its expectations remain somewhat vague and difficult to discern.

Nevertheless, this morning, Saturday, August 12, 2024, we learn the startling and scintillating news that one political activist, Simone Biles, has just contributed some $4 million dollars to the Harris-Walz campaign.

Such a high-profile, altruistic, and visionary commitment, today, from a single woman, ‘speaking’ through the megaphone of her celebrity, can have ripples that can inspire, motivate and convince millions of others to see the issues we all face forthrightly, honestly, courageously and challengingly.

Thank you Ms Biles, not only for your generous vision and political commitment to the people of the United States, as well as those of us around the world who are watching anxiously for the electoral results the world needs on November 5.