cell913blog.com #80

 The notion that the pain, suffering, anxiety, sickness, old age and death are the stuff of the ‘soul’ will come to many orthodox Christians as any one or more of a list of discomforting adjectives: morbid, dark, unpleasant, Buddhist, Taoist, tragic, heretical or even a mental illness. The Christian church seems tied to and locked onto the treadmill of its dogma of some form of salvation, as a path to contending with, or possibly even avoiding inescapable death, or winning the ‘eternal life’ lottery in the final warning for Judgement Day and a final holy sentence.

As the antithesis of life, and life given and sanctified by God, as the Christian perspective holds, then how could an appreciation of death, from a different perspective, one that acknowledges its inescapable connection with everything we think, say, and do in our life, be compatible with such a ‘holy truth and reality’?

Bifurcating death and segregating it and all of its implications, connotations, ramifications and imaginative overtones, from ‘life’ writ large, limits by restricting and constricting one’s perspective; it also offers a highly righteous, and yet fallacious, binary foundation for all other metaphysics, epistemologies, belief systems, and psychological perspectives.

The very difference between ‘knowing’ as an absolute foundational truth, and ‘unknowing’ as its erroneous, untenable, unimaginable, heretical, apostatical, sinful perception and belief, lies at the core of the Christian theology. Perhaps this observation applies more, if not exclusively, to the manner in which the Christian faith is prosletyzed, practiced, preached, and awarded and rewarded, within the ecclesial edifices than to its more mystical, ephemeral, ambiguous and transcendent aspirations.

The cognitive, emotive, imaginative capacities celebrated and idolized by our contemporary culture have come to be embodied in left-brain language, literal and empirical evidence, and the persistent and pervasive verb “to do.” So long as we are ‘doing’ something about whatever pain, anxiety, discomfort, loss, and even the formal palliative preparations for death itself, we are ‘individuating,’ and climbing Maslow’s ladder to self-actualized wholeness. As conscious, attentive, energized and ‘performing’ humans, we have the stamp of acceptance and approval of our culture, including our parents, teachers, professors, mentors and shamans.

Even our clergy, and certainly our marketing guru’s and our corporate and learning organizations and institutions, view and evaluate our ‘performance,’ based on our behavioral, physiological, emotive and social ‘actions.’ This perspective and its concomitant attitude of judgement extends even to our facial expressions, our body language, our wardrobe, hairstyle, and whatever relevant ‘signs’ and signals of our success and/or failure, depending on the person or organization perceiving and judging. And the various ‘lenses’ through which we ‘perceive/judge,’ is formed by a variety of other ‘performances of our parents, teachers, and others.

As Jung reminds us, if we are unsure ‘who’ we are when asked, the world will ascribe an identity to us.’ And we spend our lives trying on various ‘identities’ based on the mirror’s reflections from others’ impressions. Almost as if we were unconsciously morphing our associates, friends, classmates, co-workers, teachers, and mentors into the ‘directors’ (screen writers? secret role models? idols?) of our ‘life roles,’ as actors in our own ‘stage play,’ we come to depend on, even rely on and expect those ‘impressions’…even if and when they directly confront some interior perception or belief that has somehow made its way into our imagination and our fantasy.

The drama of those events, people, achievements, failures, families, houses, degrees, careers, that occupy our minds, hearts and bodies for, it seems, at least a half-life, (40-50), have a cumulative impact and what for some may seem like a ‘dead-end’ road, or something approximating a significant change in direction, motivation, structure, or belief and perception.

Flooding what are termed ‘extrinsic’ motivations into children, students, workers, athletes, for many, has the potential impact of relegating ‘intrinsic’ motivation (personal desires, ambitions, visions and fantasies) to a secondary and supporting role. Even the spectre, (promise? assurance? reward? award?) of an afterlife in heaven, where the streets are paved in gold and where no conflict exists imitates the (or is it imitating) a deeply embedded modality of classical conditioning. This classical conditioning serves as a template for organizations, including families, schools, workplaces of every variety, providing hierarchical ‘means’ of motivating, to produce desired results.

The convergence of such ‘extrinsic’ motivations, while relatively easy to imagine, design, deliver (and withdraw) can eventually seem empty and hollow. The English humorist, Terry Pratchett, is reported to have authored a profound insight: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

So deeply imbued, steeped and virtually drowning, as Christians, in the notion of death as contrary to, even defiant of death, and so culturally embedded in a binary of opposites, we are not only loath to open the door of our imagination to the prospect that everything we think, say, do, and imagine has something to do with death.  Mortality, rather than a venomous, nefarious, Satanic monster, is, if we were to acknowledge its psychic and inescapable ‘image’ is a constant in our lives. The Greeks had their Hades, their god of the underworld. There he ruled with his queen, Persephone, over the infernal powers and over the dead in what was often called ‘the house of Hades,’ or simply Hades. He was aided by the dog Cerberus. Though Hades supervised the trial and punishment of the wicked after death, he was not normally one of the judges in the underworld, nor did he personally torture the guilty, a task assigned to the Furies. Hades was depicted as stern and pitiless, unmoved by prayer of sacrifice (like death itself). Forbidding and aloof, he never quite emerges as a distinct personality from the shadowy darkness of his realm. (From Britannica.com)

And from theoi.com: He presided over funeral rites and defended the right of the dead to due burial. Hades was also the god of the hidden wealth of the earth, from the fertile soil which nourished the seed-grain, to the mined wealth of gold, silver and other metals.

The question of the timeline of Greek mythology and it relation to the Christian view of death, is one for another time. The Christian view of death, however, is not.

Death is at the very core of the Christian religion. Not only is the cross to be found in cemeteries and places of worship alike, but the premise of the religion is that, by their own action, humans have forfeited immortality. Through abuse of the freedom granted in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve not only sinned and fell from grace, but they also transmitted sin to their descendants: the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. And as ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Romans 6:23), death became the universal fate.‘Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men’ (Romans 5:12) Christian theologians spent the best part of two millennia sorting out these implications and devising ways out of the dire prognosis implicit in the concept of original sin. The main salvation was to be baptism into the death of Jesus Christ (Romans6:3-4) (from Britannica.com)

Rather than attempt a sorting out of the implications of the Christian marriage of sin and death, separating a psychological connection to and relationship with death from a Christian theology of sin and death seems more accessible and perhaps even more relevant.

 In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman writes this about theology and death.

Theology has always known that death is the soul’s first concern. Theology is, in a sense, devoted to death, with its sacraments and funeral rites, its eschatological elaborations and its descriptions of heavens and hells. But death itself is hardly open to theological inquiry. The canons have been laid down by articles of faith. The authority of priesthoods draws its strength from canons that represent a worked-out position toward death. The position may vary from religion to religion, but it is always there….The anchor of the theologian’s psychology, and his authority, is his doctrine about life after death. Theological proofs for the existence of the soul are so bound to cannons of death—canons about immortality, sin, resurrection, last judgement—that an open enquiry brings into question the very basis of theological psychology. The theological position, we must remember, begins at the end opposite to the psychological one. It starts from dogma, not data; from crystallized, not living, experience. Theology requires a soul to provide ground for the elaborate death belief system that is power of its power. …The viewpoint of the natural sciences, including medicine, is more like that of theology. It is a fixed position toward death. This view shows signs of modern mechanism: death is simply the last of a chain of causes. It is an end state of entropy, a decomposition, a stillness…..Images of dying, such as running down, cooling, slowing, stiffening, fading, all show death as the last stage of decay. Death is the final link in the process of aging. (Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, pps. 47-48)

And then, following a psychological/philosophical perspective, Hillman writes:

Life and death come into the world together; the eyes and the sockets that hold them are born at the same moment. The moment I am born, I am old enough to die. As I go on living, I am dying. Death is entered continuously, not just at the moment of death as legally and medically defined. Each event in my life makes it to my death, and I build my death as I go along day by day. The counterposition must logically also follow: any action aimed against death, and action that resists death, hurts life. Philosophy can conceive life and death together. For philosophy they need not be exclusive opposites, polarized into Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, or Menninger’s Love against Hate, one played against the other. One long tradition in philosophy puts the matter in quite another way. Death is the only absolute in life, the only surety and truth. Because it is the only condition that all life must take into account, it is the only human a priori. Life matures, develops, aims at death. Death is its very purpose. We live in order to die. Life and death are contained within each other; complete each other, are understandable only in terms of each other. Life takes on its value through death, and the pursuit of death is the kind of life philosophers have often recommended. If only the living can die, only the dying are really alive. (Hillman, op. cit. p. 49)

Albeit these perspectives form the foundations of Hillman’s thesis that suicide is a legitimate human decision, from the perspective of archetypal psychology. In that vein, analysts are tutored in setting aside any preconceptions, attitudes, beliefs and/or biases about their attitude and belief about death, including the potential imminent death of a person contemplating suicide. Providing a safe, secure, non-judgmental time and space for the person, irrespective of the final choice, nevertheless, offers an experience that, one can only guess, escaped the person throughout his or her life: having the darkest, most hopeless, most isolating, alienating and desperate images, visions, voices and endings.

And, as Hillman holds throughout his writings, he encourages both analyst and desperate man or woman to dive directly into the symptoms, the images, rather than attempting to ameliorate, mediate, medicate or rationalize those symptoms. Go all the way to the depths, the psychic underworld, safely, supportively, non-judgmentally, and then, as Hillman posits, the ‘subject’ potentially and perhaps finally vents and hears and reconsiders which dark voices, myths, gods or goddesses, ‘have him’ (or her) in their grasp. S/he may still, after such a ‘dive’ into a world previously out of reach for a variety of reasons, impediments, distractions, dissociations, denials, fears, decide to end his/her life. And, according to Hillman, the analyst need not recriminate or succumb to guilt in that instance.

Is there ‘room’ or a place in the Christian belief, attitude and dogma for such a re-visionist notion of suicide, including the psychological notion that death and birth, death and life are intimately, intricately, inherently and inseparably linked in the psyche?

According to the pro-life movement on abortion, the answer is a resounding “No.” There will be those too who argue that Hillman’s perception and attitude that all the events in our lives are connected to death is nothing more or less than a rationalization or an excuse for those wishing to end their own life. Some will likely argue that such a view is a rationalization for depressive states.

The individual’s invitation to release the psyche from its heroic ego that must ‘resolve’ all traumas, depressions, psychological abnormalities, however, in favour of an imaginative, poetic, mythic lens on turbulent, troublesome and traumatic moments continues to hold relevance, promise and insight, without the specter of instant gratification, healing and ‘uprightness’ or even righteousness.

And that option could serve us individually and collectively if it were to be fully grasped, engaged and experimented.

cell913blog.com #79

In another life, I encountered the Jungian term, enantiodromia, in reference to the persona (mask) fusing with the ego, replacing whatever individual identity was inherent and innate in the individual. An example would be a role taking over the identity of a person, in a process that seems both imperceptible to that individual, and to which that individual might actually succumb. This is not a foreign notion, once we become aware of it and it’s potential. Marriages often suffer from the enantiodromia within one of the partners, and the ‘performance’ of the persona unconsciously overtakes the individual’s life and quite likely, the marriage itself. As one who, on reflection, may well have fallen into the trap of my own enantiodromia, in mid-life, and then discovered the dynamic in the lives of others, I was brought up face-to-face once again with these words:

In 1996, while being interviewed by Wes Nisker,* (James) Hillman said, We are in a time which Jung referred to as the ‘enantiodromia,’ a term from Heraclitus, when things change into their opposites and virtues become vices. That’s what happens at the end of a great period of history. People will cling to the old virtues, but they’ve now turned into vices and have to be abandoned. But if you abandon the old virtues, you are lost and don’t know what to believe in.

The 2000 years that preceded this was the great expansion of the West, and the age of the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet these three salvational prophecies with their tremendous aesthetic accomplishments and enormous civilizing effects have turned into monsters in their self-absorption with their righteousness and orthodoxies. They lack insight: all three claim to be ‘the one’.

In a talk given at Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2000, Hillman argued: ‘The better the intentions, the shorter the road to hell. At a time of enantiodromia, the Devil and Christ change places…Whatever constructive vision we aspire to must be accompanied all along by deconstruction of our own motives, our own subjectivity, our biblical righteousness. For we are each and all, willy-nilly, like it or not, children of the Biblical God…If the Bible is fundamental to our kind of consciousness, then we must read it, learn it, know it and see through it. (Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Vol. III, Soul in the World, New York, 2023 p, 637)  

*Wes Nisker (from wesnisker.com) was an award-winning broadcast journalist and commentator, a respected Buddhist meditations teacher, a best-selling author and a standup Dharma comic who has been described as ‘masterful at using humor to lighten the enlightenment journey.

In the West, we have been fed a diet of Christian stories, central to which are the birth and death stories of Jesus. Casting death in the pall of the Judgement Day, at which moment we will all be judged according to our embodiment of the ‘Christian ethic’ of having emptied, or turned over our human will to the will of God. And through the grace of God, and the Crucifixion/Resurrection of Jesus the Christ, our sins will be (are) forgiven. Believing in the ‘truth’ of this Crucifixion/Resurrection story, similar to the immaculate conception/birth of Jesus, half-man, half-God, we have been, hypothetically through prosletyzing and ‘conversion,’ introduced and welcomed into the state of mind, heart and spirit of discipleship, as ‘converted’ Christian disciples.

The mystery in between both the ‘narrative’ of the literal events and their numinous, ephemeral, ethereal mystical, incomprehensible qualities, however, becomes ‘flattened’ in that the dogma and the discipline of embracing and absorbing the supremacy of the conviction of the literal obliterates the mystical.

Hillman puts it this way:

In the kingdom (or is it the mall?) of the West, consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life. The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void. The gods have withdrawn, said the poets Holderlin and Rilke; it takes a leap of faith, said Soren Kierkegaard. Not even that will do, for God is dead, said Nietzsche. Any bridge must be made of superhuman proportions. Well, that kind of bridge our culture has ready to hand: the greatest bridge, some say, even constructed between visible and invisible: the figure of Jesus Christ.

Once invisibility has been removed from backing all the things we live among, so that all our accumulated ‘goods’ have become mere ‘stuff,’ the deaf and dumb consumables, Christ becomes the only image left in the Kingdom for bringing back to our culture the fundamental invisibility upon which cultures have always rested. Fundamentalism attempts, literally and dogmatically, to recover the invisible foundations of culture. Its strength lies in what it seeks; its menace in how it proceeds.

Christ as bridge (and isn’t the pope, vicar of Christ, still called the pontiff from pons, bridge) because the Incarnation means the presence of the invisible in the common matter of walking-around human life. A god-man: visible and invisible become one. (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 110)….

And then:

When the invisible forsakes the actual world-as it deserts Job, leaving him plagued with every sort of physical disaster—then the visible world no longer sustains life because life is no longer invisibly backed. Then the world tears you apart. Isn’t that the simple lesson taught by the withering and collapse of tribal cultures once they are robbed of their spirits in exchange for goods? (Hillman, TSC, p. 111)

For a long time, this scribe, and others, have divided/separated/‘Balkanized’ the invisibles from the empirical, as if they were two distinct universes, playing on, interacting with, influencing each other in ways that generally escaped both consciousness and cognition. (Isn’t cognition totally dependent on consciousness, I thought?) If some perceived such a perspective to be ‘self-righteous’ or ‘pretentious,’ or ‘presumptuous,’ that  perception and interpretation seems understandable, given that the perspective defies 'logic,' and 'cognition,' and 'empiricism,' and renders the perceiver ‘quixotic’ even delusional from a social, political and conventional view. Certainly, the Christian model, Jesus, the man-God, was out of reach, out of touch with the limited, minimal, even imaginative and cognitive belief system of many, including this scribe. Posited and evangelized as ‘the incarnation of the holy and the sacred,’ Jesus was the ‘ideal’ to be emulated, worshipped, and ‘followed’ depending on the various interpretations of discipleship, and the intentions of the prosletyzer. And in that ‘light,’ the archetype of the Crucifixion/Resurrection was central to a deep and seemingly indelible self-identity, as sinner, as rogue, as forsaken, as deeply damned and desperately in need of ‘forgiveness,’ ‘conversion,’ ‘redemption, and ‘salvation.’ And the ‘permission structure’ for that process, metaphorically, mythically, and religiously was first the depths of depression, guilt, shame and despondency echoed in the Biblical utterance of Jesus, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27: 45-47 and Mark 15: 33-34) Also, Good Friday had to be followed, according to the archetype, by Easter Sunday, the Resurrection and the hope and promise of forgiveness.

In Biblical ‘time’ it seems like a process of some 48 hours duration; in mythic or archetypal terms, it could take a lifetime. What has lingered, remained, as the archetypal image of ‘rising’ from desperation, (irrespective of how each individual experiences desperation, depression, and ‘intense darkness) is a rather ‘instant’ form of ‘recovery’ into ‘healing,’ ‘new awareness,’ ‘new insight,’ a profound psychic ‘aha,’ a profound ‘relief.’ From a societal perspective, this ‘transformation’ is perceived, conceived and valued as healing. And, as depression has become the substitute for Crucifixion, therapy has become the ‘symbol’ of ‘Resurrection. Some might say ‘science has replaced faith.’ (This perspective is borrowed from Hillman’s work.)

The ’instant gratification’ of how North America has interpreted and applied the “CR” archetype, however, is an unqualified reduction of many realities. Let’s list at least a few:

·      That depression is a kind of ‘sentence’ from which one must be freed

·      That depression has nothing to illustrate, explicate, inform, challenge or even to ‘gift’ the person suffering in its depths

·      That the lifting of depression, for example, is a credible sign of ‘conversion’ to discipleship of Jesus the Christ

·      That the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son is also the model on which Christian lives are intended to emulate, follow, and worship.

·      That depression is a symptom, from a medical perspective, of illness, of ‘psychological abnormality’ that requires ‘treatment’

·      That depression, having taken over the individual human’s mind, body and spirit, requires ‘intervention’ in the form of medication, therapeutic intervention, or religious conversion, as its ‘dragon-slayer’

·      That depression, once lifted, is and will be able to be thwarted in a similar manner if and when it returns.

·      That God does not wish his ‘children’ to suffer depression for an extended time, in keeping with the ‘sunrise’ of Easter Sunday morning

What if, for example, between the ‘darkness of Good Friday, and the Sunrise of Easter Sunday,’ from a psychic perspective, there are innumerable, incalculable, unknown, indecipherable, ephemeral, insights, over which this ‘slick’ and ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ cleansing passes without recognition, expectation, anticipation and encounter? Indeed, the darkest depths are our darkest and deepest mysteries, including the darkest mystery of all, death.

And what if, rather than jumping from darkness to light, through whatever metaphoric/healing/freeing and relieving archetype (religious, medical, legal, clinical psychological), we began to imagine a different psychic landscape?

In an essay entitled, The Power of the Mythic Image,  Norland Tellez, writing on the website of the Joseph Campbell Foundation,  September 24, 2024, writes:

Images are not outside of language, not even outside verbal communication; For hich caststhere is a direct relation between images (of depression, for example) and their meaning; they belong together as integrated wholes in the symbolic order. When e hear a foreign language, for example, we may have the jarring experience of hearing sounds without meaningful images attached to them. Without the resonance of images in our soul, we could not hear the song of the meaning in the vibrations of human thought. As Martin Heidegger put it, ‘Language itself is poetry in the essential sense (Poetry, Language, Thought pg. 72) that is, in the sense that language can reveal the essence of things. Hence he explains, ‘Language is not poetry because it is primal poesy; rather poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry.’ (p.72)

Rather than external opposites, mythological images are internal to words, as mythos to logos and logos to mythos, in the full concept of mythology. We know that ‘non-verbal’ images have the power to speak louder than words. As structures of signification, archetypal images are core channels of meaning and imagination; they constitute the world wide web of our symbolic life as a species.

Archetypal images retrace the order of the collective unconscious; they express the cultural forms of a collective consciousness which casts its shadow on the reality of the social field where it generally becomes unconscious. The collective consciousness and the collective unconscious are one and the same. Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination. Combining the literal with the metaphorical into a single force, it is in the nature of the mythic to become historic.

Whatever constructive vision we aspire to must be accompanied all along by deconstruction of our own motives out own subjectivity, our biblical righteousness…as Hillman reminded us above.

Any thinking, perception, action, attitude

·      that is ‘extracted’ or ‘removed’ or disengaged from our motives, irrespective of how ‘nefarious’ they may be, or

·      disengaged from our own subjectivity (including our minimal assessment and identification of who we believe ourselves to be), and especially

·      detached from our ‘biblical righteousness’ (as exampled in the strict, literal, judgmental definition and depiction of salvation (from sin, guilt, shame)…

requires our uninhibited, unconstrained, and unambiguous dive into those normally hidden ‘undercurrents’. It is those undercurrents that, if we are honest with ourselves, (as Tellez reminds us) are not and cannot be separated from our consciousness, either as individuals or as part of the collective.

This is not only an ethical mandate; it is a psychological exhortation/pedagogy/insight to which the anima mundi in the United States, and elsewhere, can and would do well to embrace.

Pontificating as another image of ‘the one’ (to the not merely rhetorical, political and ethical inferential dismissal of the other) merely underscores an already failed posture of the three Abrahamic, Biblical faiths.

Even Kamala Harris, perhaps especially Ms Harris, has an historic and epic opportunity to ‘acknowledge’ the unconscious in her party’s vision of both the Oval Office and the future of the nation. 

cell913blog.com #78

Having just listened to Mary Trump described her grandfather as a ‘sociopath’ who considered all people ‘tools’ for the growth of his business empire, and then also describe her family as a family of ‘mysogynists’ in her interview with Jen Psaki on MSNBC, I suddenly ‘connected’ these two dots…misogyny and tools.

Albeit, in reference to the American economy, political culture and ethos, including the anima mundi, human resources have for decades, if not longer, considered the workforce in the same ‘frame’ as ‘raw materials’ to be ‘mined, processed, and disposed of as their usefulness came to an end. And a similar frame and perspective has spread like ink in a blotter (dating this scribe!), into the economies, politics, cultures and ethos of many, if not all developed countries. The pursuit of profit, the manufacture and ownership of the machines and the products they produce, have both far outweighed the significance of what is ultimately and tragically considered a ‘cost’ on the corporate profit-and-loss statement.

Whenever costs have to be cut, the first ‘disposable’ is human beings. Of course, there is a graduated scale of ‘disposability’ ranking in inverse order to the rung on the hierarchical organization chart, the lowest being the most disposable, with the highest considered only in the emergency of the public relations scandal or as a last resort.

Tools, to, the word Ms Trump uses for her grandfather’s framing of people, is exclusively a depiction that could and would come only from a misogynist. It is a male frame of mind that would make the link between the tool and the worker, from a variety of useful perspectives. First, it is purchasable, and thereby ‘owned’ by the executive; and then, it can be replaced with a ‘better model’ as soon as one appears, especially one that is more durable, less costly, and likely to produce more ‘product’ or ‘service’ while saving money; furthermore, it has no ‘ties’ of responsibility from the management, and as such is easily, freely and insouciantly dismissed with or without cause (even those phrases are recent legal inclusions).

So far, this argument has been made zillions of times by various advocates for workers, union organizers, social workers, and even economists. The last group has acknowledged the inverse proportion of not ‘seeing’ the full value of the worker and their lethargic if outright defiant attitude to their work. Absenteeism, hiding in the workplace, theft and other deviance from normal worker expectations are only some of the now clearly evident symptoms of what is essentially an historic management perspective on the drones of industry.

There are several roots to this deplorable, and unsustainable dynamic. And the relatively simple strategy of voting for and instituting unions, while somewhat effective, will never be able to supplant the deeply embedded, conventional and ‘class’ framing of workers as far less important to the enterprise than the executives, the engineers, the researchers, and the managers and messaging professionals. And here is where there is a case to be made that links misogyny and tools.

From the beginning of human history, the club, the bow, the gun, the shovel, the knife, the bucket, all considered extensions of the physical body, have been considered ‘primary,’ necessary, helpful, and worthy of mastery, especially by the men of the community. That is not to say that women did not use and master these tools; the recorded evidence, however, has come, again primarily, from the men who committed their stories to some form of record. The pen, and the brush, presumably along with the spoon, fork, cooking utensils came along as further imaginative additions to the survival of the family and thereby the community.

We do not need a litany of ‘tools’ in an historic timeline to establish the human dependency, reverence, amazement and commitment to design, create and both produce and distribute ‘tools’ that morphed into machines in the industrial age, capable of producing 'more’ with less physical effort, and at lower cost than the human hand. Thinking both of effectiveness and efficiency, two of the most influential guide words in a contemporary economy, embedding the notion of precision, accuracy, timing, quality control and elevated expectations into the design and operation of the machines, brought with that initiative, a corollary impact: that humans, too, could and would and even must be ‘more perfect’ especially on a moral and ethical scale. Indeed Lionel Tiger, the Rutgers anthropologist, in his The Manufacture of Evil, argues that defying biology, the culture that brough the machine also birthed a new (and both inescapable and unsustainable) requirement of ethical and moral ‘perfection’ that echoed, emulated and embodied the kind of precision and efficiency that ‘metal’ can be fashioned into.

Tied to these heightened expectations, requirements, judgements and their link to whatever God was the subject of worship, were the men, first and likely then the women whose ego’s were now subject to the kind of scrutiny, judgement, exposure and sheer intolerance, a level that can never be fully explained by the human instinct for power and control…over whatever and whomever it seemed to need to dominate. Implicit in that dynamic of judgement was the already embedded ‘power imbalance’ between men and women…the former ‘on top,’ the latter, ‘below’. The history of gender relations is not exclusively tied to the development of tools, machines and the moral/ethical framework that was concomitant with those developments. Neither can the gender question be totally excised from the ‘tool-machine’ thread.

Another accompanying trailer to the tool-machine-thread is the identification of effective, normal, respectable, honourable and highly ethical human beings with whatever they might produce, generate, create, build, design. This ‘doing’ culture, not only as a matter of identity but also as highly significant measure of ‘worth’ starts very early in the life of the North American child. Test scores, music festival awards, athletic medals, allowances for chores performed, monitored and evaluated and the transition into the ‘money-for-work’ economy. Classical conditioning, the kind of behaviorism that Pavlov developed with food and bell for his dogs, and Skinner advanced, while having application to some human skill development, falls far short as a legitimate and honourable ‘training’ model for highly educated, creative, sensitive and motivated adults.

Nevertheless, its efficiency and publicly acclaimed success, have made it a central ‘training method’ for corporations and governments even into the twenty-first century. Immanuel Kant has reminded us not to be the ‘means to another’s ends’ in a kind of warning against abuse by those with power over us. The detailed, intricate, onerous task of first identifying and then separating the ‘desired ends’ of one person or agency, and then of discerning how and why ‘the means’ (skills, experience, attitudes, perspectives, values and motives) that I might bring to that ‘end’ are or are not compatible is often left to both chance and need.

If I need work and an income, I will obviously be far less likely to withhold my ‘work’ from the expressed invitation and desire of an employer for my ‘skill set’ as the HR parlance puts it today.

Nevertheless, the identification of ‘doing,’ and ‘building,’ and ‘generating,’ and ‘producing,’ and ‘selling,’ and ‘persuading,’ and ‘deciding,’…..the list is endless has become a ‘measuring stick’ for what we call normality…and, it says here, a recipe for sabotage.

Universities have become machines training students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) to the death and demise of the liberal arts. We are complicitous in a culture whose aphoristic posters hung on the walls of classrooms back in the 1960’s which read, “Learn to Earn!” It was, and still is, the declared public and political definition of the purpose of learning to ‘earn a living’…as if earning a living were the highest and solitary purpose of acquiring an education. ‘Tools’ in the quiver of the employers, at best a reduction of aspiration to a function, fails to aspire and to inspire and thereby motivate ordinary adolescents to a more complicated, nuanced, critical and creative ‘vision’ of their adult lives.

The whole onslaught of brainwashing in a corporate, capitalist and elitist culture, given the highly successful billionaires at the top of the pyramid of income scales, renders not only the language, the perspective, the highly valued attitudes, aspirations and even the dreams of both children and their parents to a high-paying, highly rewarding socially, and exclusively gated-community life of a new and burgeoning elite. Their ‘achievements’ are so trumpeted, the numbers of billionaires skyrocketing, the eyes of our young so fixated on their role-modelling, that one mother, on hearing of the graduation from law school of one of her daughter’s friends, sardonically complained to her daughter, “See, now why could you not have graduated from law school like her?” To which her highly educated daughter responded, without skipping a breath, “So mother, have we not become successful enough for you?”

Competition for the so-called elite universities is ravaging some families’ psyches, depending on the feelings of adequacy/inadequacy of the parents. And from much anecdotal and research evidence, the inadequacy quotient seems to outrank the adequacy quotient. I once calculated the report card mark of a grade twelve student of Asian ethnicity at 58%. The next day he returned to tell me that he was unable to show his parents that report card and had ‘deliberately erased his grade.’ This scribe as a twelve-year-old hid the Christmas report card in order to prevent a fractious visit from two aunts over the holiday, after receiving only a 63% in History. The consequences of what was deemed ‘deception’ were traumatic.

“Performance anxiety” is only one of the many ‘descriptors’ that march up and down the streets of our neighborhoods, masquerading as ‘anticipated rejection’ in the event of a failure and the judgement that can and too often will follow a disappointing ‘performance.

Men, fired from their jobs in the dot-com-debacle, in Silicon Valley, continued to shower, dress and return to the workplace from which they had been fired…only to cower in a recently jointly purchased (or rented?) motorhome parked in the parking lot unable and unwilling to inform their spouses of their firing. Losing one’s job, as president Biden often reminds us, (a job is much more than a pay cheque, from his father’s memory), is for millions analogous to a death. It is the death of one’s identity, one’s self-acceptance, one’s social standing, one’s friends, and one’s hopes and dreams. It is also very often the literal loss of one’s family.

Riding the various expectations, conventions, identities, storms and deaths of millions of lives in North America is our fragile, individual, personal and highly sensitive ego. And it is not only our ‘fault’ that we succumb.

The ‘system’ is so stacked against us in the form of what we are expected to ‘produce’ and to ‘do’ and to ‘prove ourselves’ that we stumble, fall, and then have to pick up the pieces. Having come to define ourselves, especially the men of the twentieth century, as ‘doers,’ ‘producers,’ and ‘agents,’ and ‘salesmen,’ and ‘performers,’ of many kinds, we are both unable and unwilling to consider any other form of identity.

In a binary, highly judgemental, dismissive, social-media-generated, success-addicted/failure-avoidant, competitive social and corporate and political, not to mention moral and ethical ethos, it would be reasonable to posit that ‘resisting this strait-jacket’ of the performing ‘ego’ qualifies as closer to ‘normal’ and mentally ‘healthy’ than to fall victim to it.

 

  

cell913blog.com #77

Tossing out the names of Ares and his two sons, Deimos and Phobos, in the last post here, certainly sounds like merely affixing a ‘face/name’ to what is happening in the city of Springfield, and across the United States, as if this scribe were somehow more in touch with ‘a poetic basis of mind’ than perhaps others. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

However, attempting to ‘imagine’ what the current ‘images’ in Springfield have to tell us about their depth, their contact with the underworld of our most troubling images of ourselves, not only as individuals but also as a culture, in Hillman’s words, anima mundi, suggest that we (including this scribe) struggle somewhat impotently with our own hatred, contempt, bigotry and racism. If we take on the notion that comes from Hillman’s later writings that everything, buildings, streets, institutions, churches, schools, factories…all have a ‘soul’….an ephemeral, ineffable, ambiguous, mysterious ‘pathology’ (as do each of us) that is troubling, disturbing, confounding, and even shaking our ‘comfort’….and our vision of ‘ideas’, then a different process from diagnosing, prescribing, ‘treating’ and especially ‘moralizing’ is possible.

Taken from the Greek, eidos, ‘which meant originally in early Greek thought, and as Plato use it, both that which one sees—an appearance or shape in a concrete sense—and that by means of which one sees. We see them, and by means of them. Ideas are both the shape of events, their constellation in this or that archetypal pattern and the modes that make possible our ability to see through events into their pattern. By means of an idea, we can see the idea cloaked in the passing parade. The implicit connection between having ideas to see with and see in ideas themselves suggests that the more ideas we have, the more we see, and the deeper the ideas we have, the deeper we see. It also suggests that ideas engender other ideas, breeding perspectives for viewing ourselves in the world. (Hillman, re-visioning Psychology, p. 121)

Some might suggest that if the idea of ‘sadness, longing, depression, desperation, for example, is evoked when ‘seeing’ a building, is, from another perspective, a ‘psychological projection’ coming from the ‘perceiver’ onto the building. Hillman’s guidance may help:  

When we do not ‘get’ an idea, we ask ‘how’ to put it into practice, thereby trying to turn insights of the soul into actions of the ego. But when an insight or idea has sunk in, practice invisibly changes. The idea has opened the eye of the soul. By seeing differently, we do differently. Then ‘how’ is implicitly taken care of. ‘How?’ disappears as the idea sinks in---as one reflects upon it rather than on how to do something with it. This movement of grasping ideas is vertical or inward rather than horizontal or outward into the realm of doing something. The only legitimate ‘How?’ in regard to these psychological insights is: ‘How can I grasp an idea? ….(P)sychological learning or psychologizing seems to represent the soul’s desire for light, like the moth for the flame. The psyche wants to find itself by seeing through; even more, it loves to be enlightened by seeing through itself, as if the very act of seeing-through clarified and made the soul transparent—as if psychologizing with ideas were an archetypal therapy, enlightening, illuminating. The soul seems to suffer when its inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events. This suggests that all ways of enlightening soul—mystical and meditative, Socratic and dialectic, Oriental and disciplined, psychotherapeutic, and even Cartesian longing for clear and distinct ideas—arise from the psyche’s need for vision. (Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, p.122-123)

Living in a time, place, culture, language and conventionally embedded ‘perceptive mode’ of seeing primarily, if not exclusively, the literal, the empirical, the ‘out there,’ and finding it both unusual and decidedly uncomfortable, to ‘see’ differently, there is a potential seismic shift in what Hillman is offering from our ‘usual’ way of seeing.

It is not that, by ‘name-dropping’ Ares, Phobos, and Deimos, we are looking for what the Democratic presidential campaign staff might ‘do’ differently in order to ‘win’ the election. Rather, by opening up the story of the God of War and his sons, we might envision a pattern, whether we might consider it epic or not, representing the distasteful aspects of brutal warfare and slaughter, Ares was one of the Olympian deities; his fellow gods and even his parents (Zeus and Hera), however were not fond of him…  Ares’ worship was largely in the northern areas of Greece, and although devoid of the social, moral, and theological associations usual with major deities, his cult had many interesting local features. At Sparta, in early times, at least, human sacrifices were made to him from among the prisoners of war. In addition, an offering of dogs—an unusual sacrificial victim, which might indicate a chthonic (infernal) deity was made to him at Enyalius. (from Britannica.com)

Some might suggest that another Greek god, Ate,  according to Hesiod, a daughter of Eris and according to Homer of Zeus, was an ancient Greek divinity, who led both gods and men to rash and inconsiderate actions and to suffering (from theoi.com) is plying her chaos across America. From study.com, Ate is the ancient Greek goddess of mischief. She was a trickster character who would spread lies and encourage to act in self-destructive, reckless, or inconsiderate ways. In some versions of myths, she was the daughter of Zeus. He banished her from Mount ithOlympus and sent her to Earth, where she started wreaking havoc among humans instead of gods….Ate got Zeus to sign an oath saying that his next child born would be a hero and leader on Earth. Hera then switched which child was to be born next, and Zeus banished Ate.

Clearly, none of us can deny or avoid the mythic as well as the epic face of Nemesis as one of the mor prominent mythic voices on the American political landscape. From theoi.com, Nemesis was the goddess of indignation against and retribution for, evil deeds and underserved good fortune. She was a personification of the resentment aroused in men by those who committed crimes with apparent impunity, or who had inordinate good fortune. Nemesis directed human affairs in such a way as to maintain equilibrium. Her name means she who distributes or deals out. Happiness and unhappiness were measured out by her, care being taken that happiness was not too frequent or too excessive. If this happened, Nemesis could bring about losses and suffering. As one who checked extravagant favours by Fortune, Nemesis was regarded as an avenging or punishing divinity.

Taking the ‘stage’ in the mythic landscape, although not necessarily in the ‘public mind,’ along with Ares, Ate, Deimos and Phobos, Ate and Nemesis, almost as if evoked by this ‘battalion,’ are various mythic voices of (form theoi.com) Harmonia..the goddess of harmony and concord. She was daughter of Ares and Aphrodite and as such presided over both marital harmony, soothing strife and discord, and harmonious action of soldiers in war….Harmonia was born of Aphrodite’s adulterous affair with the god Ares

Harmonia’s opposite, Eris (from theoi.com) was the goddess or personified spirit (daimona)of strife, discord, contention and rivalry. She was often portrayed, more specifically, as the daimona of the strife of war, haunting the battlefield and delighting in human bloodshed. From Britainnica.com, Eris, in Greco-Roman mythology, the personification of strife…..Eris is best known for her part in starting the Trojan War.

Also deeply embedded in the anima mundi, is the goddess Elpis,  (from theoi.com)…the personified spirit (daimona) of hope. She and the other daimones were trapped in a jar by Zeus and entrusted to the care of the first woman Pandora. When she opened the vessel all of the spirits escaped except for Elpis (Hope) who remained behind to comfort mankind. Elpis was depicted as a young woman carrying flowers in her arms. Her opposite number was Moros, the spirit of hopelessness and doom.

Some readers are already, if they have waded into these “word-waters” this far, are asking themselves, and certainly this scribe, ‘What is the point of this catalogue of Greek/Roman mythological figures?’

We are such a deeply embedded ‘ego-driven-and-defined’ culture, based on the literal, empirical data of our ‘daily news’ and our twisting of the information contained therein, we have lost sight of deeper, more both ordinary and certainly far less binary, dichotomized and exclusive voices, both in our own heads and in the culture(s) in which we live. These mythic voices carry voices, moods, exploits, victories, losses, triumphs and disasters in a sometimes symphony, other times cacophony of psychic energies as we are deeply, if somewhat unconsciously, engaged in today.

And while, through a lens of ideology, and/or of religion, and/or of economic and/or educational ‘accomplishment’ and/or scarcity, and/or personal taste and/or gut feeling, we each bring to the voting booth, as well as to the kitchen table, to the sanctuary, the mosque, the synagogue, the board room, the classroom, the athletic field, the laboratory and/or the construction site a highly complex, highly mysterious and highly diversified human being.

Irrespective of which ‘role’ or which ‘situation’ we find ourselves in, and these too change often almost without warning, without plan and without our direct control, the moments of our deepest psychic turbulence are those moments that offer the chance to ‘dig’ into the mythic voices that seem to ‘have us’ in their throes. Listing names on a screen, is neither a clinical approach to psychic trauma, nor a superficial, adolescent application of a mythic ‘name’ to an emotion.

Each mythic voice is also an ‘idea’ in the sense that it is perceived, grasped, and also that it enables a different way of seeing. In a time/culture/place when we are just trying to keep our ‘heads above water’ in a hellish ‘sea-storm’ of lies, deceptions, personal agendas, the slaughter of children, women, families, towns and cities, when we are also flooded with “pills” and therapeutics of all kinds to ‘grow’ and to ‘get better’ and to become ‘unified’ in our thoughts and emotions, the life-saving rings thrown out to us drowning demonstrate their impotence, their reduction both of the ‘sea-turbulence’ and our individual capacity to continue to struggle against the undertow.

To even the most casual observer, (aren’t we all?) something clearly in wrong with this picture. Walking, riding, thinking, perceiving and believing that our ego is our last and only defense is precisely the petard on which we are all hoisted.

And, whether consciously and deliberately, or unconsciously and unwittingly, we are all walking in a mass parade towards our own demise. We throw around the word ‘existential’ about the various threats we face (for Democrats, the threat is Republican; for Republicans, the threat is Democrats); similarly, Israel claims Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran are all existential threats. Super-domes that intercept missiles and drones on their path to killing Israelis, from whatever direction and source, is a metallic metaphor for the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Pentagon, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and even NATO….

While we listen to shouting and wailing about immigrants and refugees eating cats and dogs in Springfield Pennsylvania, all of the ‘tempest in a teapot’ for the purpose of distraction and demonizing, weaponizing, and self-promotion, the world is unconsciously, (or perhaps willfully?) poised on the edge of a gigantic, shared, eroding and fragile escarpment of political, ethical, moral, environmental, global dependence. That escarpment needs to be brought into the ‘personal, political, ideological, theological and ethical consciousness not only of the millions of children, many of whom are currently taking nations to court for failing to meet commitments on the protection of the environment, but also those men and women charged with ‘public responsibility and duty and the honour of ‘protecting’ their respective public.

Let’s try to begin to release our heroic definition and dependence on our personal ego, transferred also to our national ego, and all of the various demonic and death-wish voices that will never be cast off from our psyche.

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!