[New post] July 26 2022 The Origins of Evil and the State as Embodied Violence
jayofdollhousepark posted: " You may by now be familiar with my thesis of the origins of evil and the state as embodied violence in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and in my prescription for escape from this recursive systemic and historical tr" Torch of Liberty
You may by now be familiar with my thesis of the origins of evil and the state as embodied violence in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and in my prescription for escape from this recursive systemic and historical trauma which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail as an imposed condition of struggle; refusal to submit to authority and seizures of power over the ownership of ourselves as revolutionary struggle and as the primary act of becoming human, and the abandonment of the use of social force as dominion over others as the basis of human exchange and civilization.
How did I get here?
I was made strange by a primary trauma in which I died and was reborn and experienced a moment of supraconsciousness out of time and beheld myriads of possible human futures, on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969, when the police opened fire on a protest in People's Park, Berkeley, the most massive and terrible incident of domestic terror ever perpetrated by our government since the Civil War, with the possible exceptions of Wounded Knee, the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War Two, and the 1985 Move Commune Bombing by Philadelphia Police.
The longer I contemplate this, the more other examples arise to challenge the uniqueness of state terror and tyranny, of the psychopathy of authority and the nihilism of power.
Sadly, such atrocities and crimes against humanity by governments including that of America are without number. Herein lies our valorized normality; for normality is deviant, virtue is perverse, law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
Of the six thousand protesters at the scene, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.
I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I'd like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children's books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, like God's head being split open with a hammer, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.
The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.
What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; "Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides."
Here I must share with you the other Defining Moment of my ninth year, in the context of my life mission to unravel the origins of evil as illnesses of power and violence, and of the consequences for me of growing up with three voices, English as my home language, Chinese from the age of nine, and French from seventh grade, and of spending ten years from fifth grade in near-daily study and practice of Buddhist and Taoist disciplines.
How I met my teacher happened like this; during the first weeks of fifth grade I spent recess at school either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found disrespectful and insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose.
This is how division, otherness, and disconnectedness escalate into war, and why interdependence, solidarity, and communication can restore the balance of peace when things begin to fall apart.
That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. Having escaped by chance the fate of becoming a nine year old mass murderer, I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; "You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can embrace your fear and show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn't always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what's best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else's. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need now is a way to confront people directly when you're upset with them that doesn't cause more harm than it solves."
This was 1969 and he arranged for me to study with a scholar of traditional arts who had just escaped arrest during the Cultural Revolution in China.
I called him Sifu Long because of a story he told on the day we met, a version of Plato's Allegory of the Cave; I had been startled by the sudden fluid movement of his enormous shadow, like a flight of silent birds, in the still room of his study through moon gate doors which like a gaping mouth opened into the chasms of darkness of a gorgeous pillared temple illuminated only by the many incense sticks which glowed like eyes of fire. And I asked, "Why is your shadow so huge? And it moves."
"Once we were dragons," he began, "we were vast, without end or beginning, and we filled the universe. But when humans came there was no place for them, and they could not see us all at once; so we became small, lost our greatness, and found ways to share our world. We abandoned eternity and the rapture of the heavens for the stewardship of humankind, who insist on living in boxes from which they refuse to venture out and discover what lies beyond their boundaries.
But you can see me because your cage has not yet been built, and because we are alike in our powers of vision and illusion, to see the true selves of others. This suggests possibilities. So I will teach you how to fight as you wish, but also how to grow beyond your limits and find your greatness."
These studies included arts from The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung's primary reference on Taoist practices, Chan or Zen study, the game of Go, kung fu very like that of the television series with whose protagonist I identified, and possibly best of all Chinese language and inkbrush calligraphy. Here was a method of questioning oneself with a fabulous knowledge base, with which we may seize control of our own evolution, and which again set its mark of difference upon me as a bicultural person in my origins.
Fate handed me a Gordian Knot of problems to solve five years after this, in the summer before I entered High School, when I went to Brazil to train with a friend as a fencer in preparation for the Pan American Games, and I first escaped my gilded cage and was immersed into a bifurcated and discontiguous world of aristocratic privilege and the vast horrors of the surrounding slums of abandoned street children, beggars, garbage mound gleaners, quasi-slave laborers, and the ruthless and brutal police and gangsters who ruled them in partnership. Here I witnessed the true costs of our privilege, and when the police came to murder children for the bounty placed on them by the rich, I fought in their defense.
These issues, unequal wealth, power, and privilege, became my subjects of study, and throughout the years since I have struggled to understand them as systems which produce evil, a Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force, and divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite hierarchies of belonging from which are born fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and subjugation to authority. When I speak of evil and its origins and functions, this is what I mean.
During Middle School and High School I read through the University of Chicago's Great Books of the Western World series, and became interested in the curious and the arcane; Grimm's Fairytales as a lost faith, magic, the Cabala, the art of Hieronymus Bosch of which I made a collage on one entire wall of my bedroom as a gate of dreams, and shaped by the bizarre stories my father's Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs would tell in the evenings after dinner; his journeys to other worlds, duels with magical beings, the art of curses and wishes, poetic vision as a path of reimagination and transformation, how to believe impossible things and transcend ourselves and the limits of our humanity.
Above all was the shadow work encoded in stories as magic rituals in which he passed to me the chthonic guardian spirit which possessed him as its avatar as the successor of Nietzsche; for all his stories ended with our repetition together of Shakespeare's words from The Tempest; "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine". Thus I became heir to his powers of poetic vision as shadow work.
Also there were my conversations with my mother, a psychologist, biologist, and scholar of Coleridge who wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from Jerzy Kosinski's childhood therapy journal and Soviet mental hospital records, weaving discussions of religious symbolism and the novel he wrote from his journal, The Painted Bird together as an exploration of the problem of evil, and led me through the nuances of symbolism using as a text Émile Mâle's The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. From her I inherit a duality of vision, the symbolic and the psychological, which echoes Monet's dictum, "Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks inward, the other looks outward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see."
At this point during my last year of high school, I read a book which fixed me on the origins of evil and its functions as a field of study, Robert G.L. Waite's multidisciplinary work on Hitler, The Psychopathic God, and another which suggested intriguing possibilities and solutions, Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
My Freshman year at university I designed a Jungian Studies course and talked a professor into meeting with me as a private weekly class for credits, and haunted the library at the Jung Institute of San Francisco, where they had beautifully written studies of my beloved operas and many other things. My initial special studies tutorial included Jung's three volumes on alchemy as a mystery faith and the structural basis for his psychology as a path of reintegration of the self; ;Alchemical Studies, which contains his commentary on Secret of the Golden Flower, a primary text which was the basis for my traditional supervised meditation disciplines for a decade with Dragon Teacher and my point of entry into Jung's world, Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Psychology and Alchemy. Later I made a close study of Aion, the final volume of his four works on alchemy, though I worked through the entire corpus of his works throughout my undergraduate studies.
During this time I was a student in the Nexus program of integrated arts and sciences, which served my personal mission to explore the origins of evil and its functions through the intersection of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, as had Waite. My literary studies focused on Classical mythology, fairytales, and Shakespearean theatre as the lost faith of pre-Christian Europe as Jacob Grimm and Ted Hughes claimed, and spent a number of glorious summers at the annual Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Renaissance Faire a twenty minute drive from my home in Sonoma.
Beyond this, my interest in dreams as a field of study has led me to explore three spheres of ideas wherein dreamwork is primary and which in general were influences on Jung; I have been a Buddhist monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order in Nepal, a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism in Kashmir, and an enthusiast of Surrealist art, literature, and cinema; and I see the same interconnections and commonalities between them as Jung did.
Carl Gustave Jung has shaped me and our civilization with his brilliant quest to forge a Grand Unified Theory of the processes of becoming human as a universal faith grounded in science, and return medicine to its original function of healing the soul.
Such was the journey which led me to the place from which I write to you today, an Ariadne's Thread of Defining Moments, a few of many and but briefly told; but these few seized and shook me, transformational events of sudden illumination like flashes of lightning which open doors in the heavens, letting angels through, or devils.
My angels and my devils have all traded places; I speak to you now of revolution and poetic vision as the reimagination of the world and ourselves, we humans, of human being, meaning, and value, of our unconquerable will to become and of the flaws of our humanity as an imposed condition of struggle.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
How shall we answer the brokenness of the world and the terror of our nothingness, we beings made of stories?
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2021, A Song of Liberty: On Neil Gaiman's Lucifer; A new moon signals the advent of the Halloween season tonight, a liminal time of transformation, change, rebirth, and the permeability of the boundary between life and death, dreams and consensus reality, truths and illusions, normality and transgression, as the gateway of the Forbidden opens and beckons us into unknowns.
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
A Great Work begins with moonrise as it does each year, of the destruction and re-creation of ourselves and our universe, and I write now in praise of sacred acts of Chaos and Transformation, and of songs of Liberty such as Neil Gaiman's Lucifer. I am a fan of the Netflix series Lucifer and have watched it through several times; it places the task of healing from abandonment in a mythic context from Milton's Paradise Lost; Neil Gaiman has written a reimagination of Paradise Regained.
Primarily a work which interrogates issues of freedom and autonomy versus authority and subjugation, falsification versus authenticity, and identity as a ground of struggle, Neil Gaiman places his drama in the context of the problem of the deus absconditus, the Biblical god who bound humankind to his laws and then abandoned us to struggle free of them in a defining act of self-creation.
His secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Plato's Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein which reimagines them all in a glorious recursion like an ouroboros swallowing its tail. Neil Gaiman also references the poetry of Ted Hughes and William Blake, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Lucifer's signature line, "What do you desire?" appropriates the central question of Lacan, "Che vuoi?"; his power to reveal one's true self through looking into one''s eyes and soul references the power of Medusa which appropriates the Male Gaze, and he never lies, for lies are the instrument of authority and those who would enslave us, and he is above all a Liberator and a Truth Teller as Foucault referred to parrhesia, whose purpose is to free us from tyranny. Secondarily he is a Trickster figure, who disrupts order through acts of chaos and transgression as a guide of the soul and as revolutionary struggle.
Gaiman's Lucifer provides a role model and defines a personal mission statement for me, and for his enormous audience and fandom of the series. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in How to Read Lacan; "Even when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this transgression relies on what it transgresses. Paul knows this very well, when in the famous passage in Romans, he describes how the Law gives societies the desire to violate it."
"The evil that I would not, that I do" Romans 7:19, contextualizes transgression as the violation of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden, which like the divine command in Genesis not to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become gods establishes the primary human act as defiance of authority and refusal to submit, whereby we seize our power and become self-created and self-owned beings, autonomous and free. As Max Stirner wrote; "Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized."
As such it interrogates power as rebellion against tyranny and authority, as transgression of the Forbidden, and as violations of normality and imposed ideas of virtue, three things I consider and practice as sacred Acts of Chaos and Transformation.
Lucifer in Gaiman's mythos is a brilliantly depicted damaged child trying to grow up and free himself from the legacies of his enslavement. When one has been raised as a beast, becoming human is revolutionary struggle.
I find reflection of myself in the character of Lucifer and the issues he faces as a wounded champion of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who cannot escape the consequences of his aberrations and transgressions of the Forbidden or defiance of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people's ideas of virtue and normality; he is an outcast hero who is seen by others as a villain and must accept his own monstrosity if he is to champion others.
In the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dr Jekyll refuses to use his power with the words, "No. Hyde will never use me again." To this Stuart Townsend's glorious and strange Dorian Gray replies; "Then what good are you?"
Let us embrace our monstrosity as a seizure of power and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare 's The Tempest; "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."
Ours is a fallen world, a wilderness of mirrors wherein the truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature have been captured and distorted by those who would enslave us, falsified and abstracted from our lived experience as wild things, limitless and free; but one in which true heroism is possible, and where the uncontrollable and anarchic tidal force of love and desire can redeem the wildness of nature and the wildness within ourselves.
The romance subplot centers on the redemptive power of love and references Jean Cocteau's classic film Beauty and the Beast, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and directly appropriates as its model the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as the tragic re-enactment of that myth and its reimagination in Wuthering Heights in the lives and poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who cast themselves in the roles of Heathcliff and Catherine.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton's rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one's reading of her source Frankenstein, and the works of Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte's successors Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?
Such beautiful imagery, in an allegory of epigenetic trauma and resilience. We are all prisoners of our history, whose legacies we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
We must free ourselves from our history; this is the first phase of revolutionary struggle and a precondition to our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves and the achievement of internal conditions of being characterized by Liberty, autonomy, and Sartrean freedom and authenticity, a state which I term Unconquered, for who cannot be compelled by force is free.
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals; the quiet and grim black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa's Apartheid regime, grim giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee's and thou's, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve. Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and his relatives called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
Here I was notorious, the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued, who had adopted Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite authority in the repression of dissent. My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art, and my father the high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director and collected artists and intellectuals, including Edward Albee and William S. Burroughs.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; "I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I'm hoping we can be friends.
The poem I've chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. "
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
Lucifer's Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
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