The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism; they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall cease to be the vale of tears to the labourer; that in the communist society of the future, which we shall establish "peaceably if we may, forcefully if we must", the impulses of men will be given a free rein, for "all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid but their misuse and their excess", and they will not be avoided except by their mutual counter-balancing, by the harmonious development of the human organism, for as Dr Beddoe says, 'It is only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigour". Such was also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.
Sunday 30 December 2012
Sunday 25 November 2012
When love fails, we organise
We were born to love. When love fails, we organise. When organisations fail, we resort to power.
So it is with our triune brain. The paleo-mammalian brain, the limbic system, the emotional centre (the physical centre of the brain, too) develops in the womb, and stores our affective and implicit memories.
The neo-cortex, develops when we enter the 'outside' world, at birth, and isn't fully formed until after adolescence: it is the the seat of awareness, language and reasoning: of social organisation.
The brainstem and hindbrain, are legacies of our reptilian past: they regulate our most basic functions, and are the source of rage and lust.
We need all of these areas, of course, and all such subdivisions are over-simplified, of course.
We were born to love. When love fails, we organise. When organisations fail, we resort to power.
So it is with our triune brain. The paleo-mammalian brain, the limbic system, the emotional centre (the physical centre of the brain, too) develops in the womb, and stores our affective and implicit memories.
The neo-cortex, develops when we enter the 'outside' world, at birth, and isn't fully formed until after adolescence: it is the the seat of awareness, language and reasoning: of social organisation.
The brainstem and hindbrain, are legacies of our reptilian past: they regulate our most basic functions, and are the source of rage and lust.
We need all of these areas, of course, and all such subdivisions are over-simplified, of course.
BUT...
Remember that you were born with feeling, with love and empathy, and not much more than those, mentally. Your self-consciousness, your ego, formed later, as the neocortex grew - as you learned the rules of your society, and how safe you were within it.
Some of us had to block out our emotional core completely, as we tried to fit in with the crazy rules of a crazy family, religion or nation... forever to become organised machines with no access to a human heart. Some were so neglected or abused that organisation failed them, and they became no more than reptiles... taking what they could from the world by force, full of dread and terror when not on the attack, alone in the universe. A fortunate few were nurtured sufficiently during development, and their thoughts were tempered by love from the core, their instincts could be satisfied without harming those around them.
Wednesday 7 November 2012
Hiatus
There's been a gap in my postings to this blogs as of late. I've been sadly trapped at the thin end of the capitalist wage slavery wedgie. Bummer.
While you're waiting for the next dose of my wit, here's a few people who speak for themselves.
Gabor Maté and Robert Sapolsky (see video above)
Ida Rolf
Stanley Keleman
Thomas Hanna
Moshe Feldenkrais
Hans Selye
Alexander Lowen
Fritz Perls
While you're waiting for the next dose of my wit, here's a few people who speak for themselves.
Ida Rolf
Stanley Keleman
Thomas Hanna
Moshe Feldenkrais
Hans Selye
Alexander Lowen
Fritz Perls
Wednesday 22 August 2012
Interesting Wilhelm Reich -based bits 'n' bobs
orgonomist.blogspot.com has some interesting articles, covering Reichian analyses of subjects like school discipline, and Reich's relationship with Herbert Marcuse. A bit too heavy on orgone accumulators and flying saucers for my liking: that part of Reich's legacy I see as more of a burden than a blessing: sometimes I wonder if W.R., under enormous pressure from McCarthyism (carried out by the FBI, FDA and other US federal agencies), actually felt safer in allowing himself to be portrayed as a crank in his final years. In any case, it's sad the way he's become known in popular culture - as a goofy New Age psychonaut. The truly radical, truly revolutionary insights of his early work are wholly ignored. In books like The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Function of the Orgasm, he communicates a programme for moving towards a natural, healthy and radically free social order: without ignoring the physiological and psychic parameters that inhere for human beings with a body and a history.
Reich was purged from Stalin's Comintern for being 'Trotskyist'; purged from Freud's International Psychoanalytic Association for being scientific - for stressing the physical basis of the mind and of neuroses [not to mention for treating the poor... for free!]; persecuted by '50s America for holding Socialist ideals. Given all of that, he must have been doing something right!
What bugs me most, though, is the way he is dismissed by the supposedly Libertarian Left. Reich was the darling of British Anarchist thinking for a while in the sixties and seventies, in part because he contrasted so much with the bourgeois Existentialism of the likes of Sartre, or the authoritarian overtones of Louis Althusser et al. ... but any respect for the philosophical aspect of his work has since been eroded. In part, this was because he was co-opted as a father figure for commodified Californian post-Hippie New Age Spirituality. It was also because a new generation of cultural theorists had gained prominence: Foucault, Derrida, and - importantly for the Radical Left - the 'anti-psychiatry' movement: R.D. Laing, Deleuze and Guattari (In another post, I'll return to the damage done to the political left by the over-application of the social critiques made by the anti-psychiatry people).
When Reich is mentioned at all these days, he's a parodied as the 'sex guy'... supposedly he and Margaret Mead came up the idea that society's problems would all be solved if everyone could have every possible variety of guilt-free sexual activity, with no strings attached, but plenty of bells and whistles. We've now had the sexual revolution (the story goes), things are still shitty, Capitalism is still destroying lives... so let's forget about Wilhelm Reich. This totally overlooks his constant stress on the natural drive to unalienated, co-operative labour... and on the loving relationship as the only sexual situation that can be acceptable to the unarmoured (ie healthy, undamaged, trauma-free) person. Reich presents a thorough and convincing synthesis of the social and personal aspirations of humanity - of socialist idealism and the individual, animal needs of each one of us. His theory gives a solid empirical basis for discussing the 'tricky' question of what Marx called 'species-being'.
Sadly, no-one wants to mention that. Slavoj Žižek, this week's favourite vaguely anti-establishment pop philosopher quite knowingly engages only with the 'comedy' version of Wilhelm Reich. In 'Living in End Times' (Verso 2011, p74), he correctly draws a parallel between the Reichianism-Stalinism split in socialist thinking and the battle between Pelagius and Augustine in early Christianity... but he argues that the authoritarian 'anti-life' side are correct: Stalin, Augustine and everyone in between. He says:
The opposition between the Pelagians and Augustine on (sexual) lust is instructive here. For the Pelagians,lust was itself a good thing, which might be put to bad use, while for Augustine, lust was a good thing which might, in marriage, be put to good use...Did the Communist movement not face the same dilemma in how to deal with "sexual liberation": oscillating between the two extremes. On the one side the Wilhelm-Reichian "Pelagians"; on the other side the ascetic "Augustinians" who castigated "free sexuality" as the exemplary phenomenon of bourgeois decadence, destined to confound people and divert their energy away from revolutionary objectives.
He goes on to argue that the Reichian view leads to a kind of 'Masochistic perversion', that by 'enforcing' sexual freedom, we necessitate extreme sexual behaviours. The analogy he gives is with those who leap from 'clean clothes and body can contain a dirty mind', to 'clean clothes and body imply a dirty mind'... ie he thinks that allowing sexual freedom implies sexual excess and depravity. But Reich's whole point is that perversion and excess become unnecessary only when sexual energy is free to flow in a healthy way - in fact he presents loads of case histories of patients with masochistic and other 'perversions' who went on to enjoy stable orgasmic sex lives after receiving his therapy, and who also found a new passion for their lives in general: with the release of their character armour, the could no longer accept unsatisfying sex, unsatisfying jobs, or unsatisfying, alienating social roles. To me, this kind of embodied sexual liberation (as opposed to intellectually accepting sexual permissivity) must be a necessary cause and condition of authentic revolutionary zeal, rather than a bar to revolution. To take Zizek's position, one has to believe that a) sex is dirty and b) sex and love are not correlates. What Reich found is that good orgastic sex and good, non-controlling relationships go hand in hand. This is true at a societal level as well as a personal one.
Reich was purged from Stalin's Comintern for being 'Trotskyist'; purged from Freud's International Psychoanalytic Association for being scientific - for stressing the physical basis of the mind and of neuroses [not to mention for treating the poor... for free!]; persecuted by '50s America for holding Socialist ideals. Given all of that, he must have been doing something right!
What bugs me most, though, is the way he is dismissed by the supposedly Libertarian Left. Reich was the darling of British Anarchist thinking for a while in the sixties and seventies, in part because he contrasted so much with the bourgeois Existentialism of the likes of Sartre, or the authoritarian overtones of Louis Althusser et al. ... but any respect for the philosophical aspect of his work has since been eroded. In part, this was because he was co-opted as a father figure for commodified Californian post-Hippie New Age Spirituality. It was also because a new generation of cultural theorists had gained prominence: Foucault, Derrida, and - importantly for the Radical Left - the 'anti-psychiatry' movement: R.D. Laing, Deleuze and Guattari (In another post, I'll return to the damage done to the political left by the over-application of the social critiques made by the anti-psychiatry people).
When Reich is mentioned at all these days, he's a parodied as the 'sex guy'... supposedly he and Margaret Mead came up the idea that society's problems would all be solved if everyone could have every possible variety of guilt-free sexual activity, with no strings attached, but plenty of bells and whistles. We've now had the sexual revolution (the story goes), things are still shitty, Capitalism is still destroying lives... so let's forget about Wilhelm Reich. This totally overlooks his constant stress on the natural drive to unalienated, co-operative labour... and on the loving relationship as the only sexual situation that can be acceptable to the unarmoured (ie healthy, undamaged, trauma-free) person. Reich presents a thorough and convincing synthesis of the social and personal aspirations of humanity - of socialist idealism and the individual, animal needs of each one of us. His theory gives a solid empirical basis for discussing the 'tricky' question of what Marx called 'species-being'.
Sadly, no-one wants to mention that. Slavoj Žižek, this week's favourite vaguely anti-establishment pop philosopher quite knowingly engages only with the 'comedy' version of Wilhelm Reich. In 'Living in End Times' (Verso 2011, p74), he correctly draws a parallel between the Reichianism-Stalinism split in socialist thinking and the battle between Pelagius and Augustine in early Christianity... but he argues that the authoritarian 'anti-life' side are correct: Stalin, Augustine and everyone in between. He says:
The opposition between the Pelagians and Augustine on (sexual) lust is instructive here. For the Pelagians,lust was itself a good thing, which might be put to bad use, while for Augustine, lust was a good thing which might, in marriage, be put to good use...Did the Communist movement not face the same dilemma in how to deal with "sexual liberation": oscillating between the two extremes. On the one side the Wilhelm-Reichian "Pelagians"; on the other side the ascetic "Augustinians" who castigated "free sexuality" as the exemplary phenomenon of bourgeois decadence, destined to confound people and divert their energy away from revolutionary objectives.
He goes on to argue that the Reichian view leads to a kind of 'Masochistic perversion', that by 'enforcing' sexual freedom, we necessitate extreme sexual behaviours. The analogy he gives is with those who leap from 'clean clothes and body can contain a dirty mind', to 'clean clothes and body imply a dirty mind'... ie he thinks that allowing sexual freedom implies sexual excess and depravity. But Reich's whole point is that perversion and excess become unnecessary only when sexual energy is free to flow in a healthy way - in fact he presents loads of case histories of patients with masochistic and other 'perversions' who went on to enjoy stable orgasmic sex lives after receiving his therapy, and who also found a new passion for their lives in general: with the release of their character armour, the could no longer accept unsatisfying sex, unsatisfying jobs, or unsatisfying, alienating social roles. To me, this kind of embodied sexual liberation (as opposed to intellectually accepting sexual permissivity) must be a necessary cause and condition of authentic revolutionary zeal, rather than a bar to revolution. To take Zizek's position, one has to believe that a) sex is dirty and b) sex and love are not correlates. What Reich found is that good orgastic sex and good, non-controlling relationships go hand in hand. This is true at a societal level as well as a personal one.
Tuesday 24 July 2012
Alienation of the Name-of-the-Father [pt2]
Part one discussed Descartes, and Mind-Body Dualism. This part covers Lacan, the shrink from Hell... but first a quick look at the concept of Alienation.
[... and yes, I am going somewhere with all of this ;-) ...]
Alienation was originally a concept from the fields of jurisprudence and political economy. The world could be neatly divided between what was a person's own (proper to him - his property) and everything else (what was alien to him). Notably, [and as far as I know, I'm the first to note this notable] these 'classical' theories of property presume cartesian dualism: my mind and my free will are unalienably mine - everything else I may have, that is made of physical matter, is alienable property... not my essential self, and capable of being sold, lost, stolen, or floated on the stock market. My lands, my livestock, my labour and my right arm all fall into this category. In this theory, the ghost can sell his machine.
So alienation at this point just meant selling.
A more philosophical sense of the term was promoted by Hegel and Feuerbach, and brought to bloom in the writings of Karl Marx. For Marx, alienation was intrinsic to industrial capitalism. A worker sold his work and his time to a capitalist...who took posession of the product of the work. The worker had no control over what he produced or how: his work had no meaning. Marx saw this as robbing a person of his most basic human trait - to improve and adapt the world by co-operatively planning and executing work for the benefit of all concerned. Man was being turned into a mere machine: and was thereby being made miserable.
But wasn't this inherent in the empirical sciences on which industrial technology was based, which were cartesian to the marrow? Is capitalism underpinned by a mistaken, de-humanising mind/body dualism? I believe so, and I'll argue for that point in detail in an upcoming post. To be already a ghost in a machine, an atom of immaterial mind, is the root of all cruelty. Such an existential position is definitional of disocciation and psychosis: if I have no fundamental connection with the world, it matters little how I treat the world, or the people in it. If I'm Rene Descartes, and I believe in a Big Other - a God, who will zap my soul to perdition if I misbehave, I may act with balance: if I'm Andrew Carnegie, or Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or anyone who holds to the ghost in the machine theory - but doesn't dig the Holy Sky Ghost - it's harder to feel a good reason to be invariably ethical.
In any case, Marx's analysis of capitalism became well known, and stayed popular through a hundred years of social struggles, revolutions, and a brace of global wars.
After the second of these wars - Jacque Lacan tottered into the limelight.
To be continued...
[... and yes, I am going somewhere with all of this ;-) ...]
Alienation was originally a concept from the fields of jurisprudence and political economy. The world could be neatly divided between what was a person's own (proper to him - his property) and everything else (what was alien to him). Notably, [and as far as I know, I'm the first to note this notable] these 'classical' theories of property presume cartesian dualism: my mind and my free will are unalienably mine - everything else I may have, that is made of physical matter, is alienable property... not my essential self, and capable of being sold, lost, stolen, or floated on the stock market. My lands, my livestock, my labour and my right arm all fall into this category. In this theory, the ghost can sell his machine.
So alienation at this point just meant selling.
A more philosophical sense of the term was promoted by Hegel and Feuerbach, and brought to bloom in the writings of Karl Marx. For Marx, alienation was intrinsic to industrial capitalism. A worker sold his work and his time to a capitalist...who took posession of the product of the work. The worker had no control over what he produced or how: his work had no meaning. Marx saw this as robbing a person of his most basic human trait - to improve and adapt the world by co-operatively planning and executing work for the benefit of all concerned. Man was being turned into a mere machine: and was thereby being made miserable.
But wasn't this inherent in the empirical sciences on which industrial technology was based, which were cartesian to the marrow? Is capitalism underpinned by a mistaken, de-humanising mind/body dualism? I believe so, and I'll argue for that point in detail in an upcoming post. To be already a ghost in a machine, an atom of immaterial mind, is the root of all cruelty. Such an existential position is definitional of disocciation and psychosis: if I have no fundamental connection with the world, it matters little how I treat the world, or the people in it. If I'm Rene Descartes, and I believe in a Big Other - a God, who will zap my soul to perdition if I misbehave, I may act with balance: if I'm Andrew Carnegie, or Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or anyone who holds to the ghost in the machine theory - but doesn't dig the Holy Sky Ghost - it's harder to feel a good reason to be invariably ethical.
In any case, Marx's analysis of capitalism became well known, and stayed popular through a hundred years of social struggles, revolutions, and a brace of global wars.
After the second of these wars - Jacque Lacan tottered into the limelight.
To be continued...
Saturday 14 July 2012
Borborygmus
Borborygmus, I'm told, is the name for a visceral gurgle. The profoundest gurgle of all the gurgles of mankind. We are, when all's said and done, little more than glorified earthworms: our ecological niche is turning and composting the soil. Biota of every kind go in at our leading, gnawing, swallowing edge... finest fertiliser exits at the rump. Limbs, senses and reproductive glands are auxiliary adaptations.
The worst alienation of all is alienation from the belly: the gut: the second brain... second brain from the top, that is, but the older by a billion years. There are more neurons in the tract between the stomach and the anal sphincter than in all the whorls of the cranium. Those who meditate come to know this, intimately. Insight lives in the intestine: the hara - the tan t'ien - the immortal spiritual foetus forever striving to be born. Deep diaphragmatic belly breaths burn off aeons of karma like the pushing of some perfective protoplasmic piston.
I sat once breathing silent breaths on a wooden platform inside a walled garden. The gardener raked the gravel of a path. I experienced all of this in my belly, being precisely for that moment both the gravel and the rake. What a marvelous taste of worm-mind!
For the worm there is no duality of outside-inside. Its hidden name is earth-glide-through-glide-through-earth. It is the soft mud's conscious tongue tasting itself. For a worm, far is as good as near. It is wholly self-same: it is maximally sensate: if it were any more adapted, it would be indistinguishable from its environment: its skin tastes mud, its gut tastes of glorious mud.
My ego stampedes towards intellect and fancy: fearing that one day I will be food for worms: believing that it can kill me and survive: that it can outrun the composting process which is all of life. The ego hounds us pell-mell up and down property ladders, onto treadmills of boom and bust. We charge for the safety of porno and reality tv: 7 billion constipated commuters taking a holiday from self.
Ego, I heard it said, is the sum total of our insults and wounds: it calcifies around the soft peristalsis of our life process. Look at us! All you can see is the scar tissue. Awkward gaits, twisted minds, rigid moralities, shallow breaths, bacchanalias enforced at gunpoint, the apotheosis of every perversion.
All that of course you already know: eat, drink, be merry, they say, for tomorrow we die. We killed the planet, now anything goes. It is suicide to run against the herd... Why die now when you can die very slightly later?
Anything you might say in protest against the race to the bottom is just more text, of which there is no right reading - every voice is a voice in the wilderness.
But, if you stop for just a while, in a still garden - while there are still gardens - and listen to the silence of your breath, you may hear the voice of utter confidence ringing out from your abdomen. Borborygmus, borborygmus, all is one (not even one), all is well. On that fixed point, you might just turn over the earth!
The worst alienation of all is alienation from the belly: the gut: the second brain... second brain from the top, that is, but the older by a billion years. There are more neurons in the tract between the stomach and the anal sphincter than in all the whorls of the cranium. Those who meditate come to know this, intimately. Insight lives in the intestine: the hara - the tan t'ien - the immortal spiritual foetus forever striving to be born. Deep diaphragmatic belly breaths burn off aeons of karma like the pushing of some perfective protoplasmic piston.
I sat once breathing silent breaths on a wooden platform inside a walled garden. The gardener raked the gravel of a path. I experienced all of this in my belly, being precisely for that moment both the gravel and the rake. What a marvelous taste of worm-mind!
For the worm there is no duality of outside-inside. Its hidden name is earth-glide-through-glide-through-earth. It is the soft mud's conscious tongue tasting itself. For a worm, far is as good as near. It is wholly self-same: it is maximally sensate: if it were any more adapted, it would be indistinguishable from its environment: its skin tastes mud, its gut tastes of glorious mud.
My ego stampedes towards intellect and fancy: fearing that one day I will be food for worms: believing that it can kill me and survive: that it can outrun the composting process which is all of life. The ego hounds us pell-mell up and down property ladders, onto treadmills of boom and bust. We charge for the safety of porno and reality tv: 7 billion constipated commuters taking a holiday from self.
Ego, I heard it said, is the sum total of our insults and wounds: it calcifies around the soft peristalsis of our life process. Look at us! All you can see is the scar tissue. Awkward gaits, twisted minds, rigid moralities, shallow breaths, bacchanalias enforced at gunpoint, the apotheosis of every perversion.
All that of course you already know: eat, drink, be merry, they say, for tomorrow we die. We killed the planet, now anything goes. It is suicide to run against the herd... Why die now when you can die very slightly later?
Anything you might say in protest against the race to the bottom is just more text, of which there is no right reading - every voice is a voice in the wilderness.
But, if you stop for just a while, in a still garden - while there are still gardens - and listen to the silence of your breath, you may hear the voice of utter confidence ringing out from your abdomen. Borborygmus, borborygmus, all is one (not even one), all is well. On that fixed point, you might just turn over the earth!
Tuesday 3 July 2012
Mana Vijnana Saves the World
1) Via Negativa :: Not That! Not That!
Here's a quote from Slavoj Zizek's Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism He's considering Buddhism as a way to escape from the problems of the 'Big Other'.
"[The point is] ...not to criticise Buddhism, but merely to emphasise the irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one's false self and yet still commit horrible crimes - and vice versa... This is why all the desperate attempts by Buddhists to demonstrate how respect and care for others are necessary steps to (and conditions of) enlightenment misfire: Suzuki himself was much more more honest in this regard when he pointed out that Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance - in his political life a Zen Buddhist may be a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist. Again, the two vacuums never coincide: in order to be fully engaged politically, it is necessary to exit the 'inner peace' of one's authentic self." p135
This is the type of dross that passes for philosophy these days. It relies on a pop-cultural parody of Zen Buddhism, as much as Zizek's dismissal of Reichian theory relies on a parody of Reich. This particular parody has its roots in the Beat poets, and other hippie heroes like Alan Watts. Watts famously alleged that Californian Buddhist 'Converts' in the Sixties who objected to his drunkenness were just 'crypto-protestants', who carried the baggage of the Calvinist ethics under their eastern robes. The Beats (par excellence, Kerouac) studied the Theravada Buddhist tradition to an extent, and no doubt hung out at the odd Zendo, but they can hardly be classed as experts on Zen philosophy. The whole category of 'Dharma Bums', 'Drunken Zen-men', 'Zig-Zag Zen' (ie finding enlightenment while up on large doses of hallucinogens), etc. , was spawned from shallow readings of Buddhism. No doubt this was rooted in the notion of Buddhism as ontological nihilism that was casually held in the West, at least from the time of Schopenhauer.
Obviously [to me, lol! ;)] this interpretation of Buddhism (and of Dhyana/Ch'an/Zen) is a dried shit stick. The summation of the Northern (Mahayana) School's belief system - to which Zen adheres as tight as dried shit to a stick - can be found in that marvellous phrase from the Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra: "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form". For the sake of clarity, let's add a few more of these funky identifications:
OK, so Zen is experiential rather than rational. Subjectivity is also experiential, rather than rational: now there's a statement that should really be too obvious to ever be stated, but it seems to have escaped the great minds of the West for the past three millenia, with few exceptions.The few exceptions - Duns Scotus, Sartre, and so on, go too far in the opposite direction. The legacy of Classical Hellenistic thought is the belief that everything must be either rational or chaotic - everything of the mind, the body and the cosmos must be logically ordered, law-following and utterly predictable: otherwise it is chaotic, primal, terrifying and destructive. Jean Paul Sartre rightly notes that experience is Absurd (in the logical sense of absurd: it just IS, can't be deduced from any premise, there is no reason why I don't turn into a giant lobster at 5pm today, for example). His direct experience of this absurdity came after shooting himself full of mescaline, and and then being followed round Venice by a giant crayfish for six months. The poor guy then went to see Jacques Lacan for advice. Lacan persuaded him that the visions were due to his fear of being forced to live the formalised life of a teacher... maybe he thought Sartre's subconscious was symbolising l'angoisse - anguish/angst - as a crayfish - langouste. Sartre based his enormously influential existentialist philosophy on his interpretation of this bizarre peyote trip. Experience is absurd - therefore there no way of choosing an objectively correct course of action - therefore every person is absolutely free in each moment - this freedom fills us with enormous anxiety - which we spend our lives trying to ignore. Life is absurd, we have nothing to depend upon: so we must swim forever in a simmering pot of terror, anguish, nausea and hallucinated crustaceans.
Zen too admits this fundamental freedom, and the undependable fact of stark reality - with all it's one-handed-clappingness. But you don't often hear zen masters prattling on about anguish.
There's an old Zen Koan, goes something like this: A Zen abbot, let's call him Maureen, walks past one of his novices - Violet - who's crying. "Wherefore dost thou weep?", asks Maureen (he's been learning English). "I have nothing to depend upon", says Violet. "I too have nothing to depend upon. That is why I laugh". At which point, we infer, Violet becomes enlightened.
Now, how is the Zen Master's absolute freedom so much more mirthsome than Jean-Paul Sartre's absolute freedom? Both have nothing to depend upon in each moment. One possible explanation would be that the Zen Master is indifferent to Karmic consequences or determinants of his actions... at least in the sense that he has no preference for himself over another... after all, he has nothing which may be called a 'self'. But we should be careful with such verbal analyses of enlightenment: I'll leave it to you to consider the implications of another koan - Pai Chang's fox
0) !
Sartre's existential angst seems to me to be more to do with a fear of inconsistent biography than anything else. Indeed Sartre was not keen on psychology, preferring to "improve the biography of the person". Anxiety at being completely free in each moment makes sense only if one is attached to one's personal history: identified with it even.
For the Zen Buddhist, personal history is a lighter load. Right Action is right only in the moment of its acting: Zen equals answering in each moment of ever-changing life the koan "The World is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robe when you hear the sound of the bell". The answer may be to dress each time the bell rings for a thousand lifetimes, and then once to run naked because the robe is on fire. There is no more merit, no more freedom in consistency than in inconsistency - no merit in inconsistency.
At last we can return to Zizek, and to DT Suzuki: 'Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance', we are told. Correct, in a sense - no pre-existent stance is required to begin the activity of meditating. However meditation is itself a stance, a posture with respect to the world, like all human action it is political. To say that 'social responsibility' is equivalent to 'being' 'a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist' would be more of a fallacy: social responsibility must surely be an action, or sequence of actions carried out with compassion and presence - not payment of lip-service to some worldview. The biography of a Zen practitioner might say "Hakuin then joined the Hitler Youth", or "Bodhidharma stood as Conservative candidate for Slough in the 1997 General Election", or (more plausibly) Thich Nhat Hanh addressed the UN. But it is acceptance of the very absurdity of biography that characterises Zen. The Buddha can dress as a giant lobster, but can he ever taste like one?
Here's a quote from Slavoj Zizek's Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism He's considering Buddhism as a way to escape from the problems of the 'Big Other'.
"[The point is] ...not to criticise Buddhism, but merely to emphasise the irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one's false self and yet still commit horrible crimes - and vice versa... This is why all the desperate attempts by Buddhists to demonstrate how respect and care for others are necessary steps to (and conditions of) enlightenment misfire: Suzuki himself was much more more honest in this regard when he pointed out that Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance - in his political life a Zen Buddhist may be a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist. Again, the two vacuums never coincide: in order to be fully engaged politically, it is necessary to exit the 'inner peace' of one's authentic self." p135
This is the type of dross that passes for philosophy these days. It relies on a pop-cultural parody of Zen Buddhism, as much as Zizek's dismissal of Reichian theory relies on a parody of Reich. This particular parody has its roots in the Beat poets, and other hippie heroes like Alan Watts. Watts famously alleged that Californian Buddhist 'Converts' in the Sixties who objected to his drunkenness were just 'crypto-protestants', who carried the baggage of the Calvinist ethics under their eastern robes. The Beats (par excellence, Kerouac) studied the Theravada Buddhist tradition to an extent, and no doubt hung out at the odd Zendo, but they can hardly be classed as experts on Zen philosophy. The whole category of 'Dharma Bums', 'Drunken Zen-men', 'Zig-Zag Zen' (ie finding enlightenment while up on large doses of hallucinogens), etc. , was spawned from shallow readings of Buddhism. No doubt this was rooted in the notion of Buddhism as ontological nihilism that was casually held in the West, at least from the time of Schopenhauer.
Obviously [to me, lol! ;)] this interpretation of Buddhism (and of Dhyana/Ch'an/Zen) is a dried shit stick. The summation of the Northern (Mahayana) School's belief system - to which Zen adheres as tight as dried shit to a stick - can be found in that marvellous phrase from the Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra: "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form". For the sake of clarity, let's add a few more of these funky identifications:
Being is Nothingness;
Nirvana is Samsara;
Eros is Agape;
Dharma is Karma [maybe... that one's mine... I may well re-incarnate as a toilet brush for saying that, but what the heck];
Body is Mind.
In fact, all dualities are exploded in Zen (and of course put back together again... like Humpty Dumpty in a rhyme free of the laws of thermodynamics). The point is that the world of non-discrimination IS the world of discrimination: it is the very concept of a 'self' that warps our perception. A person stuck in a depressive worldview (Athur Schopenhauer, I'm a-lookin' at you), reads that "Everything is Void" and says, "Hey, I knew that all along. It's all pointless, I'm gonna smoke a lot of weed and watch bizarre pornos for the rest of the month". What that person can't/won't see is that the converse also holds: "Void is Everything" ... the only place where suffering can be escaped is in the suffering world. In the parlance of Zen teachers, the guy is Attached to Emptiness.
So this idea of Zizek's, that someone has to leave the 'inner peace of one's authentic self' in order to engage politically is bunkum. There is no reality to 'inner' and 'outer' in this sense - there is no 'self' authentic or otherwise [at least not a 'self' that can be equated with the psychoanalytic ego, which is what Zizek is referring to here].
Video interlude... Here's a documentary about Seung Sahn. I love the way he sums it all up so beautifully: "NO I. NO PWOBWEM!" (There are several parts on youtube, I recommend watching them all in order).
2) Via Positiva :: Tat Tvam Asi!
Zen too admits this fundamental freedom, and the undependable fact of stark reality - with all it's one-handed-clappingness. But you don't often hear zen masters prattling on about anguish.
Now, how is the Zen Master's absolute freedom so much more mirthsome than Jean-Paul Sartre's absolute freedom? Both have nothing to depend upon in each moment. One possible explanation would be that the Zen Master is indifferent to Karmic consequences or determinants of his actions... at least in the sense that he has no preference for himself over another... after all, he has nothing which may be called a 'self'. But we should be careful with such verbal analyses of enlightenment: I'll leave it to you to consider the implications of another koan - Pai Chang's fox
0) !
Sartre's existential angst seems to me to be more to do with a fear of inconsistent biography than anything else. Indeed Sartre was not keen on psychology, preferring to "improve the biography of the person". Anxiety at being completely free in each moment makes sense only if one is attached to one's personal history: identified with it even.
For the Zen Buddhist, personal history is a lighter load. Right Action is right only in the moment of its acting: Zen equals answering in each moment of ever-changing life the koan "The World is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robe when you hear the sound of the bell". The answer may be to dress each time the bell rings for a thousand lifetimes, and then once to run naked because the robe is on fire. There is no more merit, no more freedom in consistency than in inconsistency - no merit in inconsistency.
At last we can return to Zizek, and to DT Suzuki: 'Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance', we are told. Correct, in a sense - no pre-existent stance is required to begin the activity of meditating. However meditation is itself a stance, a posture with respect to the world, like all human action it is political. To say that 'social responsibility' is equivalent to 'being' 'a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist' would be more of a fallacy: social responsibility must surely be an action, or sequence of actions carried out with compassion and presence - not payment of lip-service to some worldview. The biography of a Zen practitioner might say "Hakuin then joined the Hitler Youth", or "Bodhidharma stood as Conservative candidate for Slough in the 1997 General Election", or (more plausibly) Thich Nhat Hanh addressed the UN. But it is acceptance of the very absurdity of biography that characterises Zen. The Buddha can dress as a giant lobster, but can he ever taste like one?
Monday 11 June 2012
Wednesday 6 June 2012
Alienation of the Name-of-the-Father [pt1]
Thinking is the sickness of the Mind - Philip Kapleau
The Jesuits are reputed authors of the maxim, "Give me the child until the age of seven, and I will give you the man", and are supposed to have followed it closely in the education of their protégés. Their idea was that thorough indoctrination and habituation to Christian values, carried out before a child is old enough to make its own moral judgements, will set the little blighter up for a life of virtue. Underlying this is the belief that human beings are born flawed, stained by Original Sin, and that only the most stringent pedagogical steps can make for ultimate Salvation. The practice of attempting to bring souls to God when their defences are weakest was widespread: another Jesuit technique was to seek conversions in the fever wards of hospitals, or after exposing the intended convert to prolonged fasting and isolation, when he was at his most 'suggestible'... and most open to receiving the 'Good News'.
To anyone with a libertarian bent, practices that seek to tightly mould the thought patterns of an infant (or adult) and to break its will seem cruel and unnatural... amounting to a kind of spiritual pederasty. Contemporary theories of child development are much more to do with nurture and guidance, and less about the exorcism of innate wickedness. Yet the Jesuits' psychological insight - that behaviours learned at the beginning of life are hardest to forget - can hardly be denied. I know of no-one who has studied the human mind, since the beginnings of the Jesuit Order in the 17th century, who has doubted this. With these points in view, I'd like to re-consider the writings of two of the most influential founders of modern (and post-modern) ideas: René Descartes and Jacques Lacan, who were both schooled by the Society of Jesus. While both rejected many aspects of their earliest training, its mark remained on their thought throughout their respective careers.
Descartes made Mind-Body Dualism fundamental to subsequent Western Philosophy and Science. Following the early death of his mother, he was sent to the Jesuit College Henri-le-Grand (pictured), where he excelled in his studies despite ill health. From the Jesuits, he gained the admirable pragma of accepting nothing that one had not rigorously scrutinised and found to be true by rational inquiry. Thus, he applied radical skepticism when producing his Meditations on First Philosophy, an attempt to find fundamental and indubitable truths on which to build the edifice of human knowledge. Famously, he concluded that because anything experienced by the senses might possibly be hallucinated, or implanted by some 'evil genius', the only thing that Descartes could be sure of was that he was thinking thoughts. Cogito ergo Sum... I think, therefore I exist: famously. From the Cogito, a number of conclusions were gradually deduced [I'm omitting a great deal of reasoning here, read Descartes yourself if that bothers you ;)], the most important of which, for our present purpose is this:
The material world, including the human body, is mechanical and governed by laws of cause and effect, but the mind/soul has free will, and must therefore be a radically different substance.
Descartes thus creates the preposterous image of the human being as a 'Ghost in a machine', which went unchallenged in Europe for quite some time. How the immaterial ghost could make changes to the clockwork material universe was a bit of a moot point, although Descartes was happy to invoke God (and some mysterious vapours) as the agents which effected physical change when someone's mind willed his finger to twitch, say, or his eyelid to blink.
A consequence of this Cartesian Dualism was that a scientist could see himself (please note the male pronoun, it was pretty much all dudes) as a rational observer, abstracted from the physical world under observation. For the natural sciences this was a major boon, for the humanities it was a very stinky red herring. A physicist could record the result of experiments, and deduce mathematical laws of nature from them, without being arrested for disagreeing with Aristotle or the Pope. Similarly, chemists could seek the fundamental elements without making sacrifices to Hermes Tresmegistus, or spending years purifying their souls. which was nice. But applying Cartesianism to people's individual and social lives was an enormous cock-up - I aver.
Such monstrosities as Bentham's panopticon rely on a cartesian viewpoint, indeed any practical utilitarianism relies on the cartesian view: for a society to be governed in such a way as to create the 'greatest happiness for the greatest number' someone has to be rational and impartial enough to figure out what this happiness would consist of, and how to implement it. Such a person or group cannot be 'part of' the social system to be improved.
All imperialisms and totalitarianisms subsequent to Descartes have used similar rationalisations of their power. The hegemony is natural because the in-group are better educated, racially superior, more scientifically socialist, whatever, than society at large. The ordinary citizen is in some respect less of a cartesian mind, and more of a mechanical object to be manipulated... due to some gap in his rationality, he is a victim of bodily or subconscious reflexes, or too muddled in his thinking to see the true facts of the larger situation. The citizen or the conquered race must be treated as a toddler in the care of benign Jesuits... to be improved by Discipline and Punishment, or simply to be administered and managed by the intelligent minority.
Quantum theory in Physics, and many findings of modern neuroscience have undermined the ghost in the machine view of humanity... and depth theories in psychology have undermined the idea of a unitary, transparently rational mind. Yet our social structures are still set up as if the 20th century never happened. The ubiquity of CCTV is the mark of an improved panopticon, economic theories still assume everyone to act from rational self-interest (self-interest being equivalent to financial profit seeking, apparently). So it goes, blame Descartes!
One more point about mind-body dualism, before we have a peek at Lacan's jesuiticality. In the mediaeval, pre-Descartes, world... people felt at home in the world, now they feel much more isolated. Erich Fromm has a lot to say on this, he attributes the change in consciousness to the rise of proto-capitalist modes of production, and to the Protestant Ethic. I agree with Fromm here, but I can't overlook the power of Dualism to create a lonely, isolated subjectivity. Fromm is coming from a Marxist perspective, where changes in the cultural/subjective superstructure must be determined by the economic base. Be that as it may, Descartes theory alienates the thinking mind from its own physical body, as well as from the body politic, and the natural world. The ghost in the machine is a lonely ghost. In the language of contemporary psychology... the Cartesian position is a schizoid, even a psychotic one.
My fundamental contention - which I maintain throughout this blog, and elsewhere - is that the natural and happiest condition for human life is one where the distinctions between subject and object, body and mind are broken down. [this is not the same as the Hegelian concept of spirit realising itself in the world] I believe this is philosophically tenable, and I know it can be lived experience. In the next part of this post, I'll defend my stance against Descartes, and against his fellow Jesuit alumnus Jacques Lacan.
... to be continued.
Sunday 20 May 2012
You were kicked off a precipice when you were born...
... and it's no use clinging to rocks on the way down. Alan Watts
Synchronicity... and Waking the Tiger
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| 3rd Century BC statue of Athena, Musee du Louvre |
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| The Aegis |
Flabbergasted is not the word. Levine mentions Medusa as an ancient example of a traumatised person... his interpretation of the story is not identical to mine, but it's close enough for my jaw to drop as quick as a guillotine, much to the puzzlement of a passing party of Chinese holidaymakers.
Levine does point out one feature of the tale that I hadn't noticed... it is the look of fear in Medusa's eyes that turns people to stone, rather than anger or hideous snakiness!
I think the ideas from the book are worthy of dissemination, so I'll give them a write-up in another post. For now, here's a paragraph from Chapter 3, dealing with Medusa.
"The Greek myth of Medusa captures the very essence of trauma, and describes it's pathway to transformation.
[...] those who looked directly into Medusa's eyes were promptly turned to stone... frozen in time.[ ...] There is more to this myth. out of Medusa's wound, two mythical entities emerged: Pegasus the winged horse and the one-eyed giant Chrysaor, the warrior with the golden sword. The golden sword represents penetratng truth and clarity. The horse is a symbol of the body and instinctual knowledge; the wings represent transcendence. Together they suggest transformation through the living body.Together these aspects form the archetypal qualities and resources that a human must mobilise to heal the Medusa (fright paralysis) of trauma.."
More on Levine and his theory of trauma to follow. Stay tuned ;
Monday 7 May 2012
Sympathy for the Gorgon, Part the Third
Often a quick backflip precedes two steps forward, so let's recap. In Part 2, we uncovered a hidden meaning to our myth. Athena and Medusa should not be viewed as opposing entities, but as complementary aspects of the same feminine power. We noted that traditional representations show the face of Medusa as a talisman on Athena's shield. We've also seen how this Athena-Medusa complex finally thwarts Poseidon by turning his whopping great phallic-symbolic sea beast to stone.
What now? Well, we could of course go French, and interpret the whole shebang in terms of the power of the female Gaze: which would make a degree of sense... in fact it's a totally obvious approach, given that Medusa's dirty looks are the main player in the piece. But this is a Reichian blog, OK! What interests me is the dichotomy between the goddess's cerebral, rule-based approach to life, and the instinctual, embodied responses of the gorgon. To paraphrase the immortal words of Dory Previn, Athena just can't get down with the iguanas.
The Greeks believed in a sound mind in a sound body after all: Νοῦς ὑγιὴς ἐν σώματι ὑγιεῖ. The outcome of the whole piece is a new improved Athena, whose high ideals are backed up with natural aggression: she no longer needs to renounce instinct and pleasure in order to embrace reason. As for Medusa, she turned totally iguana after the rape... and needs to be restored to humane behaviour, by very drastic means.
But what of the bit players, onlookers, bystanders and passers-by? While the gods and gorgons are throwing tantrums, Perseus and Andromeda have their own crazy-making dysfunctional family systems to contend with. Perseus's mother Danae was impregnated by Zeus during a surprise golden shower gone wrong; then thrown into the sea in a wooden chest by her first husband; then kept locked up in a tower by the next guy she bumped into. Like Medusa, she shows many of the hallmarks of a survivor of sex abuse: she can't make positive changes to her situation... either by marrying king Polydectes, or by leaving him: she can't exercise her will in a healthy way. Her son is compelled to act as her proxy.
(In case you think I'm spinning too many implications from this old Grecian yarn, take a look at the very similar Danae/Danu myths and placenames dispersed from Ireland to India and beyond. These stories have survived for millenia, because they provide useful lessons for human life, and resonate deeply.)
Polydectes says he'll stop pestering Danae, if Perseus will slay the gorgon. So off goes Perseus, mummy's good little helper, to do just that. Perseus's enthusiasm for this dangerous mission can be analysed in various ways: he wants to redeem the family's honour given the shameful circumstances of his birth; his place in the world is threatened - he has the role of surrogate spouse and confidante to Danae, which Polydectes might usurp; he's just a typical hormonal teenage boy. But the parallels between Danae and Medusa are too strong to be accidental.
Those who study infant development tell us that, warm, open, attuned touch and visual contact from the initial caregiver are vital if a child is to grow into a self-confident and happy adult. Ideally the child should receive unconditional positive regard from its mother. This is precisely what Danae cannot give, try as she might: she is disturbed, depressed, shamed, and scared stiff... understandably. And Perseus goes through childhood knowing something isn't quite right: 'What's wrong with Mum? Why isn't she happy. Am I to blame? Can I fix this?'' Additionally, he's filled with unconscious rage at the emotional neglect he experienced as a baby. This makes him an ideal candidate to work as Chief
Gorgon Exterminator. To kill Medusa, he looks at her reflection in his shield... I can only agree with Robert Bly's interpretation: direct confrontation of a mother's rage and pain are too much for any boy, only by a gradual approach to the truth of the situation can he succeed. This is a partial explanation of why men unwittingly choose partners who have the same faults as their mothers did, and why girls 'marry their fathers' - we need to resolve the initial conflicts of our lives before we can form healthy adult relationships. It also explains why therapeutic processes can take years to produce lasting results... primal pain can only be safely experienced in small doses.
That's Perseus. As for Andromeda, her father has chained her to a rock to be enjoyed by a sea monster: and she's gone along with it! She really needs to learn to pull a gorgon face. ;
What now? Well, we could of course go French, and interpret the whole shebang in terms of the power of the female Gaze: which would make a degree of sense... in fact it's a totally obvious approach, given that Medusa's dirty looks are the main player in the piece. But this is a Reichian blog, OK! What interests me is the dichotomy between the goddess's cerebral, rule-based approach to life, and the instinctual, embodied responses of the gorgon. To paraphrase the immortal words of Dory Previn, Athena just can't get down with the iguanas.
The Greeks believed in a sound mind in a sound body after all: Νοῦς ὑγιὴς ἐν σώματι ὑγιεῖ. The outcome of the whole piece is a new improved Athena, whose high ideals are backed up with natural aggression: she no longer needs to renounce instinct and pleasure in order to embrace reason. As for Medusa, she turned totally iguana after the rape... and needs to be restored to humane behaviour, by very drastic means.
But what of the bit players, onlookers, bystanders and passers-by? While the gods and gorgons are throwing tantrums, Perseus and Andromeda have their own crazy-making dysfunctional family systems to contend with. Perseus's mother Danae was impregnated by Zeus during a surprise golden shower gone wrong; then thrown into the sea in a wooden chest by her first husband; then kept locked up in a tower by the next guy she bumped into. Like Medusa, she shows many of the hallmarks of a survivor of sex abuse: she can't make positive changes to her situation... either by marrying king Polydectes, or by leaving him: she can't exercise her will in a healthy way. Her son is compelled to act as her proxy.
(In case you think I'm spinning too many implications from this old Grecian yarn, take a look at the very similar Danae/Danu myths and placenames dispersed from Ireland to India and beyond. These stories have survived for millenia, because they provide useful lessons for human life, and resonate deeply.)
Polydectes says he'll stop pestering Danae, if Perseus will slay the gorgon. So off goes Perseus, mummy's good little helper, to do just that. Perseus's enthusiasm for this dangerous mission can be analysed in various ways: he wants to redeem the family's honour given the shameful circumstances of his birth; his place in the world is threatened - he has the role of surrogate spouse and confidante to Danae, which Polydectes might usurp; he's just a typical hormonal teenage boy. But the parallels between Danae and Medusa are too strong to be accidental.
Those who study infant development tell us that, warm, open, attuned touch and visual contact from the initial caregiver are vital if a child is to grow into a self-confident and happy adult. Ideally the child should receive unconditional positive regard from its mother. This is precisely what Danae cannot give, try as she might: she is disturbed, depressed, shamed, and scared stiff... understandably. And Perseus goes through childhood knowing something isn't quite right: 'What's wrong with Mum? Why isn't she happy. Am I to blame? Can I fix this?'' Additionally, he's filled with unconscious rage at the emotional neglect he experienced as a baby. This makes him an ideal candidate to work as Chief
Gorgon Exterminator. To kill Medusa, he looks at her reflection in his shield... I can only agree with Robert Bly's interpretation: direct confrontation of a mother's rage and pain are too much for any boy, only by a gradual approach to the truth of the situation can he succeed. This is a partial explanation of why men unwittingly choose partners who have the same faults as their mothers did, and why girls 'marry their fathers' - we need to resolve the initial conflicts of our lives before we can form healthy adult relationships. It also explains why therapeutic processes can take years to produce lasting results... primal pain can only be safely experienced in small doses.
That's Perseus. As for Andromeda, her father has chained her to a rock to be enjoyed by a sea monster: and she's gone along with it! She really needs to learn to pull a gorgon face. ;
Sunday 29 April 2012
Sympathy for The Gorgon, Part 2
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| Athena wearing the Aegis, from the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece |
The Gorgons are an ancient branch in the family tree of gods and titans... more ancient than Athena, and her Johnny-come-lately kinsfolk. In one account, they were spawned by the primal sea deity Phorcys, and are therefore grandchildren of Gaia, mother earth. The gorgons are monstrous forces of nature.
So what is the Gorgon Medusa doing as a mortal skivvy in Athena's temple? Could it be that Medusa's humanity depends on her paying homage to rationality, purity and wisdom? Or is the great poet Ovid just playing loose with the original legend in order to spin his yarn?
If you ask me (and you may as well - you read this far already... good for you) poetic licence is being put to excellent use here: Medusa's personality in the original was a bit too one-sided, and so was Athena's. It was just a case of good goddess v. bad gorgon. Ovid adds a twist. In his version, Athena is way too much of a Type A personality (a narcissist, we might add) and Medusa is a Type C (some would say schizoid-oral). Athena goes around with a pickle up her arse: overbearing, officiously godly and deeply intolerant of playboys, tramps and unwashed hippies. Medusa is a compulsive caretaker, who sees others' needs as more important than her own. She can't express anger, and can't say no effectively.
Then along came a randy Poseidon.
Now, the goddess is well known for giving short shrift to lechery (she speared Hephaestos in the crotch for getting too feisty), so she ain't no easy lay. Even so she surely reckons she's the only broad worth having in that particular temple, and she would like the attention - just with a little more wooing... and less rape. Poseidon, however, picks Medusa. This should be no surprise: Medusa's demure exterior only barely conceals her heaving, monstrous sexual appetite - whether she knows it or not.
Poseidon knows.
And so, with little further a-do, the poor Gorgon is left with all her illusions shattered, traumatised and distraught. But Athena can't see it that way: her wrath is not directed at Poseidon: sea-gods will be sea-gods after all. She feels rejected by him, but takes it out on Medusa, projecting all her anger and sexual frustration onto the Gorgon, who is much more in touch with her passionate side... Even though poor Medusa was scrupulously avoiding those passions all along, as best she could.
Oh, Woe!
And there we leave our sad tale for now. Athena (being an eternal archetype of the mind) may never loosen up and get herself a toyboy. Medusa will always be just another snaky head in a bag, c'est la mythe grecque.
But we mortals are a bit more resilient, and can recover from such nastiness. Find out how in Part III, when we look at Perseus, Danae, and Andromeda. Stay tuned folks. ;
Tuesday 6 March 2012
Sympathy for the Gorgon, Part 1
Medusa gets a raw deal. The poor snake-haired, hideously-deformed, boggle-eyed, lithogenic hag was made to play the role of Victim in an early performance of Blaming the Victim - one of Western Civilisation's most cherished and regular productions.
As we are all aware - if only from watching the slaughter of plastic monsters in the original Clash of the Titans movie (or the plastic acting of the recent remake) - Medusa is a heinous slug beast that gets her comeuppance at the hands of mighty Perseus, who goes on to use her severed head to petrify a sea monster, and rescue the fair Andromeda. Or something like that.
Well, I discovered the back-story to the Medusa myth today*, and it paints her in a more favourable, but tragic light. In this version, Medusa starts her life as a chaste and dutiful young lady. Unlike her ugly sisters, Stheno and Euryale, Medusa is a good kid, and enjoys nothing better than tending fires and polishing statues Cinderella-style, in the Parthenon: the home of Athena - everybody's favourite ever-virgin goddess of wisdom.
That's just about working out for Medusa, until Poseidon takes a shine to her, and in typically Olympian style, he dispenses with courtship, and ravishes Medusa, right there in Athena's temple. Now you might well suppose that Athena should be miffed at Poseidon for rudely deflowering her serving girl in such a manner: but No! This is Greek Myth, and the gods are capricious. Medusa gets a scalp-load of asps, and a one way ticket to Hades, sine die. Any man who looks at her will be turned to stone.
So what can we make of this new evidence? I'm moving for acquittal in the case of History v. M. Gorgon. I'll explain my reasoning now, and I'll also show that some of the theories used in the 20th c. to interpret myths are outdated, and need to be supplemented with new ideas.
1) It's been suggested before** that the doctrine of Athena's perpetual maidenhood was introduced as a patriarchal ploy, intended to remind women that engaging in illicit sexual activity is the opposite of wisdom, and will result in severe punishment. Allowing oneself to be raped is equally unwise and punishable. I can agree that the story probably did serve this 'moral' function...ie it's all Medusa's own fault, she must have been behaving improperly - polishing the statues seductively, being in the temple without a chaperone, or whatever... So that's where the 'blaming the victim' charge comes in. But I'm not resting my case just yet.
2) When the whole myth is interpreted as a piece, and with a psychodynamic slant, a more humane ethic can be discerned. For one thing, the serpentine sea monster, Cetus, sent by Poseidon to take the helplessly bound maiden Andromeda, is about as clear a phallic symbol as ever slipped out of the sick mind of Sigmund Freud. It is defeated by the disfigured face of Medusa, Poseidon's earlier victim. This suggests a kind of aversion therapy... the abuser is made to look at the result of his abuse, and loses the power to re-offend: shame and guilt lead to remorse...
It's worth noting here that the defeat of Poseidon's lust - Athena's revenge by proxy - does not come about until after Medusa's head has been separated from her body. Poseidon is made at last to see the injured psyche of the Gorgon - and can no longer see her sexual aspect. She becomes the suffering subject, no longer merely an object of lust.
The points above might all be made within the framework of 'traditional' Freudian theory, or mythological analysis as practised by Jung or Joseph Campbell. The focus is on the power struggle between the unbridled, unthinking male libido of the sea god, and Athena's demure chastity: Id against Superego; The Anima as guide to a higher consciousness. Fair enough, I guess - this is as far as the exegesis of legends and fairy tales in psychological terms usually gets.
3) What interests me more though, is the role played by the 'minor', mortal characters: Perseus, Medusa, Andromeda, Danae. I believe the whole myth presents a paradigm for dealing with, and recovering from, traumatic abuse - including rape, incest and pederasty. I'll expand on this point, and on the significance of each mortal character in parts 2 and 3 of this post.
*Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.770 (according to the Oracle of Wikipedia)
** I recall reading point 1 somewhere, but can't find the quote at the moment. I'll update this footnote asap!
As we are all aware - if only from watching the slaughter of plastic monsters in the original Clash of the Titans movie (or the plastic acting of the recent remake) - Medusa is a heinous slug beast that gets her comeuppance at the hands of mighty Perseus, who goes on to use her severed head to petrify a sea monster, and rescue the fair Andromeda. Or something like that.
Well, I discovered the back-story to the Medusa myth today*, and it paints her in a more favourable, but tragic light. In this version, Medusa starts her life as a chaste and dutiful young lady. Unlike her ugly sisters, Stheno and Euryale, Medusa is a good kid, and enjoys nothing better than tending fires and polishing statues Cinderella-style, in the Parthenon: the home of Athena - everybody's favourite ever-virgin goddess of wisdom.
That's just about working out for Medusa, until Poseidon takes a shine to her, and in typically Olympian style, he dispenses with courtship, and ravishes Medusa, right there in Athena's temple. Now you might well suppose that Athena should be miffed at Poseidon for rudely deflowering her serving girl in such a manner: but No! This is Greek Myth, and the gods are capricious. Medusa gets a scalp-load of asps, and a one way ticket to Hades, sine die. Any man who looks at her will be turned to stone.
So what can we make of this new evidence? I'm moving for acquittal in the case of History v. M. Gorgon. I'll explain my reasoning now, and I'll also show that some of the theories used in the 20th c. to interpret myths are outdated, and need to be supplemented with new ideas.
1) It's been suggested before** that the doctrine of Athena's perpetual maidenhood was introduced as a patriarchal ploy, intended to remind women that engaging in illicit sexual activity is the opposite of wisdom, and will result in severe punishment. Allowing oneself to be raped is equally unwise and punishable. I can agree that the story probably did serve this 'moral' function...ie it's all Medusa's own fault, she must have been behaving improperly - polishing the statues seductively, being in the temple without a chaperone, or whatever... So that's where the 'blaming the victim' charge comes in. But I'm not resting my case just yet.
2) When the whole myth is interpreted as a piece, and with a psychodynamic slant, a more humane ethic can be discerned. For one thing, the serpentine sea monster, Cetus, sent by Poseidon to take the helplessly bound maiden Andromeda, is about as clear a phallic symbol as ever slipped out of the sick mind of Sigmund Freud. It is defeated by the disfigured face of Medusa, Poseidon's earlier victim. This suggests a kind of aversion therapy... the abuser is made to look at the result of his abuse, and loses the power to re-offend: shame and guilt lead to remorse...
It's worth noting here that the defeat of Poseidon's lust - Athena's revenge by proxy - does not come about until after Medusa's head has been separated from her body. Poseidon is made at last to see the injured psyche of the Gorgon - and can no longer see her sexual aspect. She becomes the suffering subject, no longer merely an object of lust.
The points above might all be made within the framework of 'traditional' Freudian theory, or mythological analysis as practised by Jung or Joseph Campbell. The focus is on the power struggle between the unbridled, unthinking male libido of the sea god, and Athena's demure chastity: Id against Superego; The Anima as guide to a higher consciousness. Fair enough, I guess - this is as far as the exegesis of legends and fairy tales in psychological terms usually gets.
3) What interests me more though, is the role played by the 'minor', mortal characters: Perseus, Medusa, Andromeda, Danae. I believe the whole myth presents a paradigm for dealing with, and recovering from, traumatic abuse - including rape, incest and pederasty. I'll expand on this point, and on the significance of each mortal character in parts 2 and 3 of this post.
*Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.770 (according to the Oracle of Wikipedia)
** I recall reading point 1 somewhere, but can't find the quote at the moment. I'll update this footnote asap!
Wednesday 29 February 2012
the catastrophe has already happened
...just thought I'd point that out, in case you were having one of your blackouts at the time ;)
RAIN HAIKU!
A small publishing house once invited me to write some haiku on the theme of 'rain', for a book they were doing. I did. The publisher went bust. So here they lie, a-moulderin'.
!This kind of weather
Is water off a duck's back
To taxi drivers
!That buzzing streetlamp
I clasp a sodden bouquet
Hornets in amber
!Starlings are watching
Folk fleeing the June shower
Umbrella Billiards
!This kind of weather
Is water off a duck's back
To taxi drivers
!That buzzing streetlamp
I clasp a sodden bouquet
Hornets in amber
!Starlings are watching
Folk fleeing the June shower
Umbrella Billiards
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