The Flood

PASTUZO :

Lucy?

Lucy!

LUCY :

I'm afraid we're not going to London after all.

PASTUZO :

Why not?

LUCY :

We've got a cub to raise.

PASTUZO : 

What's he like?

LUCY:

Rather small.

(SNEEZES)

And rather sneezy.

But he likes his marmalade.

PASTUZO: 

That's a good sign.

(BURPS)

LUCY: 

Oh, yes, Pastuzo.

If we look after this bear, I have a feeling he'll go far.

“There’s an undercurrent to the story of The Flood, and that’s the fact that The City can become corrupt, and that’s because people don’t engage in heroic endeavour—or, perhaps, because they engage in precisely the opposite of that, which is outright destructive behaviour. This is also something that’s worth considering, too. If you consider your own manner of being, you can say things to people, such as, tell the truth and be good. Those are cliches, obviously, and so they lack power. But you can take them apart,and utilize them in a manner that stops being a cliche. You do that by being more humble about them, I would say. 

Maybe you can’t tell the truth because you don’t know what the truth is. But one thing you can do is to stop saying things that you know to be untrue. You might say, well, how do I know that they’re untrue? Well, you need a whole elaboration of a philosophy of truth to answer that question. We’re not going to bother with that question, because, at the moment, it’s beside the point. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that there are times in your life where you know that the thing that you’re saying is not true. It’s a deception. It’s a lie of some sort, and you’re using it to manipulate yourself, another person, or the world. You’re also fully possessed by the idea that you can get away with it. 

There’s a Satanic arrogance about that. In fact, that is the archetypal arrogance that’s portrayed in the mythological character of Satan. Satan is precisely the archetype of the element of the mind that believes it can twist and bend the structure of reality without paying the price. You can’t imagine anything that’s more arrogant than that. You really think that you can twist the structure of reality? And that that’s going to work out for you, without it snapping back? It’s so obvious that that can’t work that everyone knows it. 

Anyways, back to the initial point. You know, by the rules of the game that you yourself are playing, that, some of the time, you’re violating the rules of the game that you’re playing. The first issue with regards to, say, stating the truth or behaving in a responsible manner would be merely to stop cheating at whatever game it is that you’ve chosen to play. That’s a good start. That’ll straighten out your life. 

Well, how does the flood tie into this? We live in a corrupt structure, and we’re corrupt as individuals. Part of that corruption is just happenstance. It’s the way things fall apart. But the other part of it is that, not only are we not aiming up, but we’re actually aiming down. The flood story’s a warning, and it’s a very clear warning. The warning is that, if you aim down enough, and then if enough of you aim down at the same time, everything will degenerate into something that’s indistinguishable from the chaos from which things emerge at the beginning of time. It’s something like that. 

The cosmos that’s presented in mythological representations is chaos versus order. The order is on top, you might say, and the chaos is always underneath. The chaos can break through, or the order can crumble, and you can fall into the chaos. That chaos is intermingled potential. The way that you destroy the order and let the chaos rise back up—which is exactly how it’s portrayed in the flood story—is by inhabiting the corpse of your father and feeding on the remains with no gratitude and no attempt to replenish what it is that you’re taking from it. That’s one mythological motif. 

The warning in the flood story is, don’t do that for very long, because things will happen that are so awful that you cannot possibly imagine it. That’ll happen to you personally; it’ll happen to your family; it’ll happen to your community, and it’s happened to people over and over throughout history. It’s quite interesting. It’s very soon after the story of Cain and Abel when you see evil enter the world. In the story of Adam and Eve, along with self-consciousness, the evil, there, is the knowledge of good and evil; that’s the ability to self-consciously hurt other people. Of course, instantly, Cain takes that to the absolute extreme. He uses that capacity to destroy, really, what he loves best. He gets as close as a human being can to destroying the divine ideal. Of course, his brother is Abel, and Abel is favoured by God. Cain destroys him. Cain tells God at the end of that episode that his punishment is more than he can bear. I think the reason for that is, where are you when you destroy your own ideal? What’s left for you? There’s nowhere to go. There’s no up, and when there’s no up, there’s a lot of down. 

There’s an idea that was put forth very nicely in Milton’s Paradise Lost when he was describing, from a psychological perspective, essentially what hell is: you’re in hell to the degree that you’re distant from the good. That might be a good way of thinking about it. If you destroy your own ideal—which you do with jealousy, resentment, and the desire to pull down people that you would like to be—then you end up in a situation that’s indistinguishable from hell. The way the Biblical story unfolds is, well, it’s Cain, and then it’s the flood. Cain adopts this mode of being that’s antithetical to being itself—at least to positive being itself. He does it knowing full well what he’s doing. The net consequence of that, as it ripples through the entire social structure, is that God stands back and says, this whole thing has got so bad that the only thing we can do is wipe it to the ground. That is no joke. That’s exactly how things work. 

One of the things that’s extraordinarily terrifying about that sequence of stories—and I believe this to be true. I think I realized this independently of any of the analysis that I was doing of mythological stories. I looked at what happened in places like the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany. The most penetrating observers of those societies, the people who were most interested in how it was that those absolute catastrophes came about, all said the same thing: it was rooted in the degeneration of the individuals who made up the society. You hear that people were following orders. No; that explanation doesn’t hold water. You hear that you would be punished if you resisted. There was some truth in that, but nowhere near as much as people might think, especially at the beginnings of the process. It was more that people decided—each and every one of them—to turn a blind eye to the catastrophes and to participate in the lies. That warped entire societies, and they veered their way downward to something as closely approximating hell as you could manage, especially in places like Nazi Germany and, well, in all three of those places. 

One of the things that’s so frightening about the stories in Genesis is that they say something very clear: your moral degeneration contributes in no small way to the degeneration of the entire cosmos. You say, well, I would like my life to be meaningful. People say that. Really? Would you really like your life to be meaningful? You’d think people would trade a little nihilism for not having to face that particular realization. I think people do that all the time. It’s a terrible weight to realize. But we are networked together. That’s the vulnerability that’s associated with our intense capacity to communicate. It’s certainly possible that the ripples of our individual actions have consequences that are far beyond the limits of our immediate consciousness. I also think that people know that, too. They know that in the way that people know things when they don’t want to know them, which means they know them embodied; they can feel them; they can sense them; they have an emotional response to them, but there’s no damn way they’re going to let them become articulated, because they don’t want to know. When you’re feeling guilty and ashamed about the things you’ve done or not done—I know that can get out of hand, as well—it’s often because there is a crooked little part of you that’s aiming at the worst possible outcome. 

One of the things Jung said about the shadow—Jung’s famous idea that everyone has a dark side, and that that dark side needs to be incorporated and made conscious—was that the shadow of the human being reaches all the way to hell. That’s the thing that’s so interesting about reading Carl Jung: he actually means what he says. It’s not a metaphor. The part of you that’s twisted against being is aligned with the part of the conscious cosmos, let’s say, that’s aiming at making everything as terrible as it can possibly be. 

It’s a terrible shock to realize that. That’s partly why people don’t realize it. It’s something that people keep at an arm’s length. It’s the same as recognizing yourself as a Nazi concentration camp guard, which is a very useful exercise. There’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t have been or still could be one. And if you think otherwise, all the more reason for assuming that you would be unable to resist the temptation if it was, in fact, offered to you. And if you don’t think it’s a temptation, then there’s so much that you don’t know about human beings that you’re not even in the game. If it wasn’t a temptation, then people bloody well wouldn’t have done it. Plenty of people did it, and it’s no wonder. 

So things get serious in Genesis very, very rapidly. The depth of the seriousness is ultimate—archetypal. It gets as serious as it can get. The story of Noah and the flood opens in a fragmentary manner. I believe that these passages are a part of a longer story that we only have bits and pieces of, and also that it’s part of more than one story.”