Stormy Heart for Stormy Heart

GILGAMESH went abroad in The World, but he met with none who could withstand his arms till be came to Uruk. 

But The Men of Uruk muttered in their houses, 

'Gilgamesh sounds the tocsin for his amusement, his arrogance has no bounds by day or night. 

No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all, even the children; yet the king should be a shepherd to his people. 

His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior's daughter nor the wife of the noble; yet this is the shepherd of the city, wise, comely, and resolute.'

 

The gods heard their lament, the gods of heaven cried to the Lord of Uruk, to Anu the god of Uruk: 

'A goddess made him, strong as a savage bull, none can withstand his arms. 

No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all; and is this the king, the shepherd of his people? 

His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior's daughter nor the wife of the noble. 

When Anu had heard their lamentation the gods cried to Aruru, the goddess of creation, 

'You made him, O Aruru; now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self; stormy heart for stormy heart. Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet.'

 

So The Goddess conceived an image in her mind, and it was of the stuff of Anu of the firmament. She dipped her hands in Water and pinched off clay, She let it fall in The Wilderness, and noble Enkidu was created. 

There was Virtue in him of The God of War, of Ninurta himself. 

His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman's; it waved like the hair of Nisaba, the goddess of corn. 

His body was covered with matted hair like Samugan's, the god of cattle. 

He was Innocent of Mankind; he knew nothing of The Cultivated Land.

Be Rescued by The Princess

Come to My Aid, O Princess of Power —

You Were Always First Amongst All of My Hopes....

PROJECTION

JUST THROWING THAT OUT THERE

 

project (v.)

late 15c., "to plan," from Latin proiectus, past participle of proicere "stretch out, throw forth," from pro- "forward" (from PIE root *per- (1) "forward") + combining form of iacere (past participle iactus) "to throw" (from PIE root *ye- "to throw, impel").

 

 

Sense of "to stick out" is from 1718. Meaning "to cast an image on a screen" is recorded from 1865. Psychoanalytical sense, "attribute to another (unconsciously)" is from 1895 (implied in a use of projective). Meaning "convey to others by one's manner" is recorded by 1955. 

 

Related: Projected; projecting.

 

JUST THROWING THAT OUT THERE

 

Imagine A Cave where those inside never see The Outside World.

Instead, they see shadows of That World projected on The Cave Wall.

 

 

But it's Real to them.

 

If you were to show them the world as it actually is, they would reject it as incomprehensible.

Now what if, instead of being in A Cave, you were out in The World, except you couldn't see it.

 

Because you weren't looking.

 

Because you trusted that The World You Saw through The Prism was The Real World.

 

But there's a difference.

 

You see, unlike the allegory of the cave, where the people are real and the shadows are false here other people are the shadows.

Their faces.

Their lives.

This is The Delusion of The Narcissist, who believes that they alone are Real.

 

 

Their feelings are the only feelings that matter because Other People are just Shadows, and Shadows don't feel.

 

Because they're Not Real.

 

But what if everyone lived in caves?

 

Then no one would be real.

Not even you.

 

Unless one day you woke up and left the cave.

How strange the world would look after a lifetime of staring at shadows.

 

[TYPING, PHONES CHIMING.]

 

 

BILL MOYERS: 

When I was growing up, Tales of King Arthur,

Tales of the medieval knights,

Tales of the dragon slayers were very strong in My World.

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Dragons represent greed, really.

 

The European dragon guards things in his cave,

and what he guards are

Heaps of Gold

and

Virgins.

 

And he can’t make use of either of them,

but he just guards.

 

There’s no vitality of experience,

either of The Value of The Gold

or of The Female whom he’s guarding there.

 

Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego,

and you’re captured in your own dragon cage.

 

And the problem of the psychiatrist is to break that dragon, open him up, so that you can have a larger field of relationships.

 

Jung had a patient come to him who felt alone, and she drew a picture of herself as caught in the rocks, from the waist down she was bound in rocks.

 

And this was on a windy shore, and the wind blowing and her hair blowing, and all The Gold, which is The Sign of The Vitality of Life, was locked in The Rocks.

 

And the next picture that he had her draw had followed something he had said to her.

 

Suddenly a lightning flash hit the rocks,

and The Gold came pouring out,

and then she found reflected on rocks round about The Gold.

 

There was no more Gold in the rocks, it was all available on the top.

 

And in the conferences that followed, those patches of gold were identified.

They were her friends.

 

She wasn’t alone,

but she had locked herself in her own little room and life,

but she had friends.

 

Do you see what I mean?

 

This is Killing The Dragon.

 

And you have fears and things, this is the dragon;

that’s exactly what’s that all about.

 

At least The European dragon;

The Chinese dragon is different.

 

BILL MOYERS: 

What is it?

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

It represents The Vitality of The Swamps

and The Dragon comes out beating his belly and saying 

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

 

You know, that’s another kind of dragon.

 

And he’s The One That Yields The Bounty and The Waters and all that kind of thing. 

He’s The Great Glorious Thing. 

 

But this is The Negative One that cuts you down.

 

BILL MOYERS: 

So what you’re saying is, if there are not dragons out there,

and there may not be at any one moment.

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

The real dragon is in you.

 

BILL MOYERS: 

And what is that real dragon?

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s your ego, holding you in.

 

BILL MOYERS: 

What’s my ego?

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

What I want, what I believe, what I can do, what I think I love, and all that. 

 

What I regard as the aim of my life and so forth. 

 

It might be too small. 

 

It might be that which pins you down. 

 

And if it’s simply that of doing what the environment tells you to do,

it certainly is pinning you down.

And so the environment is your dragon, as it reflects within yourself.

 

BILL MOYERS: 

How do I slay…

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

How do you?

 

BILL MOYERS: 

Slay that dragon in me? 

What’s the journey I have to make, you have to make, each of us has to make? 

You talk about something called the soul’s high adventure.

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

My general formula for my students is, follow your bliss,

I mean, find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

 

BILL MOYERS:

Can my bliss be my life’s love, or my life’s work?

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, it will be your life.

 

BILL MOYERS: 

Is it my work or my life?

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, if the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. 

 

But if you think,

“Oh, gee, I couldn’t do that,”

you know, that’s your dragon blocking you in. 

 

“Oh, no, I couldn’t be a writer, oh, no,

I couldn’t do what so-and-so is doing.”

 

BILL MOYERS: 

Unlike the classical heroes,

we’re not going on our journey to Save The World,

but to save ourselves.

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

And in doing that, you Save The World.

I mean, you do. 

 

The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. 

 

The World is a Wasteland. 

 

People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth.

 

No, any world is a living world if it’s alive, and the thing is to bring it to life.

 

And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive yourself, it seems to me.

 

BILL MOYERS: 

But you say I have to take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons. 

Do I have to go alone?

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too.

But ultimately the last trick has to be done by you.

 

BILL MOYERS:

In all of these journeys of mythology, there’s a place everyone wishes to find. What is it? The Buddhists talk of nirvana; Jesus talks of peace. There’s a place of rest and repose. Is that typical of the hero’s journey, that there’s a place to find?

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL:

That’s a place in yourself of rest.

 

Now this I know a little bit about from athletics.

The athlete who is in championship form has a quiet place in himself. And it’s out of that that his action comes.

 

If he’s all in the action field, he’s not performing properly. There’s a center out of which you act.

 

And Jean, my wife, a dancer, tells me that in dance this is true, too, there’s the center that has to be known and held. There it’s quite physically recognized by the person. But unless this center has been found, you’re torn apart, tension comes.

Now, the Buddha’s word is nirvana; nirvana is a psychological slate of mind. It’s not a place, like heaven, it’s not something that’s not here; it is here, in the middle of the turmoil, what’s called samsara, the whirlpool of life conditions. That nirvana is what, is the condition that comes when you are not compelled by desire or by fear, or by social commitments, when you hold your center and act out of there.

 

BILL MOYERS:

And like all Heroes, The Buddha doesn’t show you The Truth, The Illumination;

He shows you The Way to It.

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL:

The Way.

But it’s got to be Your Way, too.

I mean, how should I get rid of Fear?

The Buddha can’t tell me how I’m going to do it. There are exercises that different teachers will give you, but they may not work for you. And all a teacher can do is give you a clue of the direction. He’s like a lighthouse that says there are rocks over here, and steer clear.

 

 

 

EAST

 

 

Solitude and Community

 

  As an intuitive introvert, I rarely feel lonely when I’m alone. When I was in my early twenties, I took a job in a lookout tower, firewatching in the forest. I was alone on a mountain peak for four months, and I never felt lonely. Reality didn’t catch me there. I was not in danger of my Queen leaving me. But the moment I returned to civilization, loneliness descended on me like a landslide. How could I be so happy on the mountaintop and then rubbed so raw when I came back down? I didn’t want to live my whole life on a mountaintop—I’m not a hermit. I had to go back and forth, as the King did, until the visionary life could finally stand the impact of the water of reality. The Queen in me had to learn to withstand the water. It’s a process. I believe that everyone who has touched the realm of spirit has had to go through this antechamber.

 

 

If you’re honest and perceptive, you can tell the difference between regressive loneliness, the first kind, and the ineffable second and third types of loneliness, where you sense and then see what you cannot yet have. The second and third types of loneliness are nearly indistinguishable. If you can say exactly what you are lonely for, it will reveal a lot. Do you want to go back where you came from, to the good old days? Or have you seen a vision you can’t live without? They’re as different as backward and forward.

 

Dr. Jung said that every person who came into his consulting room was either twentyone or forty-five, no matter their chronological age. The twenty-one-year-old is looking backward and must conquer it. The forty-five-year-old is being touched by something he cannot yet endure. These are the only two subjects of therapy.

 

 

Solitude

 

The Garden of Eden and The Heavenly Jerusalem are The Same Place, depending on whether you are looking backward or forward. 

 

A person touched by Loneliness is a holy person. 

 

He is caught in the development of Individuation. 

 

Whether it’s a development or a regression depends on what he does with it. 

 

Loneliness can destroy you, or it can fire you up for a Dante-like journey through Hell and Purgatory to find paradise. St. John of the Cross called this The Dark Night of the Soul.

 

The worst suffering I’ve ever experienced has been loneliness, the kind that feels as though it has no cure, that nothing can touch it. 

 

One day, at the midpoint in my life—a little like Dante—I got so exhausted from it that I went into my bedroom, lay face down on my bed, and said, “I’m not going to move until this is resolved.” 

 

I stayed a long time, and the loneliness did ease a little. 

 

Dante fell out of Hell, shimmied down the hairy leg of The Devil, went through The Centre of The World, and started up The Other Side, which was Purgatory. 

 

I felt better, but as soon as I got up and began to do anything, my loneliness returned. 

 

I made many round trips until gradually an indescribable quality began to suffuse my life, and loneliness loosened its grip. 

 

Nothing outside changed. The change was entirely inside.

 

Thomas Merton wrote a beautiful treatise on Solitude. 

 

He said that certain individuals are obliged to bear The Solitude of God. 

 

Solitude is Loneliness evolved to The Next Level of Reality.

 

He who is obliged to bear The Solitude of God should not be asked to do anything else; it’s such a difficult task. 

 

For monastics, Solitude was one of the early descriptions of God. 

 

If you can transform your Loneliness into Solitude, you’re one step away from the most precious of all experiences. 

 

This is the cure for Loneliness.

 

Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler.

 

 

Confronting Fear is The Destiny of a Jedi

Now everybody from the 616

Put your motherfuckin' hands up

and follow me - 

Everybody from the 616

Put your motherfuckin' hands up –

Look, look : –

Now while he stands tough,

Notice that This Man

did not have his hands up –

This Last Order's got you gassed up

Who's afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?

One, two, three and to the four

One Pac, two Pac, three Pac, four

Four Pac, three Pac, two Pac, one

You're Pac, he's Pac,

you're Pac none

This guy's no motherfuckin' Ruler over Thee,

I know every last thing

he's got to say against me –

I AM White;

I AM a Junkyard Savage Scavenger;

I DO live in Shipwrecked Star Destroyer on my own;

My Step-Uncle, Master Luke IS an Uncle Tom;

I DO got a dumb friend, 

Dude look like a Dawg,

Who I thought that I had accidentally shot-down, clear, out of Out of The Blue,

after I had gone + gotten way too  mad,

And smote the their ship clear, clean out of the skies with The Force of a Thunderbolt.

I DID get jumped by all six Knights of Ren,

And my Family of Origin DID sell me to a Junkyard trader for fuck-you drinking money —

I'm STILL standing Here screaming

''Fuck Tha Empire!”

Regressive Loneliness

For 27 years, I dreamt of you. 

I craved you... 

I •missed• you!

“The first kind of loneliness— loneliness for the past— is regressive. 

It attacks early in life, during adolescence or early adulthood. 

We want to return to the place we came from. 

We want the comfort and security of the good old days, the way things used to be. 

How many times do your dreams take you back to early times—the playground, the backyard, the tree you used to climb, your grade-school friends? 

This is the backward-turning loneliness, a hunger for the Garden of Eden.

There isn’t much we can do about it. We can’t go back. 

The Bible says that there is an angel with a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, forbidding reentry. 

Backward-turning loneliness is the mother complex, the wish to return to your mother’s womb. 

It is especially dangerous in men, because it becomes the will to fail, the propensity to relinquish power and regress. 

It’s the spoiler in a man, stronger than most men are able to admit. When you have an exam at school or an interview for a job and you feel terrified, this is probably The Fear of Success. 

The Enemy is Inside.

Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler. Scribd.

After The Wars

On 9 November 1920, a few platoons of British soldiers set out once more for the front. Led by one officer apiece, they went to the still-churned, still-slimy ground where great slaughters, at Ypres, Cambrai, Arras and the Somme, had taken place. They marched to a place of rough wooden crosses without markings, where dead Britons too torn about to be identified had been buried. Just one body was dug up from each site, placed in a plain deal coffin and then brought back to a small chapel. Next, an officer was blindfolded and led into it. He reached out and touched one of the four coffins. The other three were returned to be reburied. The fourth was then taken by train to the Channel, where it was met by a warship and placed inside a larger casket of oak, specially made from a tree cut down in Hampton Court forest. With an escort of destroyers and given the admiral’s nineteen-gun salute as it passed, the dead man–a Scot or a Welshman, a Nottinghamshire miner or a Devon public schoolboy, a man who had died bravely or in terror–no one knew who he was–was then taken to London. Two days after being dug up in France, he was paraded through the streets, his pallbearers being field marshals and admirals, until he was buried deep in the sand below Westminster Abbey. 

On his coffin rested an antique sword from the King’s collection. In the next days and weeks, more than a million people came to say goodbye. Outside, in Whitehall, 100,000 wreaths had almost hidden the base of the brand new Cenotaph. 

Reclaiming, and giving a State Burial to, an unknown soldier had been the idea of a young army padre, later a vicar in Margate, called David Railton. He passed the idea to the Dean of Westminster, who wrote to the King. George was initially against the notion, worrying that it was too morbid, but he was won round. 

As the writer Ronald Blythe later said, ‘The affair was morbid, but grandly and supremely so.’ It proved hugely popular and cathartic, partly because it was in its way democratic. Millions of bereaved parents, brothers and sisters could half-believe that the recovered body was theirs, and certainly that it represented their dead boy. 

There had been much argument about the different treatment of aristocratic or upper-class corpses, which might be returned for burial at home, and the great mass of the dead who were left near to where they fell. Overall, the funerary democrats–led by the poet Kipling–won the argument for all to be treated alike in death, officers and men lying alongside one another with similar headstones. 

This was not trivial. 

At a time of revolution abroad, democracy needed to be symbolized. These were the years of the memorials: the vast Commonwealth memorials in France, requiring their own large bureaucracy and the factory-scale cutting of headstones; the thousands of granite crosses, sculpted Tommies and gold-painted wooden boards in villages, schools, train stations and city squares. In every style from the mimicry of ancient Greek and Egyptian funerary art to the latest in angular modernism, the British raised up AND THEN LIVED IN a Garden of Death. 

Though there was not, in statistical terms, a lost generation as is sometimes still claimed, the three-quarters of a million dead were a ghostly presence everywhere; faces staring out of school and sporting photographs, empty upstairs bedrooms in suburban houses, silent family meals, odd gaps in offices or village pubs between the old and the very young. 

In the ten years after The War 29,000 small country estates were sold off, often simply because there was no heir to inherit them. The wounded and maimed were also visible everywhere. They might be blind, gassed, distressingly unpredictable, hobbling with empty trouser-legs or pinned-up arms. 

The worst were still coping with open wounds which needed to be dressed daily to staunch infection. New plastic surgery techniques, still crude, could last until the late 1920s before patched-up faces were ready. Unsettling smells broke through the cigarette smoke. Park benches were sometimes painted blue to warn passers-by that they were reserved for badly wounded men from hospital, in their floppy serge uniforms and blue caps. 

The exuberance of blood–the erect spirit–of Edwardian times had been drained. 

Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost the only one they loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives–albeit quite cheerful ones–focused on fruit cake and friendship. 

Eventually, of course, the sadness was too much, the weight of public stoicism too heavy for living, breathing humans to bear. Those who had survived wanted some fun again. The brittle urban gaiety for which the twenties are known was an essential response to the muffled drums and the silences and the hat-doffing to piles of brick and bronze. Ponderous hymn tunes consoled many. Jazz replied. The war had dulled and shabbied the country, so there followed a time of paint and silliness. Upper-crust girls could shock their parents by aping the masses and using rouge and mascara and lipstick. Women began smoking in public. The Great War, like littler wars, had been an overwhelmingly masculine affair. Boys grew into men very fast, and died as men. Men dressed as modern warriors in thick polished belts, heavy boots, rough, bronze-decorated overcoats and peaked caps. In wartime, beards and long hair were symbols of dissidence which drew angry looks and loud comments. So after it was over the younger men who had just missed the war responded with colourful and, to their elders’ eyes, effeminate clothing. Women, in turn, looked a little more like boys. Tubular dresses, bindings round the chest to disguise the bust and short haircuts, the bob and then the shingle, made girls seem unsettlingly androgynous. When the insolent-puppy writer Evelyn Waugh married a woman also called Evelyn, they were called He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn, and they gaze back from photos in identical trousers and shirts with similarly camp expressions. The upper classes and their arty hangers-on led the way, but thanks to the mass newspapers people across the country watched and in some ways mimicked them. Though we think of the most riotous scenes of misbehaviour coming in the twenties, the years of the Bright Young Things, the pattern had been set during the war. A good case-study can be found in the diaries of Duff Cooper, for most of the war working at the Foreign Office and in love with Lady Diana Manners, who had been a great and well-connected Edwardian beauty. His diaries recount an astonishing amount of casual love-making and hard drinking. The affairs are probably mostly not fully physical, because of the dangers of pregnancy, but in variety and number his circle rivalled or outpaced the behaviour of people in supposedly laxer, later days. The fine wines and champagnes gurgled away through the war, as did the old brandies and whisky, and a fair amount of drug taking–morphia, mainly, injected. You could buy what was, in effect, cocaine and heroin quite legally–people sent it to the troops. At one level, it is a record of hedonism and self-indulgence on a scale that would have shattered the constitutions of most rock musicians sixty years later. Yet it is only when set together with the equally astonishing death-rate of their friends that it makes full sense. After yet another friend, an in-law of the Asquiths, has been killed, Cooper recalls Edwardian parties of which he was now the only male survivor and records a day of helpless crying. It ends with him dining in his club: ‘I drank the best champagne–Pommery 1906–because I felt that Edward would have wished it and would have done so had I been killed first.’ He refuses to go out to eat ‘simply because I was afraid that I might cry in the middle of dinner’. Cooper went on to serve towards the end of the war, with spectacular bravery. This determination to drink deep and party while there was still time flowed unchecked into the post-war world. The nearest recent equivalent might be the drug-taking hedonism that flooded American youth during and after Vietnam. As then, in twenties Britain it pitted young and old against each other in an epic generational battle. The jittery, shallow, fancy-dressing army of upper-class children who smashed up bars, invented new cocktails, danced along the counters of department stores, learned to dance the camel-walk, the shimmy, the black-bottom and the notorious Charleston and stole policemen’s hats contained plenty of ex-officers from the front, and many whose brothers, cousins and lovers had been killed. Among those who arrived in London and changed the city’s taste were the first Harlem hot jazzmen, black musicians bringing the allure of early Hollywood pictures and stories of gangsters. Elders and betters looked on aghast; and, as ever, the media, in this case the fashionable new trade of newspaper gossip columnists, stoked up the story. Noe¨l Coward, whose play The Vortex dealt with drugs, was able to pose to a popular newspaper in a silk dressing gown with an expression, it reported, of advanced degeneracy. He promised the London Evening Standard that ‘I am never out of opium dens, cocaine dens, and other evil places. My mind is a mess of corruption.’ Gangs like the Sabinis and the Titanics (the latter apparently so named because they dressed up poshly, like passengers on the liner) fought across Soho, across the racetracks and for control of the new centres of vice in twenties Britain–the nightclubs. 

There you could find ex-officers, Sinn Fein men, gangsters, prostitutes, dancers and drug dealers like the famous opium supplier ‘Brilliant’ Chang. 

There were also homosexual clubs, crowded with men who had failed to heed their monarch: George V, told that an acquaintance was a ‘bugger’, replied with consternation: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’

GOLD

“In the West, gold is the symbol of the Self, while in the East, the symbol of our inner divinity is the diamond. 

In their interior meanings, they are the same, but the images are different. Diamonds are the hardest matter on earth—unearthly, celestial, and impersonal. 

Gold is much softer, a matter of relationship, the Self as related. I think we’re lucky to have gold to cope with.

Our culture understands little about these matters, so when we ask the other person for our gold back, she probably won’t know what we’re talking about. 

She might say, “Last week you were opening doors for me and treating me like a princess, and this week you’re ignoring me.” People don’t understand the dynamics. 

It is only AFTER you get your gold back that you can see the gold of the other person. 

When the time is right, when you are ready to bear the weight, you must get your gold back. 

If you can do it with dignity and tact, that’s best. But you MUST get it back, one way or another.

The Glow in Your Eyes 

When we see that we have given our spiritual gold to someone to hold for us, there are several ways we might respond. We could go to him or her and say, “The meaning of my life has suddenly appeared in the glow in your eyes. May I tell you about it?” 

This is another way of saying, “I have given you my inner gold. Will you carry it for me for a while?” 

But we rarely say and do things that directly. Instead, we stand across the room, turn our back on him, and feel totally frightened, stumbling and carrying on in odd ways. We meet at the coffee pot during the morning break at work and banter with each other, speaking all kinds of nonsense. We joke and laugh, and an animated play goes on. Then, when we head back to work, we feel energized and brightened for the day. It was not the coffee. It was the exchange of inner, alchemical gold. 

Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler.

The Foolish and The Ridiculous Demand Respect – And They are Insisting on Their Rights

OO'S THAT GUT-LORD MARCHIN'...?

YOU SHOULD CUT-DOWN ON YER PORK-LIFE, MATE, GET SOME EXERCISE..!!

IT'S NOT ABOUT YER VORSPRUNGZ-DIRK TECHNIQUE, Y'KNOW...

THE IMPOSSIBILITY PROBLEM

As a culture we have entered an area which is now mined with impossibility problems. From some of the most famous women on the planet we have heard the demand that women have the right to be sexy without being sexualized. Some of the most prominent cultural figures in the world have shown us that to oppose racism we must become a bit racist. Now a whole set of similar impossibilities are being demanded in an equally non-conciliatory manner. 

There was a fine example on the BBC’s This Week in October 2017 when an artist and writer going by the mononym ‘Scottee’ appeared on the programme to discuss a short political film he had made. As a self-described ‘big fat queer fem’ he complained that he was a ‘victim of masculinity in a way because of the aggressions I put up with on a day-to-day basis’. Although he had no answers to this problem, he insisted that ‘queer, trans, non-binary people’ shouldn’t have to be the ones who have to disable “toxic masculinity”’. It has to come from within, he argued. Men ‘have got to acknowledge their privilege, and I want them to hand over power, and also I want them to hand over some platform. I’m really up for like trying a matriarchy. We’ve done patriarchy for a long time. Hasn’t really worked.’

Avoiding the Nuclear Presumption of ‘hasn’t really worked’ for a moment, there was one even larger fact staring any viewer in the face. 

This was that one of the main complaints that this flamboyantly dressed self-declared ‘big fat queer fem’ had made about the society he lived in was that he found himself so often ridiculed.

So here is another paradoxical, impossible demand. 

A person who chooses to be ridiculous without being ridiculed.

Other impossible demands can be found everywhere  – such as the one that was on display at Evergreen State College and Yale University and was highlighted by Mark Lilla on the panel at Rutgers (where the audience member insisted to Kmele Foster that he ‘didn’t need no facts’). 

On that occasion Lilla provided an insight into one of the other central conundrums of our time. He said, ‘You cannot tell people simultaneously “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me”.’ 

Evidently a whole lot of people can make those demands simultaneously. But they shouldn’t, and if they do then they should realize that their contradictory demands cannot be granted. 

Then of course there is the question of how the hierarchy of oppression is meant to be ordered, prioritized and then sorted out. 

Laith Ashley is one of the most prominent transgender models in the world today. The female-to-male transsexual has received prominent coverage and done prestigious fashion shoots for leading brands and magazines. In a 2016 television interview he was asked by Channel 4’s Cathy Newman if in the two years he had been transitioning from a woman to a man he had encountered any discrimination. Ashley said that in fact he had not, but then alleviated his interviewer’s disappointment by adding that transgender activists and others he knew from transgender rights movements had ‘told’ him that he had in fact gained some male privilege. 

As he said, breaking it down for the viewers, ‘I have gained some male privilege. And although I am a person of colour I am fair skinned and I adhere to society’s standard of aesthetic beauty in a sense. And for that reason I have not necessarily faced much discrimination.’

So he had taken a couple of steps further into the hierarchy by becoming a man, had taken a couple of steps back by being a person of colour, but a step forward by being a light-skinned person of colour. And then he had hit the negative of being attractive. 

How can anyone work out where they are meant to be in the oppressor/oppressed stakes when they have so many competing privileges in their biography? 

No wonder Ashley looked concerned and self-effacing when going through this list. This is enough constant self-analysis to knock anybody’s confidence. But a version of that impossible self-analysis is being suggested for many people today, when in fact there is no way of knowing how to perform this task fairly on another person let alone on yourself. What is the point of an exercise that CANNOT be Done? 

And where to next? One of the pleasures in recent years has been watching people who think they are being a good liberal boundary keeper discover that one of their feet has nicked one of the tripwires. One Saturday evening in 2018 Vox’s David Roberts was spending his time happily auditioning for the committee for public virtue on Twitter. In one tweet he wrote, ‘Sometimes I think about America’s sedentary, heart-diseased, fast-food gobbling, car-addicted suburbanites, sitting watching TV in their suburban castles, casually passing judgement on refugees who have walked 1000s of miles to escape oppression, and . . . well, it makes me mad.’ As he sent it off he must have thought ‘Sounds good. Attack Americans, defend migrants, what could go wrong?’ A more cautious member of the new media might have wondered whether it was wise to sound quite so disdainful of people who live in the suburbs. But in fact it was not Roberts’s suburbo-phobia that caused him to spend the rest of his Saturday evening frantically trying to save his career in dozens of remedy tweets. The thing that caused an instant backlash from the very crowd he was hoping to impress was that he had been ‘fat-shaming’ and this was ‘problematic’. 

By his 17th tweet attempting to mop up his crime Roberts was reduced to begging: ‘Fat-shaming is real, it’s everywhere, it’s unjust & unkind, and I want no part of it.’ Soon he was apologizing sincerely for only being ‘half woke’, and blaming his upbringing.

The potential for claims of offence, allegations of shaming and new positions in the grievance hierarchy based on ever-evolving criteria could go on indefinitely. But how would they be arranged? Is a fat white person equal to a skinny person of colour? Or are there different scales of oppression which everyone should know even if no one has explained the rules because the rules are made not by rational people but by mob stampedes. 

Perhaps rather than derange ourselves by working out a puzzle that cannot be solved, we should instead try to find ways out of This Impossible Maze.

Where's your head at
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Drozze it
Okay are you ready, I'm ready
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
You get what you give that much is true
Don't let the walls cave in on you
You turn the world away from you
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Wasn't that?Okay are you ready, I'm ready
You have now found yourself trapped in the incomprehensible maze
Where's your head at, you'll know how to be
Where's your head at, you don't make it easy on yourself
Where's your head at, what you give is what you get, is what you get
Where's your head at (Where's your head at)
Where's your head at (Where's your head at (Okay are you ready, I'm ready)
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Where's your head at, Where's your head at
We can live on, live on without you
We can live on, live on without you
We can live on, live on without you
We can live on, live on without you

The Maze in The Desert

There is a maze in the desert carved from sand and rock.

A vast labyrinth of pathways and corridors a hundred miles long, a thousand miles wide, full of twists and dead ends.

Picture it a puzzle.

You walk, and at the end of this maze is a prize just waiting to be discovered.

All you have to do is find your way through.

- [RAPID CLICKING.]

- Can you see the maze? Its walls and floors, its twists and turns? Good, because the maze you've created in your mind is itself the maze.

There is no desert, no rock or sand.

There is only the idea of it.

But it's an idea that will come to dominate your every waking and sleeping moment.

You're inside the maze now.

You cannot escape.

Welcome to madness.