June 22 2024 Of the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves, Monsters, Freaks, the Limits of the Human and the Tyranny of Normality: the Werewolf As Metaphor of Freedom and Truths Written In Our Flesh

Tonight as darkness falls, the full moon rises, and the wildness calls to me once again with its songs of chaos as freedom and as beauty, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and seizures of power from Authority as revolutionary struggle, the wildness in me gives answer and soon will become uncontrollable as a tidal force of passion, truths immanent in nature and written in my flesh which must be lived and set free, and I will run amok and be ungovernable.

A maker of mischief, I.

For like all human beings I am a thing of nature cursed with the vision to transcend the limits of my flesh, through poetic vision and the rapture and exaltation of love and desire, and in this liminal moment on the cusp of becoming I write to all those who in the performance of otherness as seizure of power over the ownership of themselves become Unconquered and free, self-created beings unbound by any law or tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, including all those who question and challenge authorized identities of sex and gender, many of whom are now enacting recapitulations of the annual celebrations of June’s Pride Month. The liminal time of the parades may have passed, but this is no reason our revels must now be ended; the revolution is within us, who in refusal to submit to authority become Unconquered and free, agents of change and Bringers of Chaos as Living Autonomous Zones.

Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.

For law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.

In Mariupol the Abyss began to look back at me, and I am shaped by my history to dread purposes as a thing without pity, fear, or remorse. I wonder now, could I have become something other than a monster, had I chosen differently, to abandon rather than stand in solidarity with my fellow human beings? But then I would be complicit in their suffering, as America is in Gaza and the Palestinian Genocide, and no longer human.

How if the best we can do is to try to claw something of our humanity back from the darkness, before it annihilates us all, and maybe save somone else from becoming as I am? Our lives are dragons teeth, sown in the shadows of terror and unanswerable forces of dehumanization, but from which multitudes arise.

O my brothers, sisters, and others, let us arise and resist, and abandon not our fellows, let us embrace our monstrosity and place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, if only for one last time of glory and refusal to submit.

When those who would enslave us come for us and for others, as they always have and will, let them find not a humanity subjugated by learned helplessness and division, but united in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. If we do this, we may hope to remain human.

Let us reply to Netanyahu and Putin, and to all tyrants with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”

This day we fight.

What do I mean by the enigmatic principle, Embrace Our Monstrosity?

Many of the modern pathologies of disconnectedness from our nature are born of the need for control and of fear of our inchoate passions as threatening otherness, an internalized oppression which has riven the human soul, divided and abstracted us from ourselves as part of the processes of nature. This is a madness of inauthenticity, falsification, power, control, dominance, vanity, greed, myths, histories, and authorized versions of truth which valorize war and authorize elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, all of which arise from an Original Sin of ownership of nature which abstracts us from ourselves as the otherness of our own flesh and the truths written therein, as in the allegory of Adam Naming the Beasts.

Patriarchy, racism, sectarian division, and other identitarian forms of power, operating in mutual interdependence with capitalism, which Jean Genet called necrophilia and William S. Burroughs reimagined as the Algebra of Need, and its prefigural developmental stages of elite hegemony and political forms monarchial aristocratic feudalism and then as nationalist imperialism, all find anchorages in civilization as control of threatening nature and our fear and hatred of ourselves.

Jung described the primal disunity we must heal within ourselves; “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and become torn into opposite halves.” He was speaking of psychosis and the work of reintegration and becoming human, but it applies equally to dialectical civilizational processes of history wherein we have found ourselves conflicted and at war with nature on multiple fronts.

As the state is embodied violence, the historical processes of civilization which create it are also expressions of the conflicted human soul and the primary struggle for ownership of ourselves and self-creation versus authorized identities. Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.

Here I think also of Camille Paglia’s magisterial critique of Patriarchy as a civilizational task of controlling nature, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In the case of Emily Dickinson, metaphysical ax murderess whose poetry is a savage and relentless struggle with Patriarchy and avenging of its countless victims, she writes;” Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”

Personally I adore Emily Dickinson as a figure of Liberty; she reminds me of an ancestor of mine who was a member of the Paris Commune, an anarchist revolutionary, abolitionist, and suffragette called the Red Queen in reference to the character from Alice in Wonderland, after her preferred method of assassination. Hers was a simple doctrine; to take the enemy’s power, go directly for and behead the apex predator of a system of oppression, second totalize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from the shadows and in the most savage and terrifying ways possible, and then put everything they owned and controlled, all that serves unequal power, to the torch.

Once the true nature of our captivity and enslavement by elites has been realized, and Authority exposed as a seducer and betrayer whose apologetics of power are but lies and illusions, the choice between freedom and rebellion or dehumanization and subjugation becomes horribly clear, a chiaroscuro of terror and the grandeur of resistance.

So also with the plunder and capitalist exploitation of our common natural resources in service to wealth and power which is driving the existential threat of ecological collapse and human extinction, for it is rooted in the same fear, drive to dominance and control, and internalized oppression as in the sexual terror of Patriarchy or the white supremacist terror which threatens our democracy.

Our lives become expressions of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and in the context of liberation and revolutionary struggle to win a reimagined humanity which heals our disunity with nature through the embrace of our otherness and our true and authentic selves which dwell among the chasms of darkness of our passions, through transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, refusal to submit to Authority, violations of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, and other Acts of Chaos and Transformation, we may heal the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, and the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which Schiller identifies as “the disgodding of nature.”

Here I look to stories of our own to balance those of submission to Authority and denial and control of our nature. William S. Burroughs, whose bizarre fairytales haunted the nights of my youth, forged such a myth in his novel The Wild Boys, which I describe in my celebration of his work as follows; The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, set in a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.

As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from his conversations with my father, who mythologized our family history with the absurd claim that we are not human but werewolves, beings of the Wild Hunt, magic, and darkness, unbound by any law and with the blood of ancient terrors in our veins, and had been driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for that reason. Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women.

The Wild Boys extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as control of our animal nature.

David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine. Certainly it is among the many stories I have adopted as part of my personal myth and identity, which include Milton’s rebel angel, the visions of William Blake, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, and the iconography of Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, a pantheon and ancestral family with the wonderful image of the titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape with his three gorgon daughters Madness, Death, and Desire; really, what more could one ask for?

Such myths offer models of harmony with nature in the figure of the werewolf as a controlling metaphor for the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves. Rather than a thing of clay animated as the toy of a tyrant deity of alien and unfathomable motives as in the Abrahamic faiths, we can free ourselves from the dehumanizing legacies of our Patriarchal and Authoritarian histories by looking to counter-narratives of freedom, such as the werewolf defined as a being of wildness and uncorrupted nature.

Myths about were beings tell us how we humans view ourselves and our relationship with the natural world in specific historical contexts.

The bite is an interesting metaphor, and is akin to other forms of the medical model of madness which describes transpersonal and other states of awareness as a degradation or dehumanization rather than exaltation and participation in something greater than we are, and as an intrusive force from outside rather than a sign of our natural condition; allegories and metaphors of the desacralization of nature and the falsification of ourselves, part of the story of the human cost of the industrial and authoritarian age like the loss of magic in the age of iron.

In terms of story, there are many unexplored possibilities for the reimagination of were beings as heroes of authentic being versus normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and champions of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

Like the exhibitions in a carnival freak show, monsters help us define our limits and establish boundaries by providing examples of the truly other.

What is human?

Transgression explores and redefines our boundaries; indeed is necessary to growth and the discovery of possibilities of being. Let us parse the meaning of our reactions to violations of norms and to the truly other with great care, particularly with regard to the use of social force and control to authorize normality and codify and enforce virtue.

As the anthropologist Sam Dubal relates in his book Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army, modern Uganda provides a case study of the tribal warrior societies our werewolf myths are based on, a group who modeled themselves on gorilla warbands to achieve a higher state of being than human and reawaken our connection with nature and our natural selves, and whose acts of terror were in part ritual transgressions of the Forbidden, as were the crimes of Jean Genet. While the anticolonial warriors of the 19th century Leopard Society in Africa, Boxers in China, or Thugee in India may not be accessible to us, in the LRA we have ready examples of the use of savaging and primalism in war.

When thinking about werewolves we must place our mythologies in the context of stories told about them as monsters and figures of terror by their enemies, just as the Christians did witches or the European peoples claimed by Church and King did the Viking berserkergangr with whom they struggled for dominion.

All divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness authorized by those who would enslave us demonize the many in service to the power of the few.

To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.

How we imagine and honor the wildness of ourselves is reflected in how we imagine and honor the wildness of nature; our idea of the werewolf reflects our relationship with our animal nature, and with nature itself. If you think of your animal nature as evil, hostile, subhuman, barbaric, a thing of bottomless appetites to be controlled as Freud conceptualized what he provocatively called our polymorphously perverse nature, it is a fearsome thing, a degradation checked only by the restraining force of law; the doctrine of the innate depravity of man, corollary of original sin, being the basis of all law and of the carceral state, an idea very useful in subjugating us to authority.

But if instead our freedom and wildness is beautiful, and nature to be celebrated rather than feared, humankind is restored to wholeness and harmony with nature. This is perhaps a better way to study the idea of our wildness and harmony as animals and beings of nature expressive of its forces; look inside yourself and question your feelings and ideas about sex, death, and the possibilities of becoming human in a universe of imposed conditions which owe nothing to normality and other peoples ideas of virtue.

To be a Wolfman is to be without limit, autonomous, free, to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and dwell among the unknowns of our maps of human being, meaning, and value. To live in harmony with our nature is to abandon dominion and live as one wild thing among others in a free society of equals, without tyrants, elites, or inequalities, for all living beings are equal and merit honor, especially the ones we must consume.

Do not be deceived by the lies and illusions of those who would enslave us and steal our souls; our wildness is a thing not of terror or debasement, but of freedom and of beauty; and it awaits within you as a wisdom of your own darkness, which holds nothing which is not yours. Claim your wildness, and be free.

As I wrote in my post of October 28 2023, Let Us Be Wolfmen: Embrace the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves; On these Nights of the full moon, a cosmic event of enormous powers of change and transformative rebirth, let us embrace our monstrosity as Bringers of Chaos in the destabilization of order, disruptions of normality, transgressions of the Forbidden, and seizures of power from Authority in revolutionary struggle.

To all those who would enslave us as tyrants of unequal power, let us bring a Reckoning.

Now is the time of the Wolf and of the sacred hunt as love and as solidarity in liberation struggle, dyadic forces of the embrace of nature. Here is a ground of struggle signified by the figure of the wolfman as embodiment of our true nature uncorrupted by the subversions, lies, and falsifications of Authority; the image of human nature and our best selves.

Who are we when liberated from the legacies of our history and systems of unequal power? What is this truth we pursue in the pursuit of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh?

As I wrote in my post of February 14 2022, On the Redemptive and Transformational Power of Love: the Case of Valentine’s Day and the Festival of the Wolf; Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples under Christian law which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

So we have in one holiday defiance of authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.

But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.

Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.

Of this I have written tonight a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.

Love Triumphs Over Time

When first I learned of love,

And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping

the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins

As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation

But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh

And the limitless possibilities of becoming human

Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons

In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination

Beyond the doors of the Forbidden

Where truths are forged,

And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;

We are more ourselves when we are with others

Because humans are not designed to be alone

For we are doors which open one another

And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world

When we are savaged and broken and lost;

Love is the greatest power of all the forces

which shape, motivate, and inform living things

Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,

Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness

From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;

Love triumphs over Time.

Thus for the embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves as love; also it manifests as resistance, seizures of power, and revolutionary struggle. As I wrote in my post of May 24 2022 The Problematization of Tuesday: Why Do We Celebrate Tyr’s Binding of Fenris One Day Each Week?;

How much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice in order to confront and limit evil?

This is always the true question of Resistance; not of the origin of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, of the renouncement of love as the cost of power nor the redemptive power of love to free us from its grip and from those who would enslave us, not of our dehumanization, commodification, and falsification as theft of the soul nor of our power to become Unconquered and free in refusal to submit to authority, not of addiction to power and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness of hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil nor of seizures of power and revolutionary struggle for the ownership of ourselves against authorized identities of unequal power. The question we must face is simply this; how much of ourselves are we willing to trade for our liberty?

Resistance is always war to the knife, under imposed conditions of struggle against those who do not recognize us as fellow human beings, and who have shifted the ground of struggle beyond all limits and all laws, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden to subvert and degrade our humanity and all human being, meaning, and value, and here is where we must meet them.

Who so ever acts to subjugate us beyond all laws and all limits may hide behind none. I am a hunter of tyrants and fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. Let us give to fascists, tyrants, and all those who would enslave us the only reply it merits; Never Again!

Here the myth of Fenris and Tyr may illuminate us, for in sacrificing his hand to bind the wolf which represents his animal nature as all devouring need there is an exchange of qualities, a hierosgamos and transformative rebirth as they unite and become dyadic forces. It is a myth which reflects and refers to the human transformation of wolves into dogs, predators into partners in hunting and war, and in which the breaking of the oaths and bindings which create and sustain the universe, human nature, and civilization are part of the processes of self creation and transformative rebirth, the work of Chaos in the reinvention of the world and our liberation from imposed orders of meaning and authorized identities.

Of Chaos as the principle of freedom I have written often and will again, for I am a Bringer of Chaos and a maker of mischief for tyrants; but here I wish to speak to you of the true nature of the myth of the Binding of Fenris as a metaphor and allegory of our primary ground of struggle as our relationship with the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.

For there are two paths we can travel in this; that of control and domination of our nature, as Freud described us with his delicious phrase as “polymorphosly perverse”, chthonic forces to be surmounted and harnessed, or that of Jung, who wrote of shadow work as unification with our monstrosity, especially that which provokes disgust, revulsion, fear, and horror in us.

Here is a myth we can interpret and live as binding our animal nature, or as binding together with our animal nature as a primary human act of becoming. One leads to exploitation and dominance of nature and inevitably to our own extinction; the other to harmony, interdependence, and a sustainable civilization.

First we must situate the figure of Fenris as an archetypal wolf in the context of our fear of nature and its myths and allegories, and then interrogate the consequences of our denial of our own nature for how we have chosen to be human together.

As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”

I question and challenge the idea of normality, the authorization of identities, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.

When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.

One could think of the Binding of Fenris as slavery, abjection, degradation to an animal state or pathological denial of our nature which results in unequal social power as patriarchy, hegemonic elites, capitalism and ecological devastation; or its mirror reverse, hierosgamos, transformative rebirth, interdependence, and harmony with nature.

As we enter the liminal time of this night’s Full Moon celebrations, allegories of the performance of ourselves as a guerilla theatre of disruption and the frightening of the horses, I say to you all, my brothers, sisters, and others; Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.

Thus I write of the wolf that lives within us, in celebration of our monstrosity and beauty; sometimes you have to let your demons out to dance.

Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, full movie

https://www.veoh.com/watch/v71672331PdCWgGY2

This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate