We celebrate this week the founding of the #metoo movement by Alyssa Milano with a Twitter post on October 15, 2017, and soon joined by a host of A list celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashley Judd, Jennifer Lawrence, and Uma Thurman. Suddenly the masses of exploited women who were not global stars had powers of authorization and solidarity, and they responded with the roar of lions escaping their cages.
With aligned liberation struggles in Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion protests and the Black Lives Matter mass movement for social justice, #metoo was one of the three key protest movements to begin to reshape our nation and our civilization as triadic forces of reimagination and transformation.
This tidal change of revolutionary struggle which arose as the Fourth Reich regime of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, rapist and kingpin of a human trafficking empire disguised as a modeling and beauty pageant monopoly, was exposed before the world as an engine of death and totalitarianism with three major parts; patriarchy and Gideonite sexual terror, racism and white supremacist terror, and the dehumanization and commodification of capitalism, strategies of subjugation of the people to elites and the subversion of democracy which aligned all too well with divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership, as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against the overwhelming force and pervasive and endemic tyranny, against systemic and structural predation and the legacies of historical and epigenetic harms and trauma, our most vulnerable populations led the way in resistance; women, Black peoples and racial minorities, and a children’s crusade led by Greta Thunberg.
Let us remember always that change comes from the margins and from outside the system, that it is those whom society vilifies and excludes, the slaves and the outcasts, who have the true power to revision and bring transformational change to our civilization and to our future possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 7 2020, Victims Become Hunters: trial of the monster Weinstein begins; We find great satisfaction in the spectacle of a monster dragged into the open and exposed to the people’s justice and wrath by its former victims, and surely no predator wearing the mask of a man deserves condemnation and vengeance more than Harvey Weinstein, who joins his fellows Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Nassar in their special ring of the Inferno.
Let us not forget that it is the Patriarchy and the privileges of male immunity for crimes of sexual terror and dominion which enable the abuse of power and the subjugation and exploitation of half of humanity by the other which must be our real target of change, for hegemonies of power and privilege create and protect the tyrants of their structures, and these layers of inequality must be challenged and exposed. Only then can we achieve social transformation and a free society of equals be realized.
As I wrote in my post of August 11, 2021 The Fall of Patriarchy: the Case of Andrew Cuomo; A monster has been toppled from his throne, and like the tyrannical god who presides over Patriarchy as a cannibal father, Saturn, his fall signals a liminal time in which all things become possible, order is reversed, and chaos returns to us the power which authority has stolen from us.
Let us use this time of freedom wisely.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2020, A Balance of Conserving and Revolutionary Forces: Portents of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the Mirror of 1623; Saturn, god of agriculture whose emblem is the Horn of Plenty, also the terrible father of the gods who eats his children until he is tricked into freeing them by his son Jupiter the Liberator. A figure of wealth as rapacious cannibalism versus liberation in an allegory from the dawn of civilization in which tyranny is cast down from its throne in a seizure of power by those he has sacrificed to create the wealth of harvest; a song of revolutionary struggle and the triumph of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Saturn, whose harvest and midwinter festival has been split in our culture into Thanksgiving and Christmas, a festival of feasts, gifts, merrymaking, and above all the reversal of order and authority under the mad idiot reign of a King of Fools, a role enacted in recent years by our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the origin story of humankind in the rebellion of the gods of light against those of darkness mirrored the emergence of democracy from the tyranny of kings; the rule of laws replacing that of persons and of reason replacing barbarism and atavisms of instinct.
In the Fall of the Kings of New York, Hollywood, and the iconography of idealized feminine beauty and subjugation to male authority which is our national gymnastics system masquerading as a sport, cast down from their thrones of lies by their exposure in the rebellion of those enslaved and victimized through sexual terror, I find echoes and reflections of this primordial seizure of power from figures of Patriarchy, and while we celebrate this national liberation we must also recognize that there can be no end to revolutionary struggle.
For the enemy of our subjugation to unequal power does not live merely in his castle waiting for us to seize and dethrone him, but also within us, in our addiction to power and the use of force, falsification through lies and illusions, and divisions of identitarian exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging. These too we must challenge and defy, expose and cast down, if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and the terror of Patriarchy.
As I wrote in my post of February 24 2020, Triumph and the Dawn of a New Age: Weinstein Found Guilty; Today we witnessed the overthrow of the Patriarchy, the final casting off of the gag of silence by the victims of sexual terror and the liberation of women from the Scarlett Letter of blaming the victim, as Weinstein is found guilty.
We have waited a long time for this moment, since Odysseus’ Hanging of the Maids at the founding of our civilization some two thousand seven hundred years ago.
With Epstein and Nassar among the three principal monsters dethroned by the #metoo movement, Harvey Weinstein will join them in Hell and in our nightmares throughout history as three bogeymen of secret power, tyrants and madmen who define the limits of what is human.
Such monsters and freaks of horror are extremely useful in defining our boundaries, ideas of otherness, of identities both authorized and possible limned like a chiaroscuro against the negative spaces of the Forbidden. It is far easier to tell what is not human than what is or may be.
Therefore celebrate with me this triumph and seizure of power by the historically silenced and marginalized half of humanity, as the vengeance of the Hanged Maids and the liberation of Hester Prynne from her Scarlet Letter.
A year and a half has passed since the fall of Weinstein, and the revelations which led to the fall of Cuomo have proven that we have not yet become a free society of equals. But in the sphere of relations and identities of sex and gender, real change is underway and the true power base of Patriarchy, the silencing of women’s voices, has already collapsed into nothingness, for now we celebrate truthtellers who like the Jester of King Lear speak truth to power; no longer bearers of a Scarlet Letter, but culture heroes who call out; “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!”
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020, How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force; Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture and a counter-culture of our own in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.
At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.
In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner’s great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy’s Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.
So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, between masters and slaves, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Cat’s Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.
Melania’s message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, “I really don’t care. Do U?’ and Ghislaine’s self-description in Vanity Fair, “‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,” reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.
And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but at the pinnacle of our society’s ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.
As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”
The Handmaid’s Tale telenovela series trailer
Torch of Liberty January 17 2024 Thanks For Showing Us All What’s Under Your Masks, Republicans: the Case of E. Jean Carroll Versus Donald Trump
What is this thing of rapture and despair, wonderful and terrible like immersion in the Infinite, more precious and fundamental to our humanity than any other, more dread than hope as a gift and curse which offers redemption and healing when all else fails, full of numinous powers of reimagination and transformation in the face of our nothingness, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
I write in reflection on a day of significance for my partner and the great love of my life, who values her privacy and wants nothing of this mentioned. So while I had written a celebration of her marvelous achievements and significance to me and who I have become, here follows merely a general interrogation of the idea and purpose of love, and what we mean when we say it.
Why is love important to our humanity?
Love is a power which cannot be taken from us and can redeem us, liberate us from capture by systems of oppression and from addiction to power, signals our interdependence with one another as a ground of solidarity and for connection to this world and its material and historical imposed conditions of struggle, and the ongoing creation of meaning and value for ourselves as a sustaining function and a motivating, informing, and shaping source in the performance of ourselves.
And this nameless annual event coincides with our month of ancient celebration of death and transformation as Halloween, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, which now begins on October 2 with our Black Sun Ritual in celebration of the annual solar eclipse, the Festival of Loki as Breaking the Silence, and includes our new national holiday of amok time and the celebration of love, transgression, and vision as divine madness, the Festival of the Mad Hatter.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Beauty and the Beast or Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
The genius and allure of the Addams Family is not only that they combine an iconic romantic couple as an aspirational ideal of relationships with a family which accepts the uniqueness of its members and valorizes transgression in both themes, but that they are also a pantheon, and one entirely free from the consequences of patriarchy.
Much like the figures of Morticia, who occupies the imaginal space of Lillith, Kali, and the Morrigan as a goddess of time, death, sex, and rebirth, and Gomez, like Pluto an underworld king of fate, luck, wealth, chaos, and mischief who subsumes elements of Milton’s Rebel Angel and Loki the Trickster. Or in our own unique ways, my partner and myself as people who claimed these roles as children and dreamed ourselves into such shapes as best we might.
We have defined this month as a liminal time which begins with a festival of desire or eros and ends with one of death or thanos; a space of balance in which all things become possible.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
We can parse the meaning of the word love in terms of its origins, as does Professor Babette Babich; “The classical list, as C.S. Lewis and others detail it, is: storgē, love of the home or the family; philia or friendship, which we hear in philosophy as love of wisdom; eros which is what we’re most interested in — taking us back to the #metoo movement, including questions of men and women in love. And then there is agapē, a pure, specifically selfless love, in contrast to eros, which is anything but selfless. Agapē is anticlimactic, and even St. Augustine, praying for grace, prayed to be perfect but, as he famously wrote, not yet.
The hierarchy of kinds of love mirrors — to tell a fanciful, proto-evolutionary story — the story of our lives. We’re born into storgē, family love, the love of home and hearth. That can be conflicted to be sure, as Robert Frost reminds us: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’”
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the stone of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied; “Moments stolen from death belong to us; and may be all we can truly own. It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
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 legal 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
Who see our truths and make them real
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 questions we must face are simply this; how much of ourselves are we willing to trade for our liberty? How much of our humanity can we trade to secure the humanity of us all, without becoming something less than human?
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, the key event of domestication which gave us a crucial edge in survival over our own predators, 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 in becoming adults, 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 in terms of domination of nature, or as binding together with our animal nature as equal partners in interdependence and as a primary human act of becoming. One leads to exploitation of nature, doomed attempts to control 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 I wrote in my post of October 27 2021, Of Monsters, Freaks, the Limits of the Human and the Tyranny of Normality: the Figure of the Werewolf As Controlling Metaphor For the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves; Many of our modern pathologies of disconnectedness from our nature and from one another 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, power, dominance, vanity, greed, myths 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 Lie of separation from and ownership of nature 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 and its prefigural developmental stages of elite hegemony and political forms aristocratic monarchy and 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. Here Jung has given us a great power; how we may free ourselves of the legacies of our history and authorized identities, and escape the limits of time and fate as the unfolding of design beyond our own choosing. Like the works of Gertrude Stein, Jung describes a process of liberation and self-creation as a teleological revolution which unbinds us from the laws of the universe with which Authority seeks to harness our nature in service to power.
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. 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.”
We are beasts with the souls of beasts, and this is not a degradation but an exaltation and a glorious thing, for nature is beautiful and so are we.
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; historically our family had been driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the start of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions and the savage Cologne War and Protestant Expulsion, a prelude to the Thirty Years War which killed a third of European peoples among its theocratic horrors and is a direct cause of America’s principle of Separation of Church and State and why a secular state is foundational to any democracy. Martin Luther, then a notorious witch hunter, called us Drachenbraute, Brides of the Dragon, a unique term of Othering which I regard as an ancestral title of splendid grandeur and a cherished legacy of my family history.
The Wild Boys extends the Enlightenment ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, a historical development and like the Toad which Nietzsche feared he must swallow and Burroughs claimed to be possessed by a line of succession from Rousseau to de Sade to Nietzsche to Bataille to Burroughs and then myself, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint and control of our 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 Hieronymus Bosch and of Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze as pantheon and ancestral origins with the wonderful image of the titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape with his three gorgon daughters Madness, Death, and Desire ( I renamed the third as I found illness redundant and to reflect the Triple Goddess with whom Typhoeous is paired in the Frieze); 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 God of alien and unfathomable motives who seeks to bind our nature to his laws 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 of transformation is an interesting metaphor, especially as a metaphor of coming out and of truths written in our flesh, 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 participation in something greater than we are, and as an intrusive force from outside rather than a sign of our natural condition, which Freud so deliciously termed polymorphosly perverse; 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 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 and normalities 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 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. 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, and in the struggle of enslaved peoples to free themselves from the dehumanization of our civilization as imperialism and capitalism.
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 the Viking berserkergangr with whom they struggled for dominion of Europe, a civilizational conflict of tyranny versus liberty.
The people they fought for tell different stories; in Romania they still perform the Bear Dance in honor of an ancestor of mine, a deified Roman general whose name, Laelianus, is on Trajan’s Column in Rome.
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 or meet in battle as brother warriors to find the truth of ourselves.
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 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.
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, marriage, interdependence, and harmony with nature.
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 its forms as love, transgression, and poetic 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.
As we glory in the liminal time of this year’s Halloween celebrations, 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 Halloween; sometimes you have to let your demons out to dance.
Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina | Lupercalia 3rd Event Hunt
Typhoeus and His Daughters, Detail from Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze
Warren Zevon – Werewolves Of London (Official Music Video)
Little Red Riding Hood -sung by Amanda Seyfried
Red Riding Hood trailer for film starring Amanda Seyfried
We celebrate the founding of the Black Panthers on October 15 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in Oakland, California, a visionary organization of revolutionary struggle, resistance to tyranny, and liberation from white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
As we look forward to the great work ahead, the abolition of divisions of exclusionary otherness from our society and the restoration of democracy throughout the world, as the injustices and inequalities of our civilization are exposed, as our government is threatened by the return of Trump’s fascist tyranny of state force and control which has betrayed and subverted our liberty, as we rise up and resist our enslavement and dehumanization and the theft of our universal rights, as we join together to question and challenge authority as is the primary role and responsibility of citizens in a free society of equals, the most important thing we can say to one another now is direct and simple; I stand with you.
In this moment of peril, let us swear ourselves to one another in the cause of our liberty and in mutual aide of our rights and freedoms as citizens and as human beings.
This is the time to forge of ourselves a true Band of Brothers, Sisters, and Others, and all varieties of humanity as yet undreamed, to reach toward an America of allyship united in our diversity and the common needs of our human condition. Of this mission much remains to be discussed and explored, and it will continue to change with time.
Such is the great lesson of the Black Panthers, who maintained a principle of bottom unity, of diversity inclusive of all who challenge and resist those who would enslave us, as brothers and sisters in liberation and revolutionary regardless of gender, color, or class, or the nuances of ideology. As Nelson Mandela once said of his alliance with Cuba and the Soviet Union against Apartheid; “We are not in the position to refuse help from anyone.”
But mine is not the voice that needs to be heard in this context, for I cannot speak from within this realm of lived experience. So instead I recall to all of us the wisdom of our elders in the words of an exemplar of resistance and a champion of the people, the great and visionary Huey Newton, in the proclamation of the Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party as written in October 1966 and published in War Against the Panthers:
“We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine
The Destiny Of Our Black Community.
We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
We Want Full Employment For Our People.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
We Want An End To The Robbery
By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
We Want Education For Our People That Exposes
The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society.
We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History
And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
We Want An Immediate End To
Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.
We Want Freedom For All Black Men
Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.
We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In
Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black
Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education,
Clothing, Justice And Peace.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
How relevant and filled with creative potential for our future his words remain for us now, anchored to the principles and values of the American Revolution as an ongoing process and experiment in becoming human.
For further reading I recommend Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Bloom & Martin, and The Black Panthers Speak, Foner editor.
Stanley Nelson -“Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” film trailer
Nietzsche who awakens, Nietzsche who challenges, Nietzsche who illuminates and inspires; these are the three Nietzsche’s who have been my companions throughout life, my guides and muses, and whom I offer you as a Song of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Thread whereby to find your way through the labyrinth of life.
As the world rips itself apart at the point of fracture between theocratic tyranny and democracy as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and co-owners of the state in the bifurcated realities of Democratic and Republican America and its mirror Israel and Palestine as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history, and those who would enslave us weaponize fear in service to power and act with amoral brutality in committing crimes against humanity as interpreters of the will of death gods, the illumination of Nietzsche and his songs of liberation become newly relevant.
Protean in his forms, he may take whatever shape is needed in your quest; and will play his roles as befitting at different stages of the journey. There are many Nietzsche’s, who like an endless series of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats offer possibilities which echo and reflect those of his readers as an inkblot test. Who is Nietzsche to me?
Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a space in my life and imagination like no other shaping, motivating, and informing source, because my discovery of him in the year before I began high school was the final break of the Great Chain of Being which bound me to the will of authority and my fellow schoolmates ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty in a theocratic, patriarchal, and racist society aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and set me free to create myself in a universe without imposed meaning or value; then helped me to process a primary trauma which became a Defining Moment as I joined the liberation struggle of a foreign land whose glittering citadels of splendor concealed horrible truths.
Nietzsche it was who helped me to balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
We will need such balance all of us, as we confront our complicity in systems of oppression both in America’s sponsorship of our imperial colony Israel and its seventy years of Occupation of Palestine, and throughout the world and history, for we are all caught in the gears of a machine of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and systems of oppression which are special to nothing, though conflicts often illuminate the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
When I speak of the enforcement of normality as an evil to be resisted, it is with the voice of the old woman burned alive in her home as a witch by a mob which included fellow children I grew up with. To fully understand Nietzsche, you must inhabit the historical space of liberation from systemic tyranny which his anti-authoritarian iconoclasm represents. Much of our world still lives in such darkness, and many of its evils originate in theocratic sources.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for the Infinite, and with this false and stolen authority of lies and idolatry transfers the true cost of production of the wealth he appropriates to himself while others do the hard and dirty work. The particulars of such claims are meaningless; only the fact of unequal power and systems of oppression are real.
I grew up in such a world, a premodern world bound to the laws of a cruel and implacable Authority of alien and unknowable motives and those who would enslave us and claim to speak in his name as a tyranny of the Elect, whose hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rely on our commodification as weaponized disparity and theft of the commons, falsification through lies and illusions, subjugation through learned helplessness and divisions of exclusionary otherness, fear as an instrument of the centralization of power by carceral states of force and control through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and faith weaponized in service to power as theft of the soul.
Such atavisms of barbarism hold dominion still over much of humankind and possess us as legacies of our history, bound by embedded tyrannies of many kinds, a world America was founded to replace as a free society of equals. Ours is a very fragile civilization, defined by its ability to question itself but threatened always by chasms of darkness which surround us and with relentless, pervasive, and systemic enemies in fascist tyranny, patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, the fetishism of death and violence in identitarian nationalism and its police states and imperial militarism, and dehumanization. This we must resist, and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra as a luminous song of resistance.
Among the great loves of my literary life, I first discovered him after reading through all the works of Herman Hesse in seventh grade, in whom I found resonance with the Taoist poetry and Zen riddles which were among my subjects of formal study, then abandoning fiction after the nightmare of Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and its implied erotic horror, which I had chosen after reading his stunning novel of my favorite game after chess, The Master of Go, and turned thereafter to Plato whom I adored, and read voraciously all his works throughout my eighth grade year. The Trial of Socrates founded our civilization as a self-questioning system of being human together, and in the dialectics of Socratic method offered me tools of self-construal and reinvention which became central to my identity.
My father, who was a theatre director as well as my English, Drama, and Forensics teacher, Debate Team coach, and my Fencing Club coach throughout high school, and who taught me fencing and chess from the age of nine, suggested I might like the discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche’s vision of civilization as a struggle between passion and reason, chaos and order, conserving and revolutionary forces, which interlinks with that of Kawabata and of Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game to form a unitary vision of a process of becoming human, and informs my reading of literature, politics, and all human activity, to this day.
So it was that during the summer of my fourteenth year before I began high school I discovered with unforgettable joy and recognition a book written by someone who spoke for me, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wedded in my imagination to the context of my encounter with his work was the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division of under 16, as I had been in the under 14 and remained through high school in the under 20 division. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true mission of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Throughout all of this, Nietzsche’s great song of liberation pulled me into its heart and ignited in me a will and vision to transgress beyond our boundaries into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
I thereafter read all his works, though Thus Spake Zarathustra remained a kind of sacred text to me; I used to quote it in refutation to my fellow students who quoted the Bible to me as an instrument of subjugation to authority.
Redolent with the cadences of poetic oratory and a phraseology which echoes that of the beautiful King James Bible, pervasive in my town of Reformed Church stalwarts whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, it was both familiar and utterly strange, an empowering work of liberation proclaiming the death of Authority and the limits of the Forbidden. How I cherished it, this treasure and marvel; by summer’s end I could recite it entirely by memory so many times had I read it.
May we all find such books, which illuminate our imagination and offer to us the Promethean fire.
Read therefore the immortal classics of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, and Ecce Homo.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an insightful overview.
Maurice Blanchot’s lifelong engagement with Nietzsche can be illuminating and wonderful; The Step Not Beyond, a reply to Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which references Deleuze, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation all center on his reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as an Existentialist principle in which the negation of presence is a path of total freedom. In the pivotal 1945 essay On Nietzsche’s Side, Blanchot reimagines Karl Jaspers’ seminal thesis on Nietzsche; thereafter his works interrogate Nietzschean themes including the Will to Power, the nature of time, ecstatic vision and the Dionysian principle, the Death of God as symbol and metaphor of the emptiness of tyranny and the illusion of authority, and the relativity of meaning and value.
A student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” interrogates the reimagined doctrine of Original Sin as the innate Depravity of Man, which is the basis of all our law and an apologetics of authoritarian power which both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis made a life mission of overthrowing, a theme which continued to inform Kazantzakis throughout his life and is central to understanding his unique brand of Existentialism. In large part his works explore the implications of the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as personal and social struggle.
Do read also C.G. Jung’s work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake. An engagement with Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-gospel and Zarathustra as a figure of Liberation like Milton’s rebel angel, as for both Jung and myself, will lead you as it did me to the works of William Blake and his rebel figure Los; Milton, Nietzsche, and Blake form a line of transmission which unfolds gloriously in Jung’s Red Book.
Last of all I must cite the influence which prefigured and later reinterpreted the meaning of Nietzsche for me, the great storyteller of my childhood William S. Burroughs, whose own ideology was shaped by his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche. Bataille’s On Nietzsche brilliantly interrogates the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us to free ourselves from them, in a fearless reimagination of the will to power as a will to transgress. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, compiles the secret documents of his occult circle, disciples of Nietzsche who attempted to reimagine civilization and whose ritual transgressions echo de Sade and Jean Genet.
The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated. Burroughs derived his Anarchist Trilogy, The Wild Boys, The Cat Inside, and the Revised Boy Scout Manual, from Bataille’s synthesis of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Freud, though its central premise, The Algebra of Need, references Marx.
This is the Burroughs with whom I found connection as a teenager; the anarchist philosopher for whom the Wolfman was a figure of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, whose novel on the subject, The Wild Boys, was written during the period of his visits at our home and possibly influenced by my father’s tales of our family history.
For Burroughs, writing was conjuration; an act of chaos magic and liberation struggle in which the tyranny of authorized identities and orders of human being, meaning, and value can be destabilized as fracture, disruption, and delegitimation, and created anew through poetic vision.
In this mission William S. Burroughs was the successor and reinterpreter of of Bataille and of their shared model Nietzsche, as ritual transgression, the delegitimation of authority and seizures of power as liberation struggle, poetic vision and ecstatic trance as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Burroughs also believed himself to be the literal successor of Nietzsche as the possessed avatar of a chthonic underworld god, a Shadow figure in Jungian terms which represents his animal nature and inchoate desires as a beast with a beast’s soul, unconquerable and free, in reference to the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and that Burroughs’ Welsh nanny had cursed him with as a child. A powerful guardian spirit and otherworld guide to be offered, as was I in reciting together the line with which Burrough’s often ended his bizarre versions of Grimm’s fairytales, a line written by Shakespeare in The Tempest for Prospero, who says of Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
So the circle of meaning returns to swallow its own tail like an Ouroboros or an infinite Mobius Loop in the embrace of our darkness as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and of the balance we must find for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of total freedom in a universe without imposed meaning, wherein the only being, meaning, and value that exists are those we create for ourselves, even if we must seize them from those who would enslave us.
Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling
Looking Into the Abyss: the Hamas-Israel War of October 2023
Biden’s Speech asking Congress to fund Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing
(General Ursus speech from Beneath The planet of the Apes)
“The only thing that counts in the end is POWER! Naked merciless FORCE!”
15 Oktober 2024 Lieder der Befreiung vom theokratischen Terror: Zur Feier Nietzsches
Nietzsche, der erweckt, Nietzsche, der herausfordert, Nietzsche, der erleuchtet und inspiriert; Dies sind die drei Nietzsches, die mein ganzes Leben lang Begleiter, meine Führer und Musen waren und die ich Ihnen als Lied des Orpheus und Ariadne als Faden anbiete, um Ihren Weg durch das Labyrinth des Lebens zu finden.
Während die Welt an der Schnittstelle zwischen theokratischer Tyrannei und der Demokratie als einer freien Gesellschaft von Gleichen, die sich gegenseitig die universellen Menschenrechte garantieren und Miteigentümer des Staates sind, in den gespaltenen Realitäten Israels und Palästinas auseinanderbricht, während wir darum kämpfen Wenn wir aus den Hinterlassenschaften unserer Geschichte hervorgehen und diejenigen, die uns versklaven wollen, die Angst im Dienste der Macht als Waffe einsetzen und mit amoralischer Brutalität Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit als Interpreten des Willens der Todesgötter begehen, wird die Erleuchtung Nietzsches und seiner Befreiungslieder zu neuem Leben erweckt relevant.
Er ist in seinen Formen vielfältig und kann jede Form annehmen, die Sie für Ihre Suche benötigen. und wird seine Rollen in den verschiedenen Phasen der Reise angemessen spielen. Es gibt viele Nietzsches, die wie eine endlose Reihe tanzender Schrödingers Katzen Möglichkeiten bieten, die als Tintenkleckstest die seiner Leser widerspiegeln. Wer ist Nietzsche für mich?
Friedrich Nietzsche nimmt einen Platz in meinem Leben und meiner Vorstellungskraft ein wie keine andere prägende, motivierende und informierende Quelle, denn meine Entdeckung von ihm im Jahr vor Beginn meiner Schulzeit war der letzte Bremspunkt der Großen Kette des Seins, die mich an den Willen band der Autorität und der Vorstellungen meiner Mitschulkameraden von Tugend, Wahrheit und Schönheit in einer theokratischen, patriarchalischen und rassistischen Gesellschaft, die mit dem Apartheidregime Südafrikas verbündet ist, und mir die Freiheit gab, mich in einem Universum ohne aufgezwungene Bedeutung oder Wert zu erschaffen; Dann half er mir, ein primäres Trauma zu verarbeiten, das zu einem entscheidenden Moment wurde, als ich mich dem Befreiungskampf eines fremden Landes anschloss, dessen glitzernde Zitadellen der Pracht schreckliche Wahrheiten verbargen.
Nietzsche war es, der mir half, den Schrecken unseres Nichts mit der Freude der völligen Freiheit in Einklang zu bringen.
Wir alle werden ein solches Gleichgewicht brauchen, wenn wir uns unserer Komplizenschaft in Unterdrückungssystemen stellen, sowohl bei der Unterstützung unserer imperialen Kolonie Israel durch Amerika und ihrer siebzigjährigen Besatzung Palästinas als auch in der ganzen Welt und in der Geschichte, denn wir sind alle darin gefangen Getriebe einer Maschine aus elitärem Reichtum, Macht und Privilegien und Unterdrückungssystemen, die nichts Besonderes sind, obwohl Konflikte oft die Mängel unserer Menschlichkeit und die Zerbrochenheit der Welt ans Licht bringen.
Wenn ich von der Durchsetzung der Normalität als einem Übel spreche, dem man widerstehen muss, dann mit der Stimme der alten Frau, die in ihrem Haus als Hexe von einer Meute, zu der auch meine Mitkinder gehörten, mit denen ich aufgewachsen war, lebendig verbrannt wurde. Um Nietzsche vollständig zu verstehen, müssen Sie den historischen Raum der Befreiung von der systemischen Tyrannei bewohnen, den sein antiautoritärer Bildersturm darstellt. Ein Großteil unserer Welt lebt immer noch in dieser Dunkelheit, und viele ihrer Übel haben ihren Ursprung in theokratischen Quellen.
Ich bin in einer solchen Welt aufgewachsen, einer vormodernen Welt, die den Gesetzen einer grausamen und unversöhnlichen Autorität aus fremden und unerkennbaren Motiven und denen verpflichtet war, die uns versklaven und behaupten würden, in seinem Namen zu sprechen, als Tyrannei der Auserwählten, deren Hegemonien des Reichtums Macht, Macht und Privilegien beruhen auf unserer Kommerzialisierung als bewaffnete Ungleichheit und Diebstahl von Gemeingütern, auf Fälschung durch Lügen und Illusionen, auf Unterwerfung durch erlernte Hilflosigkeit und Spaltungen ausschließender Andersartigkeit, auf Angst als Instrument der Machtzentralisierung durch kerkerhafte Gewalt- und Kontrollzustände durch Faschismen von Blut, Glauben und Boden und Glauben, der im Dienst der Macht als Diebstahl der Seele bewaffnet wird.
Solche Atavismen der Barbarei beherrschen immer noch einen Großteil der Menschheit und besitzen uns als Vermächtnisse unserer Geschichte, gebunden durch tief verwurzelte Tyranneien verschiedenster Art, einer Welt, die Amerika als freie Gesellschaft von Gleichen ersetzen sollte. Unsere Zivilisation ist sehr zerbrechlich und wird ständig von den Abgründen der Dunkelheit, die uns umgeben, und von unerbittlichen, allgegenwärtigen und systemischen Feinden in der faschistischen Tyrannei, dem patriarchalischen Sexualterror, dem Terror der weißen Rassisten, dem Fetischismus von Tod und Gewalt im identitären Nationalismus und seinen Polizeistaaten bedroht und imperialer Militarismus und Entmenschlichung. Dem müssen wir widerstehen, und ich lese „So sprach Zarathustra“ als ein leuchtendes Lied des Widerstands.
Unter den großen Lieben meines literarischen Lebens entdeckte ich ihn zum ersten Mal, nachdem ich in der siebten Klasse alle Werke von Herman Hesse gelesen hatte, bei dem ich Resonanz mit der taoistischen Poesie und den Zen-Rätseln fand, die zu meinen formalen Studienfächern gehörten, und gab dann die Fiktion auf nach dem Albtraum von Kawabatas „Das Haus der schlafenden Schönheiten“ und dem darin enthaltenen erotischen Horror, für den ich mich entschieden hatte, nachdem ich seinen atemberaubenden Roman über mein Lieblingsspiel nach dem Schach, „Der Meister von Go“, gelesen hatte, und wandte mich danach an Plato, den ich verehrte, und las alles gierig sein w Orks während meines achten Schuljahres. Der Prozess gegen Sokrates begründete unsere Zivilisation als ein sich selbst hinterfragendes System des gemeinsamen Menschseins und bot mir in der Dialektik der sokratischen Methode Werkzeuge zur Selbstkonstruktion und Neuerfindung, die für meine Identität von zentraler Bedeutung wurden.
Mein Vater, der Theaterregisseur sowie mein Englisch-, Theater- und Forensiklehrer, Debate-Team-Trainer und mein Fechtclub-Trainer während der gesamten High School war und der mir ab meinem neunten Lebensjahr Fechten und Schach beibrachte, schlug vor, dass es mir gefallen könnte die Diskussion des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in Friedrich Nietzsches „Die Geburt der Tragödie“; Nietzsches Vision der Zivilisation als ein Kampf zwischen Leidenschaft und Vernunft, Chaos und Ordnung, bewahrenden und revolutionären Kräften, die sich mit der von Kawabata und Herman Hesse im Glasperlenspiel zu einer einheitlichen Vision eines Prozesses der Menschwerdung verbindet und informiert meine Lektüre von Literatur, Politik und allen menschlichen Aktivitäten bis heute.
So kam es, dass ich im Sommer meines vierzehnten Jahres, bevor ich mit der High School anfing, mit unvergesslicher Freude und Anerkennung ein Buch entdeckte, das von jemandem geschrieben wurde, der für mich sprach: Also sprach Zarathustra. In meiner Vorstellung war mit dem Kontext meiner Begegnung mit seiner Arbeit das große Abenteuer und das zerstörerische Trauma meiner ersten Alleinreise ins Ausland verbunden, nach Brasilien, um mit anderen Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren.
Lassen Sie mich dies in einen Kontext stellen; Brasilien war mein erstes alleiniges Reiseerlebnis im Ausland. Als ich vierzehn war, flog ich nach Sao Paulo, um mit einer Gruppe von Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren, die dort stattfinden sollten. Ich war in meiner Altersklasse San Francisco Bay Area-Meister im Säbel und Florett. Ich hatte etwas neu erlerntes Konversations-Portugiesisch, eine Einladung, bei einem Jungen zu übernachten, den ich aus der Zeit bei Fechtturnieren kannte und mit dem ich den lokalen Unfug entdecken konnte, und Visionen von Strandpartys.
So betrat ich eine Welt voller höfischer Manieren und weißbehandschuhter Diener, liebenswürdiger und brillanter Gastgeber, die lokale Koryphäen waren und einen großartigen formellen Ball veranstalteten, um mich und einen Freund vorzustellen, mit dem ich eine verrückte Leidenschaft für Kampfkunst und Sport teilte , aber auch eine Welt voller hoher Mauern und bewaffneter Wachen.
Mein erster Blick über diese Illusion hinaus erfolgte durch die Geräusche des Gewehrfeuers der Wachen; Als ich von meinem Balkon aus schaute, um zu sehen, wer das Eingangstor angriff, stellte ich fest, dass die Wachen auf eine Menge Bettler, hauptsächlich Kinder, schossen, die einen Lastwagen mit den wöchentlichen Lebensmittelvorräten überfallen hatten. An diesem Tag unternahm ich meinen ersten geheimen Ausflug über die Mauern hinaus, und seitdem lebe ich außerhalb der Mauern.
Ich erinnere mich jetzt an diesen entscheidenden Moment, an den Tag, an dem ich über meine Grenzen hinausschaute und die Grenzen des Verbotenen überschritt, um die Grundlage meines eigenen Privilegs zu entdecken und in Frage zu stellen und über Grenzen autorisierter Klassen- und Rassengrenzen hinweg in Solidarität mit denen zu blicken, die das Harte tun und Drecksarbeit für den Rest von uns und Schaffung unseres Reichtums, an den wir die wahren Kosten der Produktion exportiert und als unsere De-facto-Sklaven von ihren Vorteilen ausgeschlossen haben, was meine Vorstellungskraft anregt, ist, dass ich eine Allegorie des Erwachens gelebt habe, die die Geschichte von der Buddha und ist als Prinz im Goldenen Käfig zu einem Weltmythos geworden. Ich hatte keinen Wagenlenker, der meine Fragen beantwortete und aus meinem Zeugentrauma Ordnung und Sinn schaffte; Ich hatte einen ganzen Stamm von ihnen, die Matadore. Zu diesem Teil kommen wir gleich.
Welche Wahrheiten verbergen sich hinter den Mauern unserer Paläste, über die hinauszuschauen es verboten ist? Es ist leicht, den Lügen der Autoritäten zu glauben, wenn man der Elite angehört, in deren Interesse sie angeblich Macht ausüben, und die eigenen Motive und die privilegierte Stellung nicht in Frage zu stellen. Erschreckend leicht zu glaubende Lügen, wenn wir die Nutznießer von Hierarchien ausschließender Andersartigkeit, von Wohlstands- und Machtunterschieden und Ungleichheiten sind, die im Dienste der Macht systematisch hergestellt und als Waffe eingesetzt werden, sowie von Völkermord, Sklaverei, Eroberung und Imperialismus.
Achten Sie immer auf den Mann hinter dem Vorhang. Denn es gibt keine gerechte Autorität, und wie Dorothy im Zauberer von Oz sagt, ist er „nur ein alter Humbug“, und seine Lügen und Illusionen, seine Gewalt und Kontrolle dienen nur seinen eigenen Interessen.
Als naiver amerikanischer Junge hielt ich es für meine Pflicht, den Vorfall zu melden; Aber auf der Polizeistation hatte ich Schwierigkeiten, mich zu verständigen. Sie dachten, ich sei dort, um bei einem monatlich stattfindenden Wettbewerb, bei dem Polizisten die meisten Straßenkinder erlegten, auf meine Wachsamkeit zu wetten; Dafür gab es an der Bahnhofswand eine Tafel und ein Glas mit markierten Ohren. Bei einem weiteren Wettspiel namens „The Big One“ traten Polizisten den schwangersten Mädchen in den Bauch und zählten zu den zehn häufigsten Todesursachen für Mädchen im Teenageralter in Brasilien, die ausnahmslos in Slumgebieten lebten, in denen die ärmsten und meisten Schwarzen lebten Bürger; dies in einer Stadt, die von entflohenen afrikanischen Sklaven als freie Republik gegründet wurde.
In den folgenden Wochen habe ich viel gelernt heiraten; dass ganze zehn Prozent der Brasilianer verlassene und verwaiste Straßenkinder waren, auf die als Lösung Kopfgelder ausgesetzt worden waren, dass ein Viertel der Bevölkerung in Elendsvierteln lebte, dass die Lebenserwartung für 80 % der Menschen bei 35 Jahren lag und dass zuvor 350.000 Kinder gestorben waren jedes Jahr fünf Jahre alt waren und nur 13 % die Grundschule abschlossen, bedeutete, dass fast die Hälfte der Menschen Analphabeten waren.
Und doch war es eine reiche Nation; Der brasilianische Goldboom im 18. Jahrhundert löste die industrielle Revolution Europas aus, und in dieser Zeit allgegenwärtiger und systemischer Armut und Rassismus war Brasilien der weltweit größte Kaffee-, Zucker-, Orangen- und Benzinproduzent, der zweitgrößte Kakaoproduzent und der drittgrößte Holz- und Rindfleischproduzent Hersteller. Aber über die Hälfte des Reichtums befand sich im Besitz von weniger als zwei Prozent der Menschen, wie etwa der Familie, die meine liebenswürdigen Gastgeber waren.
Vor allem habe ich erfahren, wer für diese Ungleichheiten verantwortlich ist; Wir sind es, wenn wir die Produkte eines ungerechten Systems kaufen, als Zeugen der Geschichte zu Ungerechtigkeiten schweigen oder unsere Fürsorgepflicht gegenüber anderen aufgeben, wenn sich das Böse vor uns abspielt, und durch eine Mission des Handelns andere vor Schaden bewahren können. Dies ist die wahre Mission elitärer Hegemonien von Reichtum, Macht und Privilegien; unsere gegenseitige Abhängigkeit und die Solidarität unserer universellen Bruderschaft als Voraussetzung ungleicher Macht zu zerstören.
In den Nächten meiner Abenteuer jenseits der Mauern und bei Aktionen zur Unterstützung der Banden von Kinderbettlern und zur Behinderung der Kopfgeldjagd der Polizei hatte ich eine zweite Nahtoderfahrung, dieses Mal ähnlich, wenn auch nicht so formell wie die Scheinhinrichtung von Maurice Blanchot durch die Nazis 1944 und Fjodor Dostojewskis durch die Geheimpolizei des Zaren im Jahr 1849; Sie flüchteten mit einem verletzten Kind unter anderem vor der Verfolgung durch ein Tunnelgewirr und wurden im Freien von zwei Polizeischützen gefangen, die flankierende Positionen einnahmen und auf uns zielten, während der Anführer hinter der Kurve eines Tunnels zur Kapitulation aufrief. Ich stand vor einem Jungen mit einem verdrehten Bein, der nicht rennen konnte, während die anderen sich zerstreuten und flüchteten oder Verstecke suchten, und der sich weigerte, beiseite zu treten, als er dazu aufgefordert wurde. Dies war mein Ring des Feuers und der erste von mehr letzten Kämpfen, an die ich mich jetzt nicht mehr genau erinnern kann, und ich finde Hoffnung für uns alle in der instinktiven Fürsorgepflicht des kleinen Jungen, der ich einst war und dem es nie in den Sinn kam, wegzulaufen, sich zu ergeben , oder einen Fremden dem Leid auszusetzen, und wie Wagners großer Held entschied sich Siegfried stattdessen für das Feuer.
Mit all den Schrecken, die ich in einem Leben erlebt habe, das ich in den unbekannten Räumen unserer Karten der Menschwerdung gelebt habe, markiert Here Be Dragons, jenseits der Grenzen des Menschlichen und der Grenzen des Verbotenen, durch Kriege und Revolutionen als Unheilstifter für Tyrannen und ein Monster, das andere Monster jagt, um etwas von unserer Menschlichkeit zu retten, obwohl ich dabei oft versage, wie ich es in Mariupol vom 22. März bis 18. April 2022 und in Panjshir in Afghanistan von der letzten Augustwoche bis zum 7. September getan habe Im Jahr 2021 weigert sich etwas in uns, sich der Erniedrigung und erlernten Hilflosigkeit autoritärer Systeme zu unterwerfen, ungeachtet der Zerrüttung der Welt und der Mängel unserer Menschlichkeit, und strebt nach Erhöhung und Freiheit. Ob diese Hoffnung ein Geschenk oder ein Fluch ist, muss jeder von uns in der Art und Weise, wie er sein Leben lebt, herausfinden.
Am Ende kommt es nur darauf an, was wir mit unserer Angst machen und wie wir unsere Kraft nutzen.
Siegfried geht durch das Feuer und wird menschlich. Eine gute Nacherzählung davon gibt es in der Musicalfolge „Once More With Feeling“ von Buffy – Im Bann der Dämonen.
Als die körperlose Stimme meines Henkers aus der Dunkelheit des Fegefeuerlabyrinths, in dem wir gefangen waren, meine Kapitulation anordnete, mit dem Leben eines Fremden auf dem Spiel, fragte ich, wie viel wir gehen lassen sollten, und er befahl seinen Männer zum Feuern. Aber es gab nur einen Schuss statt einer Demonstration von Kreuzfeuer, und zwar ein Fehlschuss; er hatte Zeit zu fragen: „Was?“ bevor es zu Boden fällt.
Und dann zeigten sich unsere Retter, die sich von hinten an die Polizei herangeschlichen hatten; die Matadors, die man als Bürgerwehr, kriminelle Bande, revolutionäre Gruppe oder beides bezeichnen könnte, gegründet von Brasiliens berüchtigtem Bürgerwehrmann und Verbrecher Pedro Rodrigues Filho, der im Vorjahr verhaftet worden war. In dieser furchterregenden Bruderschaft wurde ich willkommen geheißen, und in diesem Sommer war ich nie wieder allein auf den Straßen von Sao Paulo.
Von dem Moment an, als ich sah, wie die Wachen der Adelsfamilie, bei der ich zu Gast war, auf die Menge obdachloser Kinder und Bettler feuerten, die den Lebensmittelversorgungswagen am Tor des Herrenhauses bevölkerten, nackt und ausgehungert, vernarbt und verkrüppelt und missgestaltet von unbekannten Krankheiten an alle Menschen, für die Gesundheitsversorgung und Grundnahrung kostenlose und garantierte Voraussetzungen des universellen Rechts auf Leben sind und die verzweifelt auf eine Handvoll Lebensmittel angewiesen sind, die einen weiteren Tag zum Überleben bedeuten könnten; In diesem Moment habe ich mich für meine Seite entschieden, und mein Volk sind die Machtlosen und Enteigneten, die Zum Schweigen gebrachten und Ausgelöschten.
Wie einer meiner Retter es ausdrückte; “Komm mit uns. Du sind einer von uns. Wir können nicht alle retten, aber wir können uns rächen.“
Möge uns allen die Gabe der Vision unserer gegenseitigen Abhängigkeit und der Universalität unseres Menschseins geschenkt werden, sowie der Wunden, die uns für den Schmerz anderer öffnen.
Während all dem zog mich Nietzsches großartiges Lied der Befreiung in sein Herz und entfachte in mir den Willen und die Vision, über unsere Grenzen hinaus an die unbekannten Orte mit der Aufschrift „Here Be Dragons“ vorzudringen.
Ich habe danach alle seine Werke gelesen, obwohl „So sprach Zarathustra“ für mich eine Art heiliger Text blieb; Ich habe es als Widerlegung gegenüber meinen Kommilitonen zitiert, die mir gegenüber die Bibel als Instrument der Unterwerfung unter Autoritäten zitierten.
Mit dem Klang poetischer Reden und einer Phraseologie, die an die wunderschöne King-James-Bibel erinnert, die in meiner Stadt mit Anhängern der reformierten Kirche allgegenwärtig ist und deren Mund voll von „Du“ und „Du“ war, war es sowohl vertraut als auch völlig seltsam, ein kraftvolles Werk der Befreiung verkündet den Tod der Autorität und die Grenzen des Verbotenen. Wie ich es schätzte, diesen Schatz und dieses Wunder; Am Ende des Sommers konnte ich es vollständig auswendig aufsagen, so oft ich es gelesen hatte.
Mögen wir alle solche Bücher finden, die unsere Fantasie erhellen und uns das prometheische Feuer schenken.
Lesen Sie daher die unsterblichen Klassiker von Friedrich Nietzsche, „Also sprach Zarathustra“, „Die Geburt der Tragödie“, „Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“, „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“, „Über die Geneologie der Moral“, „Der Fall Wagner“, „Der Antichrist“, „Götterdämmerung“ und „Ecce Homo“.
„American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas“ von Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen bietet einen aufschlussreichen Überblick.
Maurice Blanchots lebenslange Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche kann aufschlussreich und wunderbar sein; „The Step Not Beyond“, eine Antwort auf Klossowskis „Nietzsche und der Teufelskreis“, die sich auf Deleuze, „The Writing of the Disaster“ und „The Infinite Conversation“ bezieht, dreht sich allesamt um seine Neuinterpretation von Nietzsches „Ewige Wiederkehr“ als existentialistisches Prinzip, in dem die Negation der Präsenz ein Weg ist der völligen Freiheit. In dem entscheidenden Aufsatz „On Nietzsche’s Side“ von 1945 interpretiert Blanchot Karl Jaspers‘ bahnbrechende These über Nietzsche neu; Danach hinterfragen seine Werke Nietzsches Themen wie den Willen zur Macht, die Natur der Zeit, ekstatische Vision und das dionysische Prinzip, den Tod Gottes als Symbol und Metapher für die Leere der Tyrannei und die Illusion von Autorität sowie die Relativität von Bedeutung und Wert .
Nikos Kazantzakis, ein Schüler des Philosophen Henri Bergson, hinterfragt in seiner Dissertation „Friedrich Nietzsche über die Philosophie des Rechts und des Staates“ die neu interpretierte Lehre von der Erbsünde als der angeborenen Verderbtheit des Menschen, die die Grundlage unseres gesamten Rechts und eine Apologetik davon ist autoritäre Macht, deren Sturz sowohl für Nietzsche als auch für Kazantzakis eine Lebensaufgabe war, ein Thema, das Kazantzakis sein ganzes Leben lang prägte und für das Verständnis seiner einzigartigen Art des Existenzialismus von zentraler Bedeutung ist. In seinen Werken geht es zum großen Teil um die Implikationen des nietzscheanischen Konflikts zwischen dem Apollinischen und dem Dionysischen als persönlichen und sozialen Kampf.
Lesen Sie auch C.G. Jungs Werk Nietzsches Zarathustra, Notizen aus den 86 Seminaren, die er in 11 Semestern an der Universität leitete und die sich mit dem großen epischen Gedicht befassten, das mich packte und wachrüttelte. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Also sprach Zarathustra als Gegenevangelium und Zarathustra als Befreiungsfigur wie Miltons Rebellenengel, sowohl für Jung als auch für mich, wird Sie wie mich zu den Werken von William Blake und seiner Rebellenfigur Los führen; Milton, Nietzsche und Blake bilden eine Übertragungslinie, die sich in Jungs Red Book prächtig entfaltet.
Zu guter Letzt muss ich den Einfluss anführen, der für mich die Bedeutung von Nietzsche vorwegnahm und später neu interpretierte: den großen Geschichtenerzähler meiner Kindheit, William S. Burroughs, dessen eigene Ideologie vom Nietzsche-Kult seines Freundes Georges Bataille geprägt war. Batailles „Über Nietzsche“ hinterfragt auf brillante Weise das Problem des Deus Absconditus, des Gottes, der uns an seine Gesetze band und uns verließ, um uns von ihnen zu befreien, in einer furchtlosen Neuinterpretation des Willens zur Macht als Willen zur Übertretung. „The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology“ stellt die geheimen Dokumente seines okkulten Kreises zusammen, Schüler Nietzsches, die versuchten, die Zivilisation neu zu erfinden und deren rituelle Übertretungen an de Sade und Jean Genet erinnern.
Der Einfluss von Bataille auf William S. Burroughs kann nicht hoch genug eingeschätzt werden. Burroughs leitete seine Anarchisten-Trilogie „The Wild Boys“, „The Cat Inside“ und „The Revised Boy Scout Manual“ aus Batailles Synthese von Nietzsche, de Sade und Freud ab, obwohl sich die zentrale Prämisse, „The Algebra of Need“, auf Marx bezieht.
Das sind die Burroughs, mit denen ich als Teenager eine Verbindung gefunden habe; der anarchistische Philosoph, für den der Wolfsmann eine Figur der Wildheit der Natur und der Wildheit von uns selbst war, dessen Roman zu diesem Thema, The Wild Boys, in der Zeit von geschrieben wurde
seine Besuche bei uns zu Hause und möglicherweise beeinflusst durch die Erzählungen meines Vaters über unsere Familiengeschichte.
Für Burroughs war Schreiben eine Beschwörung; ein Akt der Chaosmagie und des Befreiungskampfs, in dem die Tyrannei autorisierter Identitäten und Ordnungen des menschlichen Seins, der Bedeutung und des Wertes als Bruch, Störung und Delegitimierung destabilisiert und durch poetische Vision neu geschaffen werden kann.
In dieser Mission war William S. Burroughs der Nachfolger und Neuinterpret von Bataille und ihrem gemeinsamen Modell Nietzsche, als rituelle Übertretung, Delegitimierung von Autorität und Machtergreifung als Befreiungskampf, poetische Vision und ekstatische Trance als Neuinterpretation und Transformation unseres unbegrenzte Möglichkeiten, Mensch zu werden.
Burroughs glaubte auch, dass er der buchstäbliche Nachfolger Nietzsches sei, als besessener Avatar eines chthonischen Unterweltgottes, einer Schattenfigur in jungianischen Begriffen, die seine tierische Natur und seine unentwickelten Wünsche als ein Tier mit einer Tierseele, unbesiegbar und frei, darstellt Die Kröte Nietzsche fürchtete, er müsse schlucken und Burroughs‘ Kindermädchen habe ihn als Kind verflucht. Ein mächtiger Schutzgeist und ein jenseitiger Führer, der angeboten werden muss, ebenso wie ich, als ich gemeinsam die Zeile rezitierte, mit der Burrough seine bizarren Versionen von Grimms Märchen oft beendete, eine Zeile, die Shakespeare in „Der Sturm für Prospero“ geschrieben hat und der von Caliban sagt; „Dieses Ding der Dunkelheit erkenne ich als meins an.“
So kehrt der Kreis der Bedeutung zurück, um seinen eigenen Schwanz zu verschlucken wie ein Ouroboros oder eine unendliche Mobius-Schleife in der Umarmung unserer Dunkelheit als der Wildheit der Natur und der Wildheit von uns selbst, von Wahrheiten, die der Natur immanent und in unserem Fleisch geschrieben sind, und von der Wir müssen für den Schrecken unseres Nichts ein Gleichgewicht in der Freude der völligen Freiheit in einem Universum ohne auferlegte Bedeutung finden, in dem das einzige Wesen, die einzige Bedeutung und der Wert, die existieren, diejenigen sind, die wir für uns selbst erschaffen, auch wenn wir sie denen entreißen müssen, die sie haben würde uns versklaven.
History as authorized identity has always been key to the idea of nation and the power of the state. Today we celebrate a unique holiday, a contested ideological ground of revolutionary struggle against divisions of exclusionary otherness which are designed to create a disparity of wealth and power by those who would enslave us, a holiday which forces decision and sets each of us in an arena of competing and mutually exclusive narratives of American identity.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, racism and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are embedded in our triumphalist narratives of the European Conquest of the Americas celebrated as a national holiday as Columbus Day. The same events are mourned as a national shame and origin of historical legacies of genocide and the theft of a continent as Indigenous People’s Day. We live now in both nations simultaneously, our two souls riven asunder by history and locked in a titanic struggle across generations and centuries as epigenetic trauma.
We dwell in two realms which are discontiguous, defined by power asymmetries and the echoes of tragedies and atavisms of instinct which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
Monet once said, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world. One looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.” He meant this literally, as metaphysics, and his art was an attempt to demonstrate the processes by which consciousness creates reality, but his primary insight applies equally to the narrative function of identity.
The great struggle for ownership of ourselves between autonomous individuals and the ideas of other people as authorized identities imposed by state force and control is driven by three principles; each of us must reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through other humans.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to other people. The question we must ask of any such story is simple; whose story is this?
As written for National Geographic; By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY; “Today is a federal holiday in the U.S., but what are we celebrating?
The first national Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors “America’s first inhabitants and the Tribal Nations that continue to thrive today,” President Joe Biden said, highlighting the resilience of native people and recommitting to honor the government’s treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.
Biden also issued a Columbus Day proclamation acknowledging the contributions of Italian Americans as well as “the painful history of wrongs and atrocities” that resulted from European exploration.”
The dissonance in the two proclamations is hard to fathom. In recent years there’s been a pivot away from recognizing Columbus Day and toward Indigenous Peoples’ Day (pictured above, an early celebration in 1992 in Berkeley, California). In the move, the origins of Columbus Day at times have been lost. Erin Blakemore writes about how the day came to be:
“In 1890 anti-Italian sentiment boiled over in New Orleans after police chief David Hennessy, reputed for his arrests of Italian Americans, was murdered. In the aftermath, more than a hundred Sicilian Americans were arrested. When nine were tried and acquitted in March 1891, a furious mob rioted and broke into the city prison, where they beat, shot, and hanged at least 11 Italian American prisoners.
None of the rioters who lynched the Italian Americans were prosecuted. It remains one of the largest mass lynchings in the nation’s history,” Blakemore writes.
This soured U.S. diplomatic relations with Italy. In an attempt to appease Italy and acknowledge the contributions of Italian Americans on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival, President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 proclaimed a nationwide celebration of “Discovery Day,” recognizing Columbus as “the pioneer of progress and enlightenment.” Eventually, the nations mended their relationship and the U.S. paid $25,000 in reparations. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated it a national holiday.
For many, especially Indigenous people, the Columbus Day holiday is offensive—a celebration of invasion, theft, brutality, and colonization. The arrival celebrated by some as a day of triumphant discovery was the beginning of an incursion onto their homeland.
Columbus and his crew enabled and perpetrated the kidnapping, enslavement, forced assimilation, rape, and sexual abuse of Native people, including children. The Native American population shrank by about half after European contact.
Today, 21 states and many cities celebrate Columbus Day. Others, including Columbus, Ohio—the largest city named for the explorer—have shifted to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It is now a paid state holiday in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon (which celebrates both Columbus Day and Native American Day), South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
“We must never forget the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country,” Biden said in his proclamation. “
As I wrote in my post of November 6 2023, Native American Heritage Month: A Reading List; Freud defined civilization when he wrote; “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” The idea of civilization as the degree to which we have abandoned the social use of force and a measure of a society’s equality, diversity, and inclusion, expressed by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek as “infinite diversity in infinite combination”, is central to the American experiment toward creating a true free society of equals as democracy.
The consequences of failure to act as each other’s guarantors of our universal human rights can be seen now in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the terror and tyranny of Israeli imperial dominion and Occupation of her neighbors, an echo and reflection of the European Conquest of the Americas along with many other conflicts of faith and ethnicity weaponized in service to power throughout history and the world, wherein colonial powers conquer, enslave, and erase in genocidal terror indigenous peoples, and the heroic Resistance of all those who refuse to be subjugated, assimilated, commodified, falsified, and ultimately become nothing, silenced and erased like the lost languages of stolen histories.
Both on national and personal levels we ourselves may be measured by our embrace of otherness and our solidarity in resistance to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, to divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
So also are we forged by how we bring a reckoning for the historical legacies and epigenetic multigenerational trauma and harm of inequalities and injustices which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail, especially those of colonialism and imperialism, racism and patriarchy, and the systems and structures of oppression which still persist.
But we are also shaped by our seizures of power and the limits of our vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization; how to be human together and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Native American History
500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians, Josephy
The Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, American West, Dee Brown
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer
Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, Peter Nabokov (editor)
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King
Native American Mythology, Hartley Burr Alexander
Pocahontas, Paula Gunn Allen
This Land is Their Land, David J. Silverman
The Cherokee Nation; a history, Robert J. Conley
One Vast Winter Count, The Indian World of George Washington, Colin Calloway
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynne
The Comanche Empire, Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power, Pekka Hamalainen
The Killing of Crazy Horse, Thomas Powers
Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, Leonard Crow Dog
Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, Richard Erdoes
The Apache Wars, Paul Andrew Hutton
The Serpent’s Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexico Pueblos, Nancy Wood
The Trickster: A Study In American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin, Karl Kerényi, C.G. Jung
Native American Literature
Secrets from the Center of the World, How We Become Human: poems 1975-2002, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: poems, Soul Talk Song Language: conversations, Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo
Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means
Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog
Black Elk Speaks
The Man Made of Words: essays, stories, passages, N. Scott Momaday
Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker
Fool’s Crow, James Welch
Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Louise Erditch
Our Stories Remember: history, culture, & values through storytelling, Joseph Bruchac
Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko
Blue Highways, William Least-Heat Moon
Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy
The Journey of Crazy Horse, John Marshall III
Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Blasphemy: new and selected stories, Sherman Alexie
Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis
The Voice of Rolling Thunder, Sidian Morning Star Jones
Spirit and Reason: the Vine Deloria, Jr Reader
Aurum, Santee Frazier
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2023, History, Identity, Power: On Native American Heritage Day, Falsification, and the Echoes of the Conquest In Our Lives; The Gordian Knot of history, memory, and identity as a function of narrative has always been a ground of struggle between autonomy and authority, between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, in which power silences and erases the voices of those it wishes to enslave and uses sophisticated techniques of disinformation and propaganda to falsify the identities of those it claims to represent as well as those it disavows.
The torturer and his prisoner are both victims of authority, and the instruments of unequal power and divisions of exclusionary otherness with which it sets them against each other in subjugation to an elite hegemony and dominion.
It only gets worse from there; unless it begins to get better.
Our story, of America and of humankind, is a lamentation, a howl of loneliness and despair, of unutterable pain, disconnectedness, horror; but also of survival of those horrors, and the roar of defiance against fathoms of darkness and unanswerable force, of the triumph of the unconquerable will to become.
Who resists becomes Unconquered and free.
This is the forge of the spirit, this place beyond fear of death or hope of victory, and those who live here are transformed and liberated by our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves as autonomous and self-created individuals.
Each of us who refuses to submit to authority and its laws which serve power becomes a living Autonomous Zone.
And this is why we will make a better future than we have the past; because tyrannies of force and control have no power over us unless we consent to give it to them. Each of us who in resistance is beyond compulsion opens the door to limitless unknowns and possibilities of becoming human, and this no authoritarian regime can survive. For authority must colonize, assimilate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, and if it cannot it has failed.
This is the great secret of power; its emptiness. Power requires complicity, for it is stolen from those it subjugates and enslaves.
As to Native American Heritage Day, let us reclaim our stories and our ownership of identity. Thanksgiving is one notable example of lies and illusions designed to serve state power and create a national identity of imperialism; as written in Time by Olivia Waxman, “early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son”.
Such stories are numberless as the stars in the heavens; time to reclaim the truth behind the illusions, and free ourselves from the grip of authorized histories and identities.
I have often written that we in the sacred pursuit of truth, including those truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature in the discovery and creation of our uniqueness and of truths made for us by others against which we emerge in struggle, often against vast historical and systemic forces and inequalities, confer twin responsibilities and rights upon us all which are both seizures of power and duties of care for others as guarantors of each others universal human rights and our inherent freedom to create ourselves and how we choose to be human together as we ourselves decide to construct human being, meaning, and value; remembrance and reckoning.
For only this offers escape from the Wilderness of Mirrors; lies and illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, falsification, dehumanization, and theft of the soul whereby those who would enslave us enact our subjugation.
So for the legacies of our history from which we must emerge; the truths we must keep and those we must escape in liberation struggle, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As written by Kisha James, The Lilly, in Popular Resistance, in an article entitled My Grandfather Founded the National Day of Mourning; “ I’m Carrying On His Legacy.
Every Year, I March To Tell The True History Of The European Conquest Of The United States.
On Thursday, millions of families across the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving without giving much thought to the truth behind the heavily mythologized and sanitized story taught in schools and promulgated by institutions. According to this myth, 400 years ago, the Pilgrims were warmly welcomed by the “Indians,” and the two groups came together in friendship to break bread. The “Indians” taught the Pilgrims how to live in the “New World,” setting the stage for the eventual establishment of a great land of liberty and opportunity.
In the usual narrative, no further mention is made of the Native people, as if they all faded away. By sanitizing the English invasion of Wampanoag homelands, the Thanksgiving myth blatantly disregards the true history of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and the centuries of violence and oppression that Indigenous peoples have endured as a result of the colonization of the Americas.
I know the Thanksgiving myth well. For my entire life — 22 years — I have gathered annually with hundreds of other Native Americans and supporters in Plymouth, Mass., on the fourth Thursday in November. We gather and march to challenge this myth, to tell the true history of the European conquest of the United States, to speak about the devastating and continuous impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples. We gather to declare Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans.
The protest was founded in 1970 by my grandfather, Wamsutta Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).
His story of the founding of the National Day of Mourning goes like this: In 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited my grandfather to give a speech at a banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. However, when state officials saw an advance copy of his speech, they refused to allow him to give it, labeling it as too “inflammatory.” My grandfather had revealed in his speech the truth about the Pilgrims and their treatment of the Wampanoag, the often-unnamed “Indians” in the Thanksgiving myth.
He described how the English even before 1620 had brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying” — nearly decimating our people — and how they took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe.
The meal Thanksgiving dinner is modeled after is misremembered, too. Although there may have been a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, it was not a “thanksgiving”; and the Wampanoag people certainly weren’t invited. Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” has its origins in 1637, when White settlers massacred hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.
Within 50-odd years of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, the Wampanoag and many other tribes had been nearly wiped out because of warfare and disease, and had been dispossessed of most of their ancestral lands. Those who resisted were killed and their families enslaved.
State officials offered to rewrite my grandfather’s speech to ensure that it presented a more sanitized version of history, but he refused to have words put into his mouth and was disinvited from the banquet. His suppressed speech was printed in newspapers across the country.
But that wasn’t enough: My grandfather and other organizers decided that something had to be done in Plymouth to ensure that the truth about the Pilgrims would be loud and clear.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1970, Wamsutta Frank James, along with other Native activists and allies, gathered on a hill above Plymouth Rock to speak about the true history of Thanksgiving, the violent history of the European settlement of the United States, the lasting impacts of colonization, and the social and political issues faced by Indigenous peoples.
They declared it a National Day of Mourning for the millions of Indigenous peoples killed as a result of European colonization. United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the organization that my grandfather founded and led for decades, has continued for more than 50 years to organize National Day of Mourning and challenge the mainstream Thanksgiving narrative, as well as highlight the modern-day struggles faced by Indigenous peoples.
My grandfather was heroic, and I am proud to be his granddaughter and help lead UAINE as we continue our work. But I also have noticed over the years, and especially while going through old newspaper clippings, that for decades the media often focused solely on the men as spokespeople and organizers of National Day of Mourning.
Women from the Boston Indian Council and other organizations played a key organizing role from 1970 on. My grandmother Priscilla helped write my grandfather’s 1970 speech. A Native activist, Judy Mendes, was attacked by police dogs in 1972 for wearing an upside-down American flag.
My mother, Mahtowin Munro, has been a major contributor to the National Day of Mourning and a tireless advocate for Indigenous rights. She and my late father, Moonanum James, became the co-leaders of UAINE in 1994. My twin brother and I learned from a young age how to patiently explain to non-Native peers and adults why we did not celebrate the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. We are not against giving thanks or family gatherings, I’d tell my classmates; in fact, we are taught to give thanks every day. But we will not give thanks for the invasion of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, nor for the ongoing colonialism and genocide that our communities continue to face.
Now, I am the co-organizer of the National Day of Mourning along with my mother. I feel a great sense of pride in my family’s role in the Indigenous rights movement and in sharing the truth about Thanksgiving, and I look forward to continuing to raise awareness about contemporary front-line Indigenous issues such as climate justice, the preservation and expansion of tribal sovereignty, and the ongoing demand for the return of our ancestral lands.
In recent years, my mother and I have worked to ensure that women’s voices, as well as those of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, are amplified at the National Day of Mourning. When I look at the Line 3 struggle or at the Indigenous people who were on the streets in Glasgow demanding climate justice, I see Indigenous people of all ages, and especially women and Two-Spirit leaders, as part of a continuum of resistance leading into the future.
Women have long been at the center of Indigenous activism, and are respected and revered within many traditional Indigenous cultures as leaders and culture-bearers — even if they were silenced by settlers. That’s why it’s crucial for our voices to be amplified within modern-day movements, especially because settler-colonial violence continues to disproportionately impact women, as evidenced by the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in the United States and Canada.
On this National Day of Mourning, I am honored to walk not only in the footsteps of my grandfather, but also in the footsteps of all the Indigenous women who have led the way for my generation.
We will not stop telling the truth about the Thanksgiving story and what happened to our ancestors.”
Here is the speech that turned the tide of history for lies in the service of white power to truth which offers equality, diversity, inclusion, remembrance and possibly hope for a Reckoning:
“THE SUPPRESSED SPEECH OF WAMSUTTA (FRANK B.) JAMES, WAMPANOAG
To have been delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1970
ABOUT THE DOCUMENT: Three hundred fifty years after the Pilgrims began their invasion of the land of the Wampanoag, their “American” descendants planned an anniversary celebration. Still clinging to the white schoolbook myth of friendly relations between their forefathers and the Wampanoag, the anniversary planners thought it would be nice to have an Indian make an appreciative and complimentary speech at their state dinner. Frank James was asked to speak at the celebration. He accepted. The planners, however, asked to see his speech in advance of the occasion, and it turned out that Frank James’ views — based on history rather than mythology — were not what the Pilgrims’ descendants wanted to hear. Frank James refused to deliver a speech written by a public relations person. Frank James did not speak at the anniversary celebration. If he had spoken, this is what he would have said:
I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (“You must succeed – your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!”). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first – but we are termed “good citizens.” Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.
It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you – celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.
Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.
Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.
What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years?
History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises – and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other “witch.”
And so down through the years there is record after record of Indian lands taken and, in token, reservations set up for him upon which to live. The Indian, having been stripped of his power, could only stand by and watch while the white man took his land and used it for his personal gain. This the Indian could not understand; for to him, land was survival, to farm, to hunt, to be enjoyed. It was not to be abused. We see incident after incident, where the white man sought to tame the “savage” and convert him to the Christian ways of life. The early Pilgrim settlers led the Indian to believe that if he did not behave, they would dig up the ground and unleash the great epidemic again.
The white man used the Indian’s nautical skills and abilities. They let him be only a seaman — but never a captain. Time and time again, in the white man’s society, we Indians have been termed “low man on the totem pole.”
Has the Wampanoag really disappeared? There is still an aura of mystery. We know there was an epidemic that took many Indian lives – some Wampanoags moved west and joined the Cherokee and Cheyenne. They were forced to move. Some even went north to Canada! Many Wampanoag put aside their Indian heritage and accepted the white man’s way for their own survival. There are some Wampanoag who do not wish it known they are Indian for social or economic reasons.
What happened to those Wampanoags who chose to remain and live among the early settlers? What kind of existence did they live as “civilized” people? True, living was not as complex as life today, but they dealt with the confusion and the change. Honesty, trust, concern, pride, and politics wove themselves in and out of their [the Wampanoags’] daily living. Hence, he was termed crafty, cunning, rapacious, and dirty.
History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal. A history that was written by an organized, disciplined people, to expose us as an unorganized and undisciplined entity. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it. Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.
The white man in the presence of the Indian is still mystified by his uncanny ability to make him feel uncomfortable. This may be the image the white man has created of the Indian; his “savageness” has boomeranged and isn’t a mystery; it is fear; fear of the Indian’s temperament!
High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We the descendants of this great Sachem have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent. Today, I and many of my people are choosing to face the truth. We ARE Indians!
Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently.
Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting We’re standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.
We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.
You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.
There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.
And finally, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “if we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell it about anyone else” here follows my interrogation of my own Native American ancestry; November 2 2023, Native American Heritage Month and the Hidden Costs of Unequal Power in the Falsification and Erasure of History as Authorized Identities: Day of the Dead Part Two, Case of the Phantom Ancestor
In contemplation of the echoes of our past as multigenerational history and of our ancestors as ghosts who possess us, literally as our DNA and metaphorically as family stories, I find intriguing the effects of falsified and erased history on self-construal and the creation of identity.
We bear the shape of our stories as a prochronism, a history expressed in out form of how we have made choices in adaptation to change across vast epochs of time, under imposed conditions of struggle.
How if intrusive forces impose conditions of struggle which interfere with this process as assimilation, silence and erasure, or internalized oppression?
Here I have a ready example in the case of a phantom Native American ancestor substituted for an erased African one as internalized oppression under conditions of survival and resistance to slavery.
November is Native American Heritage Month, a subject shaped by vast historical forces of conquest and resistance and the ambiguous and often violent relationships between indigenous peoples and European empires as a ground of struggle which authorizes identity, here I shall begin the questioning of my own historical identity as an example.
As Virginia Woolf teaches us; “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2021, The Search for Our Ancestors and a Useful Past: Family Histories as Narrative Constructions of Identity; One of the great riddles of history is untangling the knots of meaning, often shaped by erasures, silences, lies, and misdirections, which arise from the motives of our sources.
Today is my sister Erin’s birthday; I sent her a greeting which referenced some of the Defining Moments of her personal history as I remember them; “I remember our family’s discovery when you were in seventh grade that you were writing poems and stories in some of Tolkien’s invented languages, had puzzled out his sources and taught yourself a working knowledge of several ancient languages in order to write in them (Old Norse, Old Welsh, Gothic, and Old English), when you gave the Valedictorian Address for the International College at UC Santa Cruz as a graduate in Soviet Foreign Policy and Russian Language. and then became Pushkin Scholar at a Soviet University in Moscow, when Rolling Stone called your reporting on the Fall of the Soviet Union the best political writing in America, and when we celebrated your six hundredth publication. I have always been glad that in writing and the world of literature you have found your bliss.”
Among the messages which followed Erin posted a photograph which symbolizes her search for belonging, membership, and connection through the family history of our ancestors, a typically American quest for meaning as many of us share a trauma of historical abandonment and displacement, and pathologies of identity falsification and disconnectedness from relationships with families and communities, anchorages which in traditional societies nurture wellness and growth. These maladaptive disruptions and obfuscations often result from intentional breaks with the past as liberation on the part of new immigrants who wish to create themselves in no image but their own; but often they are legacies of denial, silencing, and erasure by authority as well.
Our family history claimed Cherokee as the identity of an ancestor who we recently discovered was not a Native American but African, and probably a slave of the Cherokee, the descendants of which the tribe refuses to recognize as tribal members. As the only nonwhite General in the Confederate Army was a Cherokee, this erasure of disturbing history and inconvenient truths is unsurprising; and authorized lies can become truths when there are no counternarratives.
It is also possible that this ancestor was among the Haitian professional revolutionary soldiers whom an ancestor of mine fought alongside in the War of 1812; an origin which would explain the family faith of my father being Voodoo.
And an entirely different ancestor of mine became Shawnee by marriage during the American Revolution, this one historically authenticated by the Shawnee tribe though no less complex than my phantom ancestor.
The truths with which authority is uncomfortable are the ones which are crucial to seizures of power and liberation, and it is to the empty spaces in our narratives of identity, the voices of the silenced and the erased, and to stories which bear the scars of rewritten history, to which we must listen most closely.
The Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Mock Authority, Expose Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Erin has claimed Native American Cherokee as her racial and historical identity since childhood, enthralled with the story of an Indian great grandmother, studied traditional drumming and made pilgrimages to pow wows, learned to the point of obsession what vestiges of Cherokee language and culture she could find, and as an adult went to the tribal archives in search of our ancestor.
There she hit a wall of silence; no records of such a tribal member exist. Worse, no living speakers of Sa La Gi could be found; when asked where the native language speakers were, the curator of the tribal historical archive pointed to an old vinyl record which held the voices of the last known bearers of an extinct language. All was dust, lost on the Trail of Tears.
No crime against humanity can be more terrible than the erasure of an entire people and civilization, as the United States of America perpetrated against many indigenous peoples both on our continent and throughout the world as imperial conquest and colonial dominion. Like slavery with which it is interdependent and parallel, colonial imperialism is a central legacy of our history for which we have yet to bring a Reckoning.
Like many tribes and peoples, the Cherokee had been eaten by our systems of unequal power as human sacrifices, and had no truths or songs of becoming human to offer. Here was an unanswerable tragedy of loss of meaning and belonging, which finds echo in our modern pathology of disconnectedness.
Or was deliberate obfuscation; what didn’t they want known?
Like many Americans, Erin pursued our elusive history and ambiguous identity for decades through genealogical research and recently the Pandora’s Box of DNA testing, where she struck gold; her test revealed no discoverable Indian ancestry, but instead an intriguing African heritage. Near her fifth decade of life, suddenly she was no longer Native American and Cherokee, a discovery which must have been a life disruptive event, but one balanced with the gift of an unlooked-for membership and belonging.
More importantly as regards race and other constructions of identity, who decides? And what happens if those you claim do not in turn claim you?
Of Non-European DNA; 1.2% sub-Saharan Africa, including: .9% Ghana / Liberia / Ivory Coast / Sierra Leone and .3% Senegambian and Guinean. There is also an Islamic Diaspora component; .7% North Africa, including: .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa, and .5% Central and South Asia including: .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka. These probably represent two different lines of descent, occurring at between five and eight generations of separation respectively.
Who were these mysterious and wonderful ancestors, and where was the cherished Native American heritage? Like much of nature, DNA is tricky; each generation is a total randomization of information potential, so you can inherit traits from ancestors anywhere in your history back to the dawn of humankind, in virtually any proportion of traits from any combination thereof.
On average, you will have a quarter from each grandparent at two generations of separation, and if grandmother only passes on 20%, grandfather must pass on 30%. Sometimes gene sequences are not passed on, so its possible for a known ancestor to be unconfirmable by a DNA test, and for siblings to have differences. I look like our mother, of Austrian family with hazel eyes though sadly I did not inherit her glorious red hair; my sister looks like our father whose black hair fell in tight wringlets around his shoulders.
At seven generations distance you will probably inherit less than one percent from each of the 128 ancestors in that generation, or be undetectable; the percentages are 12.5 for great grandparents at the third generation from you, 6.25 at the fourth, 3.12 at the fifth, 1.56 at the sixth, and .78 at the seventh.
DNA tests from cousins can be used with a family tree to triangulate and identify which DNA components came from which ancestors; a female cousin from one of my father’s two brothers tests as 70% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 19% Ireland and Scotland, 6% Sweden, and 5% Norway. A male cousin from my father’s second brother tests as 1% Benin and Togo and 1% Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples, an approximate match with my sister’s Sub Saharan Africa descent, the remainder being 47% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 32% Norway, 11% Ireland & Scotland, and 4% Sweden. My sister’s European DNA tests as 44.7% French & German, and why these are scientifically identical boggles the imagination, 24.8% British & Irish, 19.5% broadly northwestern European, .2% Scandinavian, and 5.8% southern European, which includes 3.1% Italian and 1.1% Spanish and Portuguese.
Illustrative of the vagaries of inheritance are the differing proportions among three first cousins, two of whom inherit nothing from a paternal grandmother shared by all three, whose family came from Genoa Italy after the Napoleonic Wars. They were still living in an enormous stilt house in Bayou La Teche built from their ship, guarded by ancient cannon, when my mother visited them in 1962.
But the best way to discover our origins is through family history, which can be consistent over great epochs of time. So we come to the origin story of the photograph and of my family in America, well documented as Kentucky and Revolutionary War history whose dates can be confirmed precisely by public records, of how a mixed and diverse community of Revolutionary War survivors came to be living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
A direct patrilineal ancestor of mine, Henry, had been captured along with much of his family in the June 21 1780 British assault on Ruddle’s Fort during Bird’s Invasion of Kentucky. One hundred fifty British Regulars of the 8th and 47th Regiments, Detroit Militia, and six cannon of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with one thousand or more warriors from the Shawnee, Huron, Lenape, and other tribal allies of Britain, compelled the surrender of the fort by cannon fire and a guarantee of status as British prisoners of war offered by Bird, who when the gates were opened broke his word and loosed the native troops to sack the fort and take slaves.
Over two hundred pioneers were killed in the attack; the remains of twenty of them were later put in iron caskets specially made in Philadelphia and sealed in a cave by a descendant of one of my family’s survivors who had moved back near the site of Ruddle’s Fort, where they remain today. The inscription on the stone archway on a cliff overlooking the Licking River reads, “Please do not disturb the rest of the sleeping dead, A.D. 1845”. I have often wondered what was so terrifying about ones own family that they needed to be entombed in iron and sealed in a cave, and why they are called “the sleeping dead’.
Near the site of the burial chamber was The Cedars, a stone home rebuilt in 1825 at a cost of $40,000 by Charles Lair, a Ruddles Fort descendant using one of the many variants of our family name. The Cedars burned in 1930; it had fifteen rooms including six bedrooms and two kitchens, a drawing room with a carved mantel, dining room, library, and a hall with a staircase.
Henry and his brothers George Jr and Peter were listed among the 49 men of the Ruddle’s Fort garrison, and many had their families with them. Survivors were marched with those of other raided forts, four hundred seventy in all, to the heartland of the Shawnee nation in Ohio and to villages of their captors along the way, though Bird still had 300 prisoners with him when he reached his base at Fort Detroit, six hundred miles from Kentucky; some were then sent another 800 miles to Montreal. Britain did not release its prisoners until fifteen years after the war, and many never found their families again.
Henry was held as a slave and/or prisoner of war until he married into the tribe four years later, making him fully Shawnee under tribal law though he was by modern constructions of race an ethnic European. His story is interwoven with that of his childhood friend and neighbor Daniel Boone, and he was among those with whom Boone discovered a route through the Cumberland Gap and explored Kentucky. I like to imagine Henry as the hero in the film Last of the Mohicans, a fictionalization of the July 14 1776 abduction and subsequent rescue of Boone’s daughter Jemima and two daughters of Colonel Richard Callaway, Elizabeth and Frances, from Chief Hanging Maw of the Overhill Cherokee, leading a mixed band of Cherokee and Shawnee.
Henry joined George Washington’s army, possibly during the retreat from the Battle of Long Island in the fall of 1776, fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton that December, at Brandywine on September 11, 1777, and in the victory at the Second Battle of Saratoga on October 7 1777 which nearly ended the war and brought help from France.
Among the family members at Ruddle’s Fort were Henry’s two brothers. Peter, who was killed in action, his wife Mary who was captured with their two daughters, of whom Katarina was rescued in 1786 and another is mentioned as married and living in Sandwich Canada in an open letter written by Mary published in the Kentucky Gazette on April 7 1822 to their third child Peter, who vanished after the battle and whose fate is unknown. It reads in part; ”I was taken at Fort Licking commanded by Captain Ruddle, and was brought into upper Canada near Amherstburgh (Fort Malden) where I now live having been 16 years among the Indians. Your eldest sister is now living in Sandwich, but the youngest I could never hear of. Now, my dear son, I would be very glad to see you once more before I die, which I do not think will be long, as I am in a very bad state of health, and have been this great while. I am married to Mr Jacob Miracle (fellow captive from Ruddle’s Fort Jacob Markle) for whom you can enquire.” These are the words of a woman who had been coerced into marrying one of her captors by torture and had a son by him whom she raised with her youngest daughter by a husband who died defending her and their children from capture, two of whom had vanished in the cauldron of war and whose fates she never learned, though her youngest daughter was safe with George Jr’s family.
Also present were Henry’s second brother George Jr and his wife Margaret, who were captured and later freed, and their children Johnny, George III, Eva, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Johnny, 1776-1853, four years old when captured, was raised with Tecumseh and fought at his side as a British ally through the War of 1812. He married Mary Williams in 1799; they had eight children. Of Margaret we know only that she survived to marry Andrew Sinnolt in 1793. Eva, captured when 14 years old and taken to Canada, ran the gauntlet to win her freedom after six years of enslavement and two years later in 1788 married fellow Ruddles Fort survivor Casper Karsner.
Elizabeth Lale, 1752-1832, eldest of the children at 28, escaped from the Shawnee capitol city of Piqua on the Great Miami River in Ohio and survived a solo trek of hundreds of miles through the wilderness back to the colonies, then with Washington and Jefferson planned and guided General Clark with 970 soldiers in a raid which liberated many of the other prisoners of war held as slaves at the Battle of Piqua, August 8 1780. With her was Daniel Boone, who had also been held captive at Piqua by Blackfish, Great Chief of the Shawnee, between his capture at the Battle of Blue Licks on February 7, 1778 and his escape six months later in June. In 1783 Elizabeth married John Franks; they had two children.
And George III, 1773-1853, captured when seven years old, was taken in 1781 to a camp in Cape Girardeau Missouri, base of a Shawnee trade empire from which the entire Mississippi basin could be navigated, becoming the first white pioneer in the region, near the land which in 1793 was granted by Baron Carondelet to the Black Bob Band of the Hathawekela Shawnee.
Nearby was a Spanish land grant awarded to Andrew Summers for service in the Cape Girardeau Company of the Spanish-American Militia by Governor Lorimier, during a six week campaign in 1803. Andrew Summers had married Elizabeth Ruddle, daughter of Captain George Ruddle and granddaughter of Isaac Ruddle; Andrew and Elizabeth moved with their family to their land in Cape Girardeau after the War of 1812; later her father joined them, as did George Lale III and his wife Louisa Wolff. George and Louisa’s seven children were born there; the old Summers cemetery where George III is buried lies two miles SW of Jackson Missouri.
Many of my family who survived the Revolutionary War moved to Cape Girardeau where the families of George III Lale and Andrew Summers had established a community of pioneers and former slaves of Indians, apparently both African and European, and the Indians they had fought alongside and against, been captured by and intermarried with. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who had not survived the same collective trauma and shared history.
Our great grandmother Lilly Summers could claim direct patrilineal descent from the Summers family of Fairfax Virginia, descended from Sir George Summers, who commanded the Sea Venture, one of the ships which brought over the Jamestown colony in 1607, through the first settler in Alexandria, John Summers, who lived from 1687 to 1790 and had at the time of his death four generations of descendants, including some four hundred individuals. Lilly was equally descended from her mother, M.B. Croft who is listed as Dutch which probably means German, and her father John William Summers, of English lineage but designated as Cherokee in family records, which we now know is a fiction describing descent from a probable African slave of the Cherokee.
It is also possible that this ancestry came into the Summers line from fellow soldiers who served with them during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, among them free Black militia companies which pre-existed the war, including slaves promised freedom and armed by Andrew Jackson as the first Black company of the American army, a former Spanish colonial Black militia with whom Andrew Summers had served alongside against France, and Major D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Color from Haiti who were elite professional revolutionaries and soldiers who had once been part of the French army. The origin of this DNA can be no nearer than Lilly’s paternal grandmother, at five generations separation from my sister and I.
Among the documents of my genealogy and family history research I have a daguerreotype from the 1840’s of Elizabeth Lale, named for her ferocious aunt, daughter of parents from opposing sides of the Revolutionary War, Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove) of the Shawnee and Henry Lale.
Born in 1786, Elizabeth had four sisters and two brothers including my ancestor George Washington Lale, named for the future President with whom Henry crossed the Delaware, and whose battle cry at Trenton in 1776, Victory or Death, Henry adopted as our family motto on our coat of arms.
My sister and I are the fifth generation from Henry, and sixth from the original immigrant Hans George Lale who arrived with his family in Philadelphia in 1737 on the ship Samuel, sailing from Rotterdam.
As our family history and myth before coming to America is beyond the subject of my inquiry here, epigenetic trauma and harms of erasure and internalized oppression in the case of a phantom ancestor in the context of relations between indigenous and colonial peoples, I will question this in future essays.
Here are the generations of our family in America; my parents A.L. Lale and Meta (Austrian), Enoch Abraham Lale and Gertie Noce (Italian), Andrew Jackson Lale 1840-1912 and Lilly Summers, George Washington Lale 1790-1854 and Elizabeth Ross, Henry Lale 1754-1830 and White Painted Dove, and Hans George Lale 1703-1771 and Maria Rudes.
But its never as simple as that, each of us a link in a chain of being which encompasses the whole span of human history; migrations, wars, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Often our ideas of identity as nationality and ethnicity would have been incomprehensible to the people we claim membership with.
Take for example my family name; its original form is on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and Cicero wrote his great essay on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, about an ancestor of mine; Gaius Laelius, whose political and military career as an ally of Scipio Africanus spans the Iberian campaign of 210- 206 BC where he commanded the Roman fleet at New Carthage, the African campaign of 204-202 commanding the cavalry at Zama, enjoyed two terms as praetor of Sicily from 196 and was granted the province of Gaul about 190, and in 160 BC met the historian Polybius in Rome, becoming his eyewitness source for the Second Punic War in The Histories.
Here I signpost that all of us are connected with the lives of others across vast millennia of history, often in surprising ways. If I accounted my identity and ethnicity as where my ancestors immigrated to America from, I would be German and not Roman, but it would not be the whole truth. We lived in Bavaria for generations until 1586, when we were driven out as werewolves during the start of an eighty year witchburning craze; Martin Luther called us Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon. During this time we absorbed many of the pre Christian myths gathered as Grimms Fairytales as family history. And still a half truth, as this tallies only my patrilineal descent, and nothing of the half of myself from my mother, whose stories I will tell another time.
As events become more remote in time and memory, the boundary between historical and mythopoeic truth becomes ambiguous, interdependent, and co-evolutionary with shared elements which reinforce each other. This is true for narratives of national identity as well as self-construction in the personal and family spheres, in which such processes may be studied in detail. Stories are a way of doing exactly thing; both creating and questioning identity.
Often with family history we are confronted with discontiguous realms of truth as self-representation and authorized identity, always a ground of struggle as a Rashomon Gate. Such stories are true in the sense that we are their expressions as living myths, but are these narratives we live within and which in turn inhabit us also history?
Who are we, we Lales?
Native American, yes, if to a lesser degree and from different sources than we had previously imagined as an authorized identity and historical construction, Shawnee rather than Cherokee and generations more distant. Indian also in the sense of an ancestor from Mughal India over three hundred years ago, great grandmother of Henry the revolutionary, and that complex. Who this grand and mysterious ancestor and source of our Indian and Eqyptian-Levantine DNA was remains an open question, though she claimed to have once been a courtier of the Mughal princess and poet Zeb-un-Nissa which is another story. And in the place of the phantom Cherokee great grandmother, an African voice among the cacophony of multitudes sings of liberation.
In retrospect, that my father practiced Voodoo as the traditional family faith should have been an enormous clue to his ethnicity, Louisiana Creole of mixed European-African-Native American ancestry. He described himself as Cajun, which means French speaking and is a cultural and historical claim.
Of my father who is my link to this history of the founding of America as a reborn Rome with all of its shifting ideas of nationality and identity, who in this our Day of the Dead I honor among my ancestors, I say this; he was my high school English, Forensics, and Drama teacher, who taught me fencing and chess and took me to martial arts lessons from the age of nine, gave me a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade which became a counter text to the Bible for me, and was an underground theatre director who collected luminaries like William S. Burroughs who told fabulous stories after dinner and Edward Albee whose plays he directed while I sat beside them as a child and listened with rapt attention to their conversations. He it was who taught me the principle of action; “Politics is the art of fear”. For one day he was arguably the greatest swordsman in the world, having defeated all the national champions at an international reclassification tournament, and went on to become a coach of Olympic fencers. He grew up fencing and playing the treasured family Stradivarius, and his favorite story from childhood was how he got his nickname, Gator Bait; grandpa used to tie a rope around his waist and throw him in the swamp to splash about and attract alligators to shoot. One story he never told but his friend from the Korean War did, was that they had escaped a North Korean POW camp with three others, one of whom died in the breakout, and the four survivors carried the dead soldier all the way back to South Korea. His last years were spent in seclusion flyfishing on a remote wilderness mining claim in Montana.
Before immigration to America, European and originally Roman, unquestionably; along the way from Gaius Laelius and the conquest of Carthage to myself, our family once briefly ruled what is now France, Germany, Spain, and the British Isles, in the Gallic Empire of 260-274 A.D. As a university student influenced by classical studies I responded to questions about my historical identity, nationality, and ethnicity in this way; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.”
I did so once to the wife of a poetry professor, who immediately whipped out a notebook and thereupon began taking notes on our conversations; this was Anne Rice, who based her character of Mael in Queen of the Damned on me as I was in my junior year at university, over forty years ago now, before the summer of 1982 which fixed me on my life course as a hunter of fascists and a member of the Resistance.
Its always interesting to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we are transformed by their different angles of view; such changes and transforms of meaning are the primary field of study in history and literature as songs of identity and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle.
Anne Rice’s idea of Mael as the caretaker of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a comment of mine about the dead white men whose books created our culture for both good and ill during a discussion of the canon of literature; There are those who must be kept, and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not the same.
Who are we, we Americans, we humans?
Identity, history, memory, which includes changing constructions of race and nationality; these hinge on questions which often have no objective answers.
We are as we imagine ourselves to be; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and the groups and historical legacies in which we claim membership, and who claim us in return.
Family history is always a personal myth of identity, though it may also be history. We bear within us thousands of other lives, in multiple states of time across vast gulfs of history, possessed by the ghosts of our ancestors literally as DNA and metaphorically as stories; we are legion.
As with all history, as narratives of authorized identities and in struggle against them as seizures of power, autonomy and self-ownership, and self-creation, a Rashomon Gate of relative and ambiguous truths, the most important question to ask of a story is this; whose story is this?
In this liminal time of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves, of questioning human being, meaning, and value, and of its praxis as revolutionary struggle during these Mad Hatter Days, I celebrate madness as a force of redemption and liberation in its three primary forms as love, transgression, and vision.
With Renfield in Dracula we may say of ourselves; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.” Madness in literature and history has always been a metaphor of resistance and revolutionary struggle against authority and systems of unequal power, as with Lewis Carroll’s magnificent and truly strange allegories and his figure of the Rebel, the Mad Hatter.
Today I perform sacred acts of violation of normalities, reversals of authorized identities, transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden, and changing the rules of the games by which we live. This I do to free myself from the legacies of my history and disrupt my own ideas, expectations, and routines; but we must all do the same as seizures of power from authority and liberation from systemic inequalities on a national and civilizational scale as well. As Max Stirner wrote; Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.
Let us frighten the horses; let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2022, How Does My Happiness Hurt You? On Transgender Day of Visibility; The frightening of the horses; it is a phrase I use often to describe the performance of identity as a form of theatre, and public spectacle as protest and challenge against authority, force, and control. Herein I reference a quote by George Bernard Shaw’s muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who played Eliza Doolittle, with which she replied in 1910 to someone who thought the display of affection between two male actors was indecent; “”My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Here is a quote from one of George Bernard Shaw’s letters to her, which celebrates and defines love as freedom, inchoate wildness, transformation, reimagination, liberation, rapture, and exaltation; “I want my dark lady. I want my angel. I want my tempter, I want my Freia with her apples. I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality. I want my inspiration, my folly, my happiness, my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my final sanity and sanctification, my transfiguration, my purification, my light across the sea, my palm across the desert, my garden of lovely flowers, my million nameless joys, my day’s wage, my night’s dream, my darling and my star.”
To see and be seen, to hear and be heard; this is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. When we see and hear others we empower and validate their process of becoming human, and they do the same for us.
Our processes of becoming human operate by three principles; we must each reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through others. We choose our friends, partners, and sometimes our families from among those who can help us become who we wish to be, a process which occurs in tension with the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, and the boundaries of the Forbidden, and from this primary struggle to create ourselves emerges human being, meaning, and value.
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.
And as George Bernard Shaw and his muse Mrs. Patrick Campbell taught us, there is a force of liberation written in our flesh with which we can free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; that of love.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I wrote in my post of February 15, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confer authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary duties of a citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
For a brilliant interrogation of madness as a means of social control and repression of dissent I turn to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which parallels many of the themes of Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization as well as Orwell’s 1984. As I wrote in my post of October 8 2021, The Uses of Madness as Repression of Dissent and Authorization of Normality and a Consensus Model of What is Real and True; Madness as joyous transgression and seizure of power and madness as an instrument of social control, repression of dissent, the authorization of identities, enforcement of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden; Sides of a coin of power bearing Janus-like faces of tyranny and liberty, madness and sanity are a ground of struggle. Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for autonomy and the ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer a simple test by which to disambiguate madness from sanity; whose truth is this? Who defines, owns, and controls this reality?
For all who own and live their truth are sane, and all who are falsified and subjugated by authority are mad.
Who possesses and controls himself is sane; who is possessed and controlled by others is mad.
Our passions are useful servants and terrible masters. There is nothing wrong with anything you may feel, even negative emotions such as rage or despair; but you must be their master.
As I wrote in my post of June 31 2020, Paradigms of Madness as Thought Control and Class Struggle; “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.” So wrote the visionary George Orwell in the great novel which prophecies the terminus of the arc of history of the American Empire as it has unfolded since the end of World War Two, 1984.
As the final arbiters of what is real and what is not, psychiatrists are the apex predators of our society and its most privileged class; no other persons hold the power to abduct and imprison others by authority of a signature, nor to conduct treatments, research, or experiments which may be considered torture or theft of memory, identity, and the soul such as surgical or electroshock personality interventions, or confinement in isolation and in secret without right of redress.
Media moguls may shape our ideas of self and other and overwhelm the truth with propaganda and lies, politicians may fatten themselves on the miseries of others and spin illusions for the benefit of their paymasters, plutocrats and oligarchs may control their workers well being and quality of life and fund the subversion and corruption of democracy, and our police and security services may hunt and kill us with impunity to enforce the power asymmetries of elite wealth, race, and gender which divide us in the service of tyranny, patriarchy, and white supremacy so long as they have concealment and immunity of judicial and political collaborators, but only the modern priesthood of medical professionals of the mind are answerable to none but their peers and are masters of them all.
With this absolute and secret power pervasive throughout the carceral state in both our prisons and educational systems acting as a success filter and authoring force of identity and repression of dissent, our mental healthcare system reinforces the power asymmetries of the status quo. The differences between our system and those of the Nazi health courts and the psychiatric institutions of the historical Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party today are those not of kind, but of degree. Just compare them to the torture and interrogation program designed by Spokane’s own Mengele for use in Guantanamo Bay and the secret political prisons operated by our intelligence services throughout the world.
Guantanamo is important because it provides a glimpse into our future, a future in which the state can imprison people without charging them with a crime for 18 years, enact crimes against humanity while the torturers go bowling next door after work, a tyranny of force and control and a fascism of blood, faith, and soil. Here dwell monsters, and they are not behind bars.
As reported in the Spokesman Review by Thomas Clouse; “Two Spokane psychologists who devised the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that a federal judge later said constituted torture,” “James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen” whose “company was paid about $81 million by the CIA for providing and sometimes carrying out the interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, during the early days of the post 9/11 war on terror.”
“Both Mitchell and Jessen were deposed but were never forced to testify as part of a civil suit filed in 2015 in Spokane by the ACLU on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, Gul Rahman, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud.
According to court records, Rahman was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison in isolation, subjected to darkness and extreme cold water, and eventually died of hypothermia. The other two men are now free.
The U.S. government settled that civil suit in August 2017 just weeks before it was scheduled for trial in Spokane before U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush.
That suit was based on a 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that found ample evidence that Mitchell and Jessen provided the CIA with torture methods, including prolonged sleep deprivation, confinement in small, enclosed spaces and waterboarding that were used on dozens of detainees yet produced no useful intelligence.”
“Mitchell no longer lives in the Spokane area, but Jessen is believed to still reside in the area. They got their start at Fairchild Air Force base as survival trainers who formed a company to help train military personnel to resist interrogations. They reverse-engineered their training and devised a program drawn from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.”
Sometimes it is not the prisoner, but the state which is mad.
As I wrote in my post of March 8 2022, International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle; What is a woman or a man, and how are such identities constructed?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones and inner experience; this ignores social construction of identity entirely, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse, to use Freud’s delicious phrase; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drags serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
“And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
All the best people are
The Mad Hatter’s Revolution; a montage in two parts
Rewrite the Stars; song by Zendaya and Zac Efron, with montage of Alice and the Mad Hatter
Mad Hatter – A Case Study in Borderline Personality Disorder
You who are fearless, unconquered, and free, who have seized ownership of your identities and made of your lives enactments of beauty and of defiance; know that you shall never stand alone, while we who love liberty yet remain.
You are not invisible. And to all those who transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, who in the performance of themselves challenge and defy the authorization of identities including those of sex and gender, and by their representation champion the silenced and the erased as heroic figures of autonomy and liberation, I salute you.
On this second day of the Festival of Loki inclusive of Coming Out Day as Breaking the Silence, we celebrate Transgression of Authorized Identities and the Seizure of Ownership of Ourselves and Our Possibilities of Becoming Human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
Go ahead; frighten the horses.
As I wrote in my post of June 30 2019, Truths Written in our Flesh: Freedom as the Struggle for Ownership of Identity; Here is a marvelous set of nested boxes of ideas regarding identity, communication and language, history and memory, psychology and transhistoric and epigenetic trauma, politics and aesthetics, the necessity of pride and self-ownership and the art of being human.
Writing in The Paris Review of the art and meaning of David Wojnarowicz, Patrick Nation interrogates the borders of self and other in an inspired meditation on the use of pronouns, the we and I, in both essays and persons as self-referential systems.
His words become a labyrinth, an echo of values which are immanent in nature like the spirals of a seashell, truths written in our flesh awaiting our discovery, an evocation of a virtual third realm and interface between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, as two essences of perfume will create together a new and prodigal scent.
It is precisely this uniqueness and surprise, and the transitory nature of experience, which confers value on the moments of our lives and on art as a motive force and a fulcrum of our passion and our vision.
Art, like one’s persona, is not an object but an experience; not a fixed quality but an adaptive process in motion and subject to change.
Gender and sexual personae are a performance, both a struggle for ownership of identity between self and other and an event occurring in the free space of play between these bounded realms.
I myself have been lucky to have found in my childhood friend and life partner Dolly, whom I bonded with the moment my mother brought me home from the hospital after being born and put me in her arms as she uttered the magic spell “Can I keep him?”, someone to share that liminal space of imaginal and transformative power with me, with whom to explore the limitless possibilities of becoming human. We saw each other, and when this is true nothing else matters.
May all of us find the gaze of the other in which our truths are realized by the redemptive and liberating powers of love, joy in our uniqueness and the journey to become human, and hold such space for others as guarantors of each other’s humanity.
And here following are my three part series of posts regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test as a tool of discovery of one’s own identity:
June 13 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance; A friend has written a brilliant, insightful, and very emotionally charged essay on the subject of queer identity, finding ones tribe, and being ostracized by ones role models due to the fracture and balkanization of identities of sex and gender in queer culture, consequences of the imposed conditions of struggle against systems of oppression. To be a Painted Bird is a tragedy on the scale of a private Holocaust, and some of this seems to me to be a result of increasing specialization and siloing of LGBT subcultures as a negative tribalization or struggle to build community as exclusivity, and also a shocking failure of solidarity. And it is a special case of a general condition , like the ideological fracture which broke the power of the Left to oppose fascism a century ago. If those who are marginalized by normative society do not stand united, surely they will become vulnerable to silencing and erasure.
I am not a member of this community, and can not speak from within this space, nor have I studied what seem to be a highly diverse, nuanced, and complex set of authorized identities, as evidenced by the curious tribal identities offered by a cursory examination of Grinder, so am utterly clueless about how such representations and choices are negotiated. I suspect this is true for many potential allies who would stand with any human who stands alone, but may not know how to do so, or recognize when someone is in pain or needs help.
Sadly, it may be also be true for those whose awareness of desire, sexual orientation, and identities of sex and gender are emerging, and who may feel confusion, ambiguity, and dislocation not as freedom and joy but as crisis and trauma, especially those who become aware of differences and chasms of meaning between themselves and others, and must cope with isolation and disconnectedness at best and shame, unworthiness, and ostracism at worst as consequences of negotiating identities in a social context of judgement, ridicule, and massively unequal power.
The universal human struggle for autonomy here collides disastrously with authorized identities and a Patriarchal-Theocratic value system which reinforces heteronormative narratives as submission to authority, in parallel with the need for belonging and membership in the quest to find a tribe within a society riven with hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, wherein our negotiations between self and others are mediated by elite hegemonic forces of dominion, whose lies and illusions, like a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, can falsify and steal our souls.
The awakening to total freedom as a self created being can be both wonderful and terrible. How do we safeguard that freedom? What does our duty of care for each other require of us as mentors and stewards for each other’s limitless possibilities of becoming human?
So I ask all of you for guidance in this matter, for whom celebrations such as Coming Out Day and Pride Month are personal and intimate, part of your story and a celebration of survival and resilience, and not merely an aspect of Resistance in general, defiance of authority, and transgression of the Forbidden as it is for me as an agent of Chaos and a revolutionary; beyond amplifying your voices and standing in solidarity when called on for help, how can we help you champion each other?
We also have a need for another kind of work, one whose intention is to provide guidance in finding ones tribe among the full spectrum of multilayered and wonderfully diverse smorgasboard of choices available in our society now, chess pieces in a great game of human being, meaning, and value, and reveals and opens the limitless possibilities of becoming human and discovering communities of wellbeing and mutual aid which can foster such a journey of introspection for the young and curious, without authorizing a prescriptive set of identities.
Identity is not a static frame into which one must fit oneself regardless of our pluralities; we are all pluralities, we are all in processes of change and growth, and our nature, to paraphrase Freud’s delightfully wicked phrase “polymorphously perverse”, obeys but one law; anything goes.
Are we not both Harley Quinn and the Joker, Beauty and the Beast, bound together in one flesh?
Does the range of choices act as an intrinsic limit on autonomy? If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. As Guillermo del Toro wrote in Carnival Row; Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
Audubon publishes a wonderful field guide to birds, which usefully describes their glorious and beautiful differences and uniqueness’s without suggesting it is better to be a falcon than a dove; each have a niche in the system of life, as do we all. We need a version for humans; Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
This raises the question of how we discover who we want to become. If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation, I would base the process not on prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor as the great question of being remains Who Chooses, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
Our masquerade of identities of sex and gender as culture, ethnicity, and performance can be played as a game or as live action theatre as well as enacted as transformation magic or guerilla theatre as political action; here I offer you a ritual act of Chaos and Transformation which is useful in disrupting order and randomizing the masks we wear. Write down three masculine and three feminine characters you know well enough to perform, roll a six sided dice to find today’s persona, and live as that character until tomorrow, when you can become someone entirely different. And regardless of who you are today, you will have five more selves in reserve.
Such constructions of identity as performance flow from the nature of self as a development of the persona or Greek theatrical mask characters speak through; a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems in adaptation, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to create ourselves.
And what of the underlying forces of love and desire from which such structures and figures are made?
Milan Kundera, paraphrasing Plato in Phaidos, wrote; “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”. To this I would add a conditional which directs us to the function of love in the construction of identity; love also reveals us to ourselves, for we choose those we love as figures of who we wish to become.
We choose those we love and share our lives with in part because they represent potential selves and qualities we aspire to realize within ourselves, as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces. This is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. Our values are revealed in our circle of partners and friends.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I once said to Jean Genet, it is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.
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.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2021, A Sorting Hat of One’s Own: A General Theory of Identities of Sex and Gender as Processes and Functions of Personality; In my previous post in this series of June 13 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance, I posed a question of how we discover who we want to become. As a joke I imagined a field guide and called it Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
As Mary Oliver framed the question; “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In the following paragraph I speculated about what such a work might involve; If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation and identities of sex and gender, I would base the process not on any precut selection of labels or prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
How does that work? With nothing more than a change of emphasis in terms, though I’m sure diagnostic questions specific to sexual orientation and desire can be written for the purposes of finding oneself, viable partners, and communities where one belongs.
We must first define what we mean when we speak of identities of sex and gender. By gender I mean who you are; as identity a confluence of holistic and interdependent and evolving relations between all four categories of being, which include nature, thinking, feeling, and nurture, and as expression, social, cultural, and historical constructions of values and ideals of masculine and feminine beauty and gender roles as performances. By sex I mean biology including evolutionary influences, genetics, and hormones, and by sexual orientation I mean whom and what one desires, which can be influenced by both sex and gender but is determined by neither. Such identities are complex, layered, nuanced, and ambiguous, shifting and protean, as our identities of sex and gender shape each other as adaptive processes of change.
As I’ve often said, this is a primary ground of struggle, of life, growth, adaptation, and individuation, and the creation of ourselves as autonomous beings in revolution against authority and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and beauty, and idealizations of masculinity and femininity.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Let us answer the question of who we are with grandeur and the frightening of the horses; let us claim, I am a Bringer of Chaos and Transformation, I am a fulcrum of change, and like Napoleon declare I am the Revolution. And with Loki the Trickster let us say;
“I am burdened with a glorious purpose.”
If we are to map the topologies of identities of sex and gender as possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, we must consider as distinct classes the social and interpersonal sphere of action and relations or gender expression and in a limited sense sexual behavior, what one does, as opposed to sexual orientation, what one wants, which include as motivating, informing, and shaping forces authorized gender identities and role models offered us by history, society, and culture, which are arbitrary and ephemeral, and those of the intrapersonal, our processes of thinking and feeling, which arise from within us rather than being imposed from without, but which are then shaped and conditioned by role modeling and how we are treated, especially by our parents.
I say again, gender identity is an artifact of being influenced by all four levels of self.
These dyadic forces of sex and gender function interdependently to create and shape the highly relational and context-determined thing we call our selves; a dance of potentialities as feminine anima and masculine animus, and our persona or the masks we wear.
For such a mapping system and wayfinding compass, I turn first to Jung’s magisterial work Psychological Types, and to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which was developed from it. It is a precision tool, which allows us to locate ourselves and others through our constellations of traits along the infinite Moebius Loop of human possibilities of sex and gender with predictive and explanatory power in terms of our relationships in romance, friendships, and work.
By direct word substitution of descriptors in the Jungian personality quadrants, we find a useful general theory of sexual and gender identity as a function of the interfaces between the bounded realms of biological determinants including neurotransmitters and epigenetic or multigenerational historic legacies, and historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts which balances nature and nurture.
We begin at birth with sexual identity, which stands outside the system of personality but influences it, primarily through relative prenatal exposure to testosterone and estrogen in the intrapersonal sphere, which we can broadly think of as gender identity with awareness that identity is complex and nondeterminative, and dopamine and serotonin in the interpersonal sphere of gender performance. Everyone has degrees of both masculinity and femininity, just as a whole person possesses both a conscious self and an unconscious self which is of the opposite gender, our animus and anima. These anima-animus relations and processes are found at all four levels of being, of which we may or may not be aware and so have limited volitional control of or personal responsibility for, meaning that we cannot simply choose to be other than we are.
This means that any relationship is quadratic and includes our own relationship with our unconscious which is figuratively of the opposite gender from our conscious selves, our partner’s internal relations, our conscious relationship with our partner’s waking self, and our submerged unconscious relations of which we are not aware but which shape our conscious ones. Simple, no?
And we wonder why relationships can be laden with issues, when the answer is simple; relationships are complex because we are.
Jung’s primary layer of personality, mind, maps directly onto this dyadic anima-animus relation, and is a measure of masculinity or independent self construal, as Extroversion which includes dominance and assertiveness, and femininity or interdependent self construal, as Introversion or nurturance.
Masculine traits of Extroversion include Initiating, Active, Expressive, Gregarious, and Enthusiastic; the first two related to dominance and assertiveness, and the last three components of sociability.
Feminine traits of Introversion include Receiving, Contained, Intimate, Reflective, and Quiet.
This fundamental dichotomy is inborn and manifests in infants as preferences for attention, interests, and play; in boys for things and how they work as objects and motion, and in girls for human facial expressions and imaginative doll play.
Jung’s second layer of personality and the next to develop as a childhood stage of growth, energy, describes how we conceptualize the world and process information, a balance of feminine Intuitive and masculine Observant traits.
Masculine Observation involves part to whole reasoning, quantitative analysis, and how things work; logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition.
Jung’s third layer of personality, nature, describes how we make decisions and process emotions; here we have traits shaped most directly by hormonal factors, though hormones influence all three of our first layers of personality as developmental stages. Otherwise gender identity would be a function of this third layer, when it is a coevolutionary product of all four successive layers of personality. This area measures our Thinking, influenced by testosterone or masculinity, and our Feeling, influenced by estrogen or femininity.
Masculine Thinking traits influenced by testosterone include: decisive, focused, direct, logical-analytical, strategic thinkers, bold, competitive, excel at rule bound systems such as machines, math, and music.
Feminine Feeling traits influenced by estrogen include: holistic and contextual thinking, imaginative, superior at verbal skills and executive social skills like reading expressions, posture, gestures, and tone of voice; also nurturing, sympathetic, intuitive, and emotionally expressive.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of gender performance and expression or one’s strategic and tactical approach to life, relationships, and work; here we have traits shaped by acculturation and historical factors. This area measures our balance of structure versus spontaneity; our Perceiving, influenced by dopamine and corresponding to masculinity, and our Judging, influenced by serotonin and corresponding to femininity.
Masculine Perceiving or Prospecting traits influenced by dopamine include: seeking novelty, risk taking, spontaneity, curiosity, creativity, mental flexibility, optimism.
Feminine Judging traits influenced by serotonin include: calm, social, cautious, persistent, loyal, orderly, fond of rules and facts.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test gives us four categories of personality types, of four types each.
The Analyst Group contains the Architect (INTJ), Logician (INTP), Commander (ENTJ), and Debater (ENTP) types.
The Diplomat Group contains the Advocate (INFJ), Mediator (INFP), Protagonist (ENFJ), and Campaigner (ENFP) types.
The Sentinel Group contains the Logistician (ISTJ), Defender (ISFJ), Executive (ESTJ), and Consul (ESFJ) types.
The Explorer Group contains the Virtuoso (ISTP), Adventurer (ISFP), Entrepreneur (ESTP), and Entertainer (ESFP) types.
What does this look like in the context of real people? Here I will use myself as an example and case, for as written by Virginia Woolf; “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
I test as an ENFP or Campaigner; in my most primal layer of personality I am 65% Extrovert over 35% Introvert. This manifests in me as a love of risk and adventure, and a natural leadership and people-centeredness which has been useful in my professional career as a teacher and counselor. I instinctively and reflexively seek to dominate and seize power in any situation, even when consciously trying to keep myself in check as Extroversion favors competition over cooperation though my ideology construes this as a negative. My Extroversion also influences my idea of life as a game of transgression and chaos, to be played with creative freedom, improvisation, fearlessness, and a gourmet aesthetics which valorizes both the monstrous and the beautiful; you can count on me to ignore authority, change the rules of any game, delight in the violation of norms, and to play our games of human being, meaning, and value without any boundaries whatever.
I remain the boy who upon hearing the term Original Sin for the first time from a friend, said; “I’ll think of some new ones we can play, games of our very own.”
In the layer of Energy, how we direct our thoughts and passions, I am 83% Intuitive over 17% Observant, a balance toward femininity. This means that I reason holistically and infer hidden relationships and patterns as a strength, that interpretation and qualitative analysis comes more easily than quantitative or mechanical tasks, and that I think outside the box and draw outside the lines, which makes me good at solving unknowns. On a team I’m the one you want as the fire brigade handling unforeseen issues, so long as I have a good forensic investigator for failure reconstruction and analysis at my right and a staff officer to handle logistics and planning at my left. I’m a natural at intelligence and policy functions, putting puzzles together and guessing what the picture they make could mean and how to use it to achieve goals.
In the third layer of Nature, how we make decisions and process emotions, I am 92% Feeling and only 8% Thinking. This is an extreme score, statistically anomalous and my strongest personality trait; a preference for empathy and ungoverned passion. As an influence in relationships it makes me the caretaker of partnerships, and professionally I’m a natural at quickly reading people and profiling motives and intentions, sifting for truth, and assessing character.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of Tactics or one’s approach to life and work, I am 57% Prospecting and 43% Judging. This means my masculine/feminine balance in terms of gender performance and roles, the most outwardly visible part of oneself and the layer of being others interact with most often, is toward masculinity, and informs how I read to others as a system of signs.
To restate how I interpret my personality; both my intrapersonal gender identity and interpersonal gender performance as an observable external cueing system, the mask I wear in the social performance of myself, in my case controlled by my Extroversion and Prospecting traits in the first and fourth layers of personality, is masculine or animus, which makes my unconscious self, always a mirror image, feminine or anima, and comprised of the layers of personality which are internal and hidden, as reflected in my Intuitive and Feeling traits. I regard this as an achievement of integration and the work of finding balance and wholeness, though I am an extreme case as most people are around 50/50 or differ only marginally in both realms of being. Because my masculine score is extreme in the conscious areas, so my unconscious scores extremely feminine. These two pairs of traits face Janus like as sides of a whole person in dynamic balance, and together form a quadratic personality type which can take 16 forms, which reflect and organize relative masculinity and femininity as adaptive processes.
As to type compatibility and the use of the MBTI system in sifting for partners, in general opposites attract in the first and fourth layers of personality, Introverts with Extroverts and Prospectors with Judges, dyadic masculine-feminine pairs and aspects of personality revealed in gender performance, and like aligns with or has no influence in the second and third layers, which are mainly concealed from public view and correspond to the unconscious.
The surfaces of ourselves and the masks we wear in our dances with others are but images and reflections moving atop a vast and bottomless sea, within whose chasms of darkness we are all interconnected.
And none of this tells you anything about the interdependent realm of love and desire as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces which both act on us as their subject and through us as their figures and agents, though it tells us everything we need to know about what we would be like as a romantic partner, friend, colleague at work or comrade in action. A human being is a work of art shaped by such forces of our nature as well as history, like stone sculpted by the action of wind and water.
Insightful work in the influence of neurotransmitters on personality has been pioneered by Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who built chemistry.com’s matching systems from her studies. Her schema, which modernizes and maps directly onto the Jungian theory of personality as I have described, dispenses with Jung’s first two categories, the Introvert/Extrovert primary layer and the Intuitive/Observant secondary layer, and yields a simple dominant and recessive binary personality type rather than the 16 types in the Myers-Briggs scale. This is why I am inclined to incorporate Fisher’s studies of hormone and neurotransmitter biochemistry into the Jungian model of personality and use her test as a quick reference tool in addition to the MBTI rather than a replacement; the Fisher model lacks predictive power because it is flawed. Personality is a developmental process which unfolds in stages as a child becomes a person, and if you ignore this and the first two stages of growth the results become unreliable. The Fisher model can be a useful tool for matching with partners using the test and essay together, if you don’t take it too seriously, but for a tool of self discovery I turn to the Myers-Briggs test.
Her Word Type study asked people to describe themselves in an essay for Chemistry.com and found the ten most common words each type used.
Explorers, Jung’s masculine Perceivers, used adventure most often, with the other ten in descending order being; venture, spontaneous, energy, new, fun, traveling, outgoing, passion, and active.
Builders, Jung’s feminine Judges, used family most often, then honesty, caring, moral, respect, loyal, trust, values, loving, and trustworthy.
Negotiators, Jung’s feminine Feelers, used passion most often, then real, heart, kind, sensitive, reader, sweet, learn, random, and empathetic.
Directors, Jung’s masculine Thinkers, used intelligent most often, then intellectual, debate, geek, nerd, ambition, driven, politics, challenging, and real.
Here you can take the Fisher Personality Type Test; read each statement and record the answer that best applies to you. Acronyms are Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
Scale 1
1. I find unpredictable situations exhilarating.
2. I do things on the spur of the moment.
3. I get bored when I have to do the same familiar things.
4. I have a very wide range of interests.
5. I am more optimistic than most people.
6.I am more creative than most people.
7. I am always looking for new experiences.
8.I am always doing new things.
9. I am more enthusiastic than most people.
10. I am willing to take risks to do what I want to do.
11. I get restless if I have to stay home for any length of time.
12.My friends would say I am very curious.
13. I have more energy than most people.
14. On my time off, I like to be free to do whatever looks fun.
Total
Scale 2
1.I think consistent routines keep life orderly and relaxing.
2. I consider and reconsider every option thoroughly before making a plan.
3. People should behave according to established standards of proper conduct.
4. I enjoy planning way ahead.
5. In general, I think it is important to follow rules.
6. Taking care of my possessions is a high priority for me.
7. My friends and family would say I have traditional values.
8. I tend to be meticulous in my duties.
9. I tend to be cautious, but not fearful.
10. People should behave in ways that are morally correct.
11. It is important to respect authority.
12. I would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends.
13. Long established customs need to be respected and preserved.
14. I like to work in a straightforward path toward completing the task.
Total
Scale 3
1. I understand complex machines easily.
2. I enjoy competitive conversations.
3. I am intrigued by rules and patterns that govern systems.
4. I am more analytical and logical than most people.
5. I pursue intellectual topics thoroughly and regularly.
6. I am able to solve problems without letting emotion get in the way.
7. I like to figure out how things work.
8. I am tough-minded.
9. Debating is a good way to match my wits with others.
10. I have no trouble making a choice, even when several alternatives seem equally good at first.
11. When I buy a new machine (like a camera, computer, or car) I want to know all of its technical features.
12. I like to avoid the nuances and say exactly what I mean.
13. I think it is important to be direct.
14. When making a decision, I like to stick to the facts rather than be swayed by people’s feelings.
Total
Scale 4
1. I like to get to know my friends deepest needs and feelings.
2. I highly value deep emotional intimacy in my relationships.
3. Regardless of what is logical, I generally listen to my heart when making important decisions.
4. I frequently catch myself daydreaming.
5. I can change my mind easily.
6. After watching an emotional film, I often still feel moved by it several hours later.
7. I vividly imagine both wonderful and horrible things happening to me.
8. I am very sensitive to people’s feelings and needs.
9. I often find myself getting lost in my thoughts during the day.
10.I feel emotions more deeply than most people.
11. I have a vivid imagination.
12. When I wake up from a vivid dream, it takes me a few seconds to return to reality.
13. When reading, I enjoy it when a writer takes a sidetrack to say something beautiful or meaningful.
14. I am very empathetic.
Scoring the test
0 for each SD, 1 for each D, 2 points for each A and three for SA. Add each section separately.
Scale 1 measures Masculinity as Dominance, the degree to which you are butch or an Explorer based on your Perceiving traits.
Scale 2 measures Femininity as Submissiveness, Judging traits or the degree to which you align with Fisher’s Builder personality type.
Scale 3 measures Masculinity as logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition, Thinking quadrant traits or what Fisher calls the Director personality type.
Scale 4 measures Femininity as linguistic-emotional-interpersonal cognition or Feeling traits on the Myers-Briggs scale which Fisher calls the Negotiator personality type.
The two top scores are your primary and secondary traits.
For further study of the idea of gender, I refer you to the works of Judith Butler; including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Undoing Gender, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, and to those of Anne Fausto-Sterling; Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men.
The nature versus nurture debate can be explored in the oppositional works of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine, and Human Diversity: Gender, Race, Class, and Genes by Charles Murray.
In histories, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century,
by Charles King.
In biography, Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade by Gary Kates.
In fiction, we have Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joseph Cassara’s House of the Impossible Beauties, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confession of the Fox, and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, by T. Fleischmann.
As I wrote in my post of July 18 2021, Of Love and Desire as Forces of Autonomy and Liberation; In my previous journal entry of yesterday I provided a brief outline of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test as a tool of discovery and description of the processes of masculinity and femininity as interdependent aspects of a whole personality, in the context of gender identity and performance.
So we come to the final category of our interest here, sexual orientation. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise; fear weaponized in service to power, fear and of otherness but also of nature and ourselves. Here is the true origin of evil as the social use of force and violence in self-hatred.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which as with the figure of Alberich the dwarf require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
We celebrate Coming Out Day as a national holiday in America, in honor of a courageous marginalized community and in solidarity of liberation struggle with all those who perform their true and best selves on the stage of the world and our history, as exemplars of seizure of power from authorized identities including those of sex and gender and of the grandeur of self ownership and the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
I am not a member of this queer LGBT community, nor do I speak for them or with the voice of lived experience, though I am formed in part by three personal relationships with those who did so, William S. Burroughs who taught me magic and storytelling as a child, Susan Sontag who during my early university days taught me how to see beauty in art and life, and Jean Genet who set me on my life’s path by swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance during the second of my numberless Last Stands in Beirut 1982 as we were about to be burned alive by the Israeli Army and refused to surrender.
But I can speak regarding the broader meaning of this holiday, Breaking the Silence.
The image of Silenced Loki, a totemic ritual statue called the Snaptun Stone which depicts the Trickster god and titan (in Old Norse, a class of beings literally termed “Devourer” and commonly translated as Giants) with his mouth sewn shut as a ritual sacrifice to silence his power to reorder the universe and change, subvert, manipulate, or evade its laws, has become part of our popular culture through the influence of Marvel comics and films, and a subject of discussion.
What does it mean? Why would a god whose power is imprisoned in his flesh and useless be an object of worship? Why has this part of his myth, so near a parallel to that of Prometheus, become central to Viking culture and assimilated into our own at this moment of history?
Silence equals Death, as the AIDS activist movement of decades ago constructed Elie Weisel’s Silence is Complicity. As he teaches us in his Nobel Prize Speech; “I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember: he asked his father: “Can this be true?” This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?
And now the boy is turning to me: “Tell me,” he asks. “What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?”
And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
Primarily I see this in terms of Loki’s role as what Foucault called a truthteller, parrhesia in classical terms, like the Jester of King Lear, as in the Lokasenna when he satirizes and mocks the gods. I call this the four primary duties of a citizen in a free society of equals; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. For there is no just authority, and our mission as Bringers of Chaos is to subvert and delegitimize tyrants, be they gods or men who would enslave us.
Secondarily this relates to Loki’s role as a source of poetic vision and inspiration, here in the context of his grand trick, the Wager of Loki, which resulted in the forging of Mjolnir as embodied lightning and other signature powers of the gods, the price of which was having his mouth sewn shut to seal his power, but of course he like Ulysses outwits the gods and escapes to reclaim his power of true speaking. This myth makes him a patron of smiths and creative arts, not a maker, but a muse; also a patron of truth tellers. And it teaches us that top give a thing form as for example by speaking or writing it is to create it, make it live, and become real.
The image of Silenced Loki, terrible though it may be, refers to his willing sacrifice to forge the truths of others, to abandon power over others in favor of equality and the empowerment of others, and to guide others seizure of power as liberation. As such it was probably used by smiths to avert the dangers of their profession, a lightning rod and totemic patron.
Magic, like revolutionary struggle, always has a cost; among the first things one will need is something to bear that cost for us. Such is the purpose of Silenced Loki.
Loki is a patron of outlaws, especially those of sex and gender, who finds reflection in Virginia Woolf’s gender changing immortal time traveler Orlando, of revolutionaries and anarchists in his guise as Milton’s rebel angel in Paradise Lost, the primary text of the iconic Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, of gamblers, chance, and luck as a figure of Fortune, of lost causes and forlorn hopes and the unknown heroes who fight for them, of all those who survive not by force but by wit and guile and changing the rules of play, and of us all as the source of our idea of the devil and his fairytale version as Rumpelstiltskin. What god or devil was ever more terrible than the Maker of Deals?
Above all else, Loki is a patron of outcasts and exiles, the abandoned and the vilified, a champion and liberator who places his life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, and of their vengeance and revolutionary struggle. In this aspect he resembles Frankenstein’s monster, a child abandoned because he is imperfect, bearer of a sacred wound which opens him to the pain of others, an innocent child trapped in the same flesh with a tortured and demonized thing of rage and pain, who wonders why others find him monstrous.
But he is also a god and daemon of creativity, inspiration, poetic vision, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization, a bringer of Chaos who disrupts order, frees us from the tyranny of authority, and bears the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say with Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
As written by Olivia Lang, in an essay entitled A Stitch in Time: Enforced Silence, or some thoughts on a mouth sewn shut in history and literature; ” The enduring symbolism of a sewn mouth, from the works of David Wojnarowicz to recent protests by refugees; “The light’s behind them. Four men, somewhere on the border between Greece and Macedonia. They can’t go forward, can’t go back. The man on the left has his eyes closed. He’s unshaven, a single freckle on his temple. The light is tangling in his hair, running down his forehead and catching on his chin. Head bowed, careful as a surgeon, the man opposite him is sewing up his mouth. The blue thread runs from lip to hand. The sewn man’s face is absolutely still, upturned to the sun. I don’t know where I first saw this photograph. Maybe it washed up on my Twitter feed. Later, I searched for it again, typing ‘refugee lip sewing’ into Google. This time, there were dozens of images, almost all of men, lips sewn shut with blue and scarlet thread. Afghan refugee, Athens. Australian immigration centre in Papua New Guinea. Stuck on the Balkan borders, a first smattering of snow.
The mouth is for speaking. But how do you speak if no one’s listening, if your voice is prohibited or no one understands your tongue? You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot. An Afghan boy who spent three years at the beginning of the millennium on Nauru – the off-shore processing camp for refugees attempting to reach Australia – told the website Solidarity.net.au: ‘My brother didn’t sew his lips but he was part of the hunger strike. He became unconscious and was sent to the hospital. Every time someone became unconscious we would send a picture to the media.’
The first time I encountered lip sewing as protest was in Rosa von Praunheim’s extraordinary 1990 AIDS documentary, Silence = Death. One of the interviewees was the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. A former street kid, a gay man who had recently been diagnosed with AIDS, he talked with great eloquence and fury about the different kinds of silence ranged against him. He spoke of what it had been like to grow up queer; the need to keep his sexuality secret because of the omnipresent threat of violence. He spoke of the silence of politicians, whose refusal to confront AIDS was hastening his own oncoming death. And, as he talked, footage he’d collaged together appeared on screen: a kaleidoscope of distress, which was later given the title A Fire in My Belly (1986–87). Ants crawl over a crucifix; a puppet dances on its strings; money pours from bandaged hands; a mouth is sewn shut, blood trickling from puncture wounds. What is the stitched mouth doing? If silence equals death, the biting slogan of AIDS activists, then part of the work of resistance is to make visible the people who are being silenced. Carefully, carefully, the needle works through skin, self-inflicted damage announcing larger harm. ‘I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,’ Wojnarowicz says. ‘I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.’ You make an image to communicate what is unsayable in words. You make an image to go on beyond you, to speak when you no longer can. The image can survive its creator’s death, but that doesn’t mean it is immune to the same forces of silencing that it protests. In 2010, nearly two decades after Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at the age of 37, A Fire in My Belly was removed from a landmark exhibition of gay art at the Smithsonian, in Washington DC, following complaints from right-wing politicians and the Catholic League. This time, the stitched mouth became a symbol of censorship. At protests, people held up posters of Wojnarowicz’s face, lantern-jawed, implacable, five stitches locking shut his lips. Both images are in front of me now: stitches in time, reporting from the past. Wojnarowicz is dead; God knows where the man on the Greek border is. In other photos from the same protest, men sit or stand on train tracks, holding hand-lettered signs on scraps of dirty cardboard: ONLY FREEDOM and OPEN THE BORDER. They are bare-chested, wrapped in blankets, ranked against police with riot shields and bulletproof vests. The word ‘stitch’ is a double-edged prayer. It means the least bit of anything – the stigmatized, say, or the devalued. And it means to join together, mend or fasten, a hope powerful enough to drive a needle through bare flesh.”
As written by Doug Dorst in his blog Monkeys and Rabbit Holes, which annotates his magnificent translation and metafictional commentary on the novel Ship of Theseus by the mythic and possibly fictional revolutionary V. M. Straka, in an article entitled Enforced Silence, or some thoughts on a mouth sewn shut in history and literature;” In Ship of Theseus, S. sails on a ship with sailors whose mouths are sewn shut. Eventually he joins them and undergoes the procedure himself. It is a continuous motif in SOT and appears several times.
Typically a mouth sewn shut is a motif more at home in the horror genre, body modification enthusiasts, and more recently as a form of actual political protest as google brought up several pages of such events.
Loki may be the first victim of this practice. Loki had his mouth sewn shut with wire after loosing a bet with some dwarves. He had wagered his head in the bet (which Loki then lost), but refused to let the dwarves take his head if they couldn’t remove his head without leaving his neck intact. Instead, the dwarves sewed his mouth shut for his slick way with words. According to wikipedia, this myth is the basis for the logical fallacy “Loki’s wager,” which “is the unreasonable insistence that a concept cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be discussed.”
The next instance is found in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first installment, published in 1605, is considered one of the world’s great masterworks. At one point in the book, Sancho tells Don Quixote, “Senor Don Quixote, give me your worship’s blessing and dismissal, for I’d like to go home at once to my wife and children with whom I can at any rate talk and converse as much as I like; for to want me to go through these solitudes day and night and not speak to you when I have a mind is burying me alive. If luck would have it that animals spoke as they did in the days of Guisopete, it would not be so bad, because I could talk to Rocinante about whatever came into my head, and so put up with my ill-fortune; but it is a hard case, and not to be borne with patience, to go seeking adventures all one’s life and get nothing but kicks and blanketings, brickbats and punches, and with all this to have to sew up one’s mouth without daring to say what is in one’s heart, just as if one were dumb.”
In 1827, it appears again in the Atheneaum. The piece is titled Painters-Authoresses-Women, but it is not attributed to any author. “It was easier to look in the glass than to make a dull canvas shine like a lucid mirror; and, as to talking, Sir Joshua used to say, a painter should sew up his mouth.”
Here is the illuminating essay written by Patrick Nathan in The Paris Review; “For David Wojnarowicz, this decade has been a renaissance. He plays a guiding spirit in Olivia Laing’s 2016 internal travelogue, The Lonely City, and haunts the 2011 music video for Justice’s “Civilization.” In last year’s retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, the Whitney Museum reminded us that Wojnarowicz “came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes.” We recognize that decade in our own, and, with it, Wojnarowicz’s anger. Our present is magnetized to his past. His art, as Hanya Yanagihara wrote, “reminds you that there is a distinction between cynicism and anger, because the work, while angry, is rarely bitter—bitterness is the absence of hope; anger is hope’s companion.” In truth, renaissance is a cruel word to give to someone who died at thirty-seven. But we do love him. We do need him.
Some things to know about who we are:
We are trapped in a moment of political terror. We are dangerously close to cynicism, but angry enough to have hope. We are no longer interested in compromise. Men, we agree, have had their chance. White women we can no longer trust to uphold feminism, not while they cling to white supremacy. We are antiracist and antifascist and prison abolitionists; we rejoiced when Bill Cosby received his sentence. We canceled Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Al Franken with equal fervor. We are uninterested in what they think.
Welcome to we: a disingenuous pronoun that both paid and unpaid pundits alike brandish without consent. I’m often guilty, too: my points are more convincing if I ventriloquize your voice alongside mine. Are we really doing this? Is this what we want? When did we decide this was okay? As usual, Adorno said it best: “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” More often than not, we is an erasure, a linguistic illusion that you or I have endorsed some third person’s opinion, politics, or decisions. Deployed in politicized spaces, the subtext of we—i.e., I didn’t need to ask you—is a violation of political agency.
What’s dangerous in maligning we, however, is how badly I—a cisgender white man living in America—need to hear these voices. Often, the contemporary we is a backlash against centuries of a white cishet male monolith, which includes the we in the Constitution. It’s a backlash voiced by women, people of color, trans and nonbinary persons, and persons with disabilities. As Wesley Morris wrote for the New York Times last year, “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginalized. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it.” Morris casts this moment as an inversion of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, when artists like Wojnarowicz faced censorship and humiliation from the religious right. After pushing their work to extremes and waging costly legal and political campaigns—including, in Wojnarowicz’s case, the very right to survive as a queer artist—the oppressed are now closer to power than ever. “This territory,” Morris writes, “was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any costs. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture.” It’s in this sense that we becomes linguistic action. We cosign or cancel speech, endorse or excoriate art, all the while presuming that any I can borrow any you. We amplifies our voices as one, an assumption of power.
While Morris’s essay is a sensitive, observant, and smart examination of ethics in contemporary art, and while I’m grateful to have read and reread it, my first impulse upon seeing its subheading (“Should art be a battleground for social justice?”) was to throw the magazine across the room and tweet something like, “Do we really need another man whispering ‘art for art’s sake’ as he pins us against the wall?” This is what our politics has done to me as a queer artist. I carry so much anger that even the threat of some man saying, Let’s not get carried away, triggers rage.
Or perhaps more exact: revenge.
I want to believe we need Wojnarowicz’s art, but I can only say that I need it. I burn for its juxtapositions, the shadows in his photographs, and the narrative ambition of his paintings—exuberant perversions of renaissance epics. Close to the Knives, his “memoir of disintegration,” immolates me entirely. Like many queers in the seventies, Wojnarowicz grew up neglected and abused, prostituting his body by the time he was fifteen. As an artist, he received no formal training—only critique from other queer artists, including his one-time lover, Peter Hujar, whose body became one of his subjects. Hujar’s face and hands and feet, photographed on his deathbed in 1987, found their way into one of Wojnarowicz’s collages, lacquered over with a fiery indictment of the society that let this happen to a man he loved; and then Wojnarowicz, too, died, with so much art left unmade.
Reading Wojnarowicz today—that is, in his words, “in a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president … a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them”—empowers me. Art “can be reparatory,” Morris writes, “a means for the oppressed and ignored to speak,” and Wojnarowicz’s anger makes me feel as if it’s my right to demand silence from those I perceive to have oppressed queer people, or even those who just don’t have the luck of being queer. I feel as if it’s my right to shun artworks in which I don’t recognize myself or my friends. To not see oneself mirrored in culture feels like abuse, every renewed act of erasure newly unbearable.
While Morris writes about art specifically, his essay reflects a tendency in discourse overall toward separating, totally, that which we call bearable from that which we decide is not. This is the subject of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. “At many levels of human interaction,” she writes, “there is an opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” As social creatures, communication and negotiation are human responsibilities. Activities that work against communication—shunning, silencing, and enlisting the power of the state to punish rather than resolve—shirk this responsibility, and are unfortunately common among vulnerable persons, for whom withdrawal and refusal are often the only communication skills they possess. This leaves both parties trapped—one behind a locked door they won’t open, the other outside. Schulman describes her struggle to understand her colleagues, who, despite their liberal politics, have developed an “almost prescribed instinct to punish, using the language originated initially by a radical movement but now co-opted to deny complexity, due process, and the kind of in-person, interactive conversation that produces resolution.” This language is that of “abuse,” which has a perpetrator and a victim.
In situations of abuse (ask yourself: is this a power struggle or does this person have power over me?), victims are indeed blameless. But Schulman’s thesis outlines how what often feels like abuse is instead conflict—a point of pain in need of resolution, arrived at only through honest and open communication, which can, and often does, hurt: “the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion.” The state and its systems of power withhold assistance and compassion from those who are not “eligible.” This creates a system where the identity of victim is desired, if only to ensure one is met with compassion instead of derision. “This concept,” Schulman writes, “is predicated on a need to enforce that one party is entirely righteous and without mistake, while the other is the Specter, the residual holder of all evil.” Anyone who endured the punditry after the 2016 elections will understand why labeling oneself an economic or demographic victim can be toxic. In a sociological refusal to communicate, 63 million voters escalated decades of capitalist-driven conflict by turning their pain into a sacrosanct identity, regardless of how it would, and has, hurt millions of people far more severely than any pain, however legitimate, those voters felt.
Schulman’s ideas on conflict, communication, escalation, abuse, and repair encourage us to accept individual responsibility, however small, for as many of the conflicts in one’s life as we can stand. Yet it remains necessary to distinguish these conflicts from abuse. What’s interesting about Schulman’s essay is how it intersects with urgent questions of speech, de-platforming, and “cancelation.” Her insistence upon open and respectful communication seems like an inversion of the tactics of silence, shunning, exclusion, and sometimes of violence used by antifascist groups for decades to combat authoritarian politics. The strategies of antifascism contradict everything Schulman says in her plea toward mutual understanding and conflict resolution, but only in the way that shouting over Ann Coulter, for example, seems like an infringement upon her right to incite violence through “free speech.” The error here is to call fascism a conflict.
A primary goal of Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook is to illuminate the “trans-historical terror of fascism,” which is never a “defeated” enemy but a constant reactionary threat as long as inequality and suffering are tolerated. History is not fixed or written but being written. The post-Holocaust slogan—“Never again!”—is not a fact, observation, or conclusion, but a plea for understanding. As Bray writes, “History is a complex tapestry stitched together by threads of continuity and discontinuity… [Anti-fascism] is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” It could indeed happen again—maybe tomorrow—and one needs to recognize it, contain it, and drive it back out of sight. These tactics don’t seek to understand the conflict and work toward resolution because there is no understanding, nor resolution; there is, in fact, no conflict. Fascism is abuse, and its evangelists know it. As Bray says, “The point here is not tactics; it is politics.” Just as an abusive parent or partner has no right to demand that his victim sit down and hear his case (again: “power over,” not “power struggle”), a political system that is predicated on the oppression and elimination of human beings from the populace based on race, legal history, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, or ability has no right to a national platform, and merits resistance over resolution. Fascism assumes a false mask of victimhood—one that seems like a “politics in conflict”—in order to undermine those who’d speak against it. But fascism is not a politics in conflict: it is a politics of abuse on a national and transnational scale. Antifascism seeks a way out of trauma; fascism governs with it.
At the Morgan Library in New York, I saw Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz, gaunt and severely shadowed, dark-eyed, a cigarette in mid drag; and I felt it, around my neck. Love there, and admiration. Grief. Seeing how Hujar saw his ex-lover, friend, and fellow artist seized me entirely. I didn’t understand why I was trembling. It just happened as these things happen—and, for me, are happening more and more. Last year, T magazine ran a special issue on the early eighties in New York. On one page, Edmund White remembered friends, writers, and artists who’d died young: “I was just thinking of Allen Barnett, who lived to publish one book of stories … He was so angry that he had to die.” On another page, the faces of over a hundred artists, choreographers, writers, performers, designers, and cinematographers “lost” to HIV related illnesses. I had no choice: I sobbed. The same thing happened with Tom Bianchi’s Polaroids of Fire Island in the early eighties, in which young men, naked or mostly naked, smile there on the sand, playing and drinking and fucking and loving each other with no idea what awaits them. “I could not have imagined,” Bianchi writes, “that my Polaroids would so suddenly become a record of a lost world—my box of pictures a mausoleum, too painful to visit. When I reopened the box decades later, I found friends and lovers playing and smiling. Alive again.” Even this, reread so many times, is hard to transcribe.
I began having sex with men in 2006. HIV is not only a treatable illness, but, thanks to PrEP, easier to avoid contracting than ever. I’ve lost no one to AIDS. I was a child when it decimated queer communities across the world. Because of this, it’s taken me a long time to understand that there is still trauma here, that for me to look back and see what has happened, and to see the people—the Reagan administration, state and local governments, charity organizations, and “normal Americans”—who stood by and let it happen, is for me a trauma I’m allowed to feel. It’s traumatic to know how many influential figures called it punishment, called it God, and how many millions nodded along with them. It’s traumatic that I believed, long after the documented success of antiretroviral therapy, that HIV was certain death. It’s traumatic to imagine myself and my friends in that other decade, losing all the men in my life I love and have loved, all while someone laughs on television, where they are paid to say, You had it coming.
Yes, they called me faggot, bullied me and threatened me; yes, I pushed myself so deeply into the closet that I thought I was someone else, hurting a lot of people in the process; and yes, I carry scars from those years when I craved physical pain instead of pain I couldn’t articulate. But no one I love died, not like that. Nor do I understand these intense reactions as merely empathetic, because I feel them a hundredfold more strongly than when I encounter the pain of people suffering in other situations. Instead—to adapt a phrase from Bray—this feels like transhistorical queer trauma. Not long ago, people like me suffered unimaginably and died in isolation, cut off not only from civil and social apparatuses but often their families; and this happened because those people were like me. Through shunning, violence, intimidation, and legislation, a society had so othered LGBTQ individuals that their drawn out and brutal deaths seemed permissible, even desirable. And alongside those deaths, what was a few million drug users, homeless persons, and black Americans living in abject poverty? Because of white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies, a virus became a weapon of the state, allowed first to proliferate and then, once activists had pushed back hard enough, to be contained, managed, and controlled by federal subsidies and corporate pharmaceutical research.
I’m not stupid enough to think “never again” calls for anything but constant vigilance. In February of 2018, the White House proposed a 20% cut in the nation’s global HIV/AIDS fund, which would lead, according to a report issued by ONE.org, to “nearly 300,000 deaths and more than 1.75 million new infections each year.” On June 1 of this year, the president logged onto Twitter and mentioned how we would “celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation,” despite everything his administration and party have done to strip trans persons of their safety and their rights, to obstruct federal and state protections for queer families and workers. It’s especially tempting to ask this transphobic autocrat what he believes the T stands for when he reminds the nation to celebrate LGBT people, but that’s beside the point. It’s not ignorance that emanates from the White House. It is not a politics in conflict. No matter how many rainbow emoji the president tweets, his queer politics is death, hate, and exclusion. It is a legacy of abuse, and perhaps it’s only natural to feel it across generations, to break down sobbing when I discover another artist or writer or human being who was, not that many years ago, “so angry that he had to die.”
Those 63 million votes: was each an act of abuse? I want to say yes—I believed they were for a long time. As Bray indicates, “It is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamaphobia, and many more hateful traits.” For me and the people I love, these votes felt cruel, and while I’m no longer sure about saying yes, I don’t question my choice to end every relationship I had with anyone who used their vote to inflict such irresponsible, widespread harm.
Every fascist regime has snuck into power through legal means with a relatively small majority. In the 1930 elections, shortly before Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reichstag, the Nazis received 18.3% of the vote. When Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Mussolini as prime minister in 1922, after 30,000 blackshirts marched theatrically on Rome, the PNF only held thirty-five of more than five hundred seats. In 2016, Trump received over 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. As I write this, there are thirty-one states—plus D.C.—with party registration. In those states, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 12 million; yet Republicans currently control sixty-seven of the ninety-nine state legislative bodies and hold a majority in the Senate. Supremacist ideologies don’t need that many fervent supporters; what they do need is indifference. In the case of Trump voters, Bray continues, “it is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.”
Here is where the difference between conflict and abuse becomes a societal urgency. I’m not going to mince words. The Republican party, championing Islamophobia, denying and exacerbating climate change, stripping trans persons of their rights, supporting police brutality against the black community, incarcerating immigrants and separating children from their families—in short, committing crime upon crime against humanity—is a global terrorist organization rooted not only in white supremacy, but the supremacy of wealth. It’s hard to see class in America—to see poverty as an identity—because the American fabrication is that today’s poor, through obedience and hard work, will be rich tomorrow. It’s a story that hides an oppressed class in plain sight of people who serve as a ready-made voting base for the rich, as long as the rich grant them whiteness, heteronormativity, male supremacy, or some other power over those more deeply oppressed. These are those who might not champion the oppression of others, but go along with it as a price paid for a seat at the table.
It’s difficult to accept responsibility for this transaction, so enticing is its reward: state-sponsored victimhood. To take an example from Schulman, the white queer community doesn’t want to hear that today, “with gay marriage and parenthood prevalent, and the advent of gay nuclear families and normalized queer childbirth … white queer families realign with the state that held them in pervasive illegality less than a generation ago.” At the same time, this community still sees itself as unable to do harm, so entrenched is its history with victimhood. To challenge this is perceived as antiqueer ideology: of course we have the right to families, to suburbs, to lattes and plaid. But so, too, do white queers, in their newfound positions of power, have newfound responsibility to uphold the greater community, and to use their privilege to resolve conflicts with the trans community and queers of color, not to mention other oppressed and persecuted communities.
There is a similarity in action, Schulman says, in both the supremacist and the victim. This is born of refusal: “For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent ‘right’ not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation.” For the conflicted, seeing their pain mirrored in another can become a way to justify pain: at least she feels what I feel, or even at least he’s worse off than me. What this creates is an ongoing and mutually reflective theater of trauma in which everyone is a victim, exempt from responsibility, beyond repair.
We live in a misogynistic, racist, homo- and transphobic, ableist, violent, and viciously unequal country whose relatively small population (4.4% of the world) and vast wealth (25%) leave us, individual voters, responsible for the fate and future of this planet as its oceans rise and reefs die, as its air grows increasingly contaminated and water less potable. To feel so powerless and yet accountable for the future of the human race means that the sheer number of traumatized persons living in America is staggering. We are rooted in a country created by two concurrent genocides and supported by two centuries of wars, spectacular terrorism, theft, and global oppression. What’s worse, as Schulman argues, traumatized persons, through their actions, amplify and spread trauma to others by shunning, bullying, silencing, scapegoating, and threatening; they cling to what little they’re given as payment for their complicity in worldwide destruction at the profit of a small minority of white, wealthy men.
What use am I, and who is profiting from my trauma? How has my pain been weaponized and turned against others to stoke greater conflict? These are questions every American should ask themselves, particularly as we enter the nauseating theater of the 2020 elections and what lies beyond.
Conflict is profitable. Not only is this obvious in two hundred years of U.S. foreign policy, but in millennia of art and entertainment: escalation is dramatic, and drama, if it doesn’t affect us directly, is cathartic. It’s fun to say, Did you see what he said about her? and to watch a conflict get worse. There’s a reason journalists crank the apocalypse up to eleven every time the president tweets. It keeps readers coming back. Resolution is boring. Resolution is unprofitable. A played-out resolution is not a drama but an education: you too are responsible, rather than, watch this. Resisting this is not easy, fast, or efficient—three values Americans cherish. To be conflicted, to explore one’s accountability in a relationship, this is not what makes an individual spectacularly eligible for compassion. Only victimhood opens that coffer, and whoever screams loudest gets the prize.
What is needed is a queering of compassion. To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognizes their existence in a continuum of conflict, and seeks to resolve and repair rather than escalate and destroy. We—and here I do mean every single one of us—must question individual guilt, which is rooted in action, rather than shame, which is entrenched in identity. Because when we insist upon the binary—that everyone is either perpetrator or victim—the cost is literal human life. One need only to look to all the Black Americans murdered by police, summoned by a white neighbor’s perceived victimhood, amplified by the aesthetics of entertainment.
The we I want to belong to is the we that recognizes our vast diversity of pain—the we that understands we’ve been assigned this pain for someone else’s profit, and that we need no longer give them want they want. To reserve compassion only for victims deemed eligible is to accept an arbitrary division, one in which the state can deem some of us worthy of aid and exclude others, meanwhile ensuring that the victims never speak to one another, competing as they must to remain in their places. Is it so revolutionary to say that every human being is eligible for compassion? That men and women of any gender or sexuality, any skin color, any ability, any legal or migratory status, any age, receive the same compassionate understanding as any other, responsible only for their actions and not the identities coerced upon them by others? To believe otherwise is to let fascism shatter our society.”
Loki montage to the song Would You Turn Your Back On Me? (Monster)
David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, by Giancarlo Ambrosino, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor), Chris Kraus (Editor), Hedi El Kholti (Editor), Justin Cavin (Editor), Jennifer Doyle (Afterword)
So wishful I was when I wrote these words on April 29 2019, Trumps Ten Thousand Lies; On this day we count ten thousand lies since Trump has taken office as President of the United States; obviously he is a pathological liar who is unable to tell the difference between truth and lies.
The sounds he makes are as meaningless as the squeals of a mindless gluttonous brute animal that he so resembles.
His words mean nothing; he also means nothing, and we do not hear him.
If only we like Ulysses beset by the sirens could stop our ears, and free ourselves from capture by the tide of lies unleashed upon us by Traitor Trump and his Fourth Reich minions which include the Republican Party.
But it is never simple, liberation struggle against systems of oppression and thought control, alternate realities, myriads of lies and illusions, phantasms of subjugation to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, and the legacies of history from which we must emerge if we are to become human, self created and self owned beings, glorious and Unconquered.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We ourselves are the primary ground of struggle between tyranny and liberty, for what we choose to believe and how we judge the choices and stories offered to us determines our subjugation to authority or our liberation from it. And truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, relative, and constantly shifting and in processes of change, and can be Rashomon Gate Events which shatter time into myriads of possible futures.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture and distort like the images of ourselves in a funhouse mirror labyrinth, and the only guidance I can offer you is to ask; Whose story is this?
So it is with the disinformation campaign surrounding the twin hurricanes which have devastated Florida and the work of FEMA and other humanitarian aid workers in savings the lives of our citizens from a disaster unleashed by the greed for wealth and power of those who would enslave us.
Trump rambles witlessly before the world once again, displaying his freakish monstrosity as an idiot madman of delusions and perversions. For beneath the mask lies the demon whom he worships and to whom he would sacrifice America and us all; Moloch the Seducer, Fount of Lies.
For an excellent interrogation of how tyranny operates through falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, and conspiracy theories in our subjugation, enslavement, and the theft of the soul, see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season one, episode 8; I, Robot…You, Jane. Crucial to the understanding of conspiracy theories is that Moloch, whose name means King, is claimed as the Big Bad of QAnon; the first principle of propaganda is deflection or to claim your enemies are doing whatever you actually are. The second is to assault the idea of truth itself by exaggerating claims to the point where belief becomes an act of perverted faith and a loyalty test.
For a brilliant fictionalization of how conspiracy theories work as falsification in the context of QAnon’s previous iteration, the Nazi blood libel against the Jews, read Umberto Eco’s magisterial novel The Prague Cemetery.
In disambiguating truth from lies, consider the source and who benefits. And remember always the First Rule of Resistance; everything the enemy says is a lie.
Of our history, memory, and identity there are those which must be kept, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of November 17 2020, Lies, Delusions, and the Subversion of Democracy: the Legacy of Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty; As our Clown of Terror’s Theatre of Cruelty prepares to surrender the keys to a kingdom which no longer open any doors and the lights begin to wink out one by one, I reflect on the legacy of the Stolen Election of 2016 and the illegitimate Trump Presidency which has so crippled America and devoured the hearts of her people as a disease of the spirit; lies, delusions, and the subversion of democracy.
Fascism, patriarchy, and the corrupt kleptocracy of a plutocratic and oligarchic regime of elites has been turned back with the dark tide of atavistic barbarism of hate and greed on which it is borne, and for now we the people have triumphed; but we must be vigilant lest it return.
Trump has been the most successful agent any foreign power has ever fielded against America, and he has damaged our ability to respond to threats more than any event in our history, exceeding even Pearl Harbor and 9-11. Yet like those who planned the attack on Pearl as a pre-emptive strike to render us powerless to oppose conquest and dominion, our enemies have underestimated the resilience of democratic institutions and the unconquerable will of a free and united people.
Let us celebrate our victory over fascism and the glorious defiance of authority by which we won; let us also give no opportunity nor moment of rest to the enemy, for he is always at the gate, testing our weaknesses and biding his time, and we must give him nothing to exploit.
As I wrote in my post of November 13 2020, The Trump Era: A Legacy of Shame, Amorality, Fear, Tyranny, Lies and Delusions, and Now We Are Become Ridiculous; Traitor Trump has already sabotaged America’s role as a guarantor of democracy and the universal rights of man, and with it any fig leaf of moral supremacy and our global hegemony of power and privilege which derives from it.
The Trump regime has been a parallel of the Salt Tax in India which brought down the British Empire; a delegitimizing event which exposes the amoral hollowness of our rapacious imperialism and any apologetics of power.
While I welcome the death of the American Empire of capitalist plunder and military colonialism, this unintended consequence of the Fourth Reich’s subversion of democracy does not offset the loss of our freedom, equality, and human rights.
Our Clown of Terror has long since made America a figure not of hope but of fear, not of liberty but of tyranny; now he has made us ridiculous as well.
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2020, A Wilderness of Mirrors: Lies, Illusions, and the Theft of the Soul; As truth becomes uncertain and malleable through the instruments of media and reduces everything to identitarian partisanship, as reality becomes a social consensus model authorized for us by others, as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, distorted images as if in a funhouse which falsify and abstract us from ourselves in infinite reflections, of misdirects, lies, and illusions, we become colonized by these falsehoods and shaped to the uses of their puppetmasters and those who would enslave us. Thus do we become puppets of the thieves of souls.
And somewhere in the funhouse, a Clown of Terror laughs.
Among the most successful propaganda campaigns of this election season is the QAnon conspiracy narrative, a modern reformulation of the charges against the Jews during the Inquisition which were later repurposed by the Nazis. Of the many great works on this subject, I recommend beginning with a novel by Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery; you can read reviews about it here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10314376-the-prague-cemetery?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KceYbFP18A&rank=1
“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”; so argues Oscar Wilde in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, a Socratic dialogue in which he deconstructs Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, memory as the basis of identity, and also a critique of Marx’s historical determinism. In this he expanded Keat’s Idealism, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not”, into an anarchist humanism embracing both political and personal spheres, in which self-creating autonomous individuals are the origin of all meaning and value.
As such Wilde prefigures Sartre and forms a link between Romantic Idealism and Existentialism; I digress to point this out because Wilde’s breaking of the Great Chain of Being and causality, from the Infinite to kings and priests and then to their subjects, levels hierarchy and social station, interrogates authorized truth, democratizes the ownership of ourselves, and seizes and reclaims our power of choice regarding bodily autonomy and identities of sex and gender.
In Oscar Wilde’s solution to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, reality and its imitation shape each other as a recursive process, circular and infinite; and between these mutual negative spaces which create one another like Escher’s Drawing Hands is a liminal interface, full of possibilities and transformative power. The nature and relativity of time, order as an emergent function of chaos, the polymorphism of identity, and the necessity of rebellion against authority which interposes itself between the free conscience and ideas of autonomous individuals and our direct relationship with the Infinite in order to enslave us; all these are major themes of Oscar Wilde; but what is important to us in the context of designed lies and illusions by authority in a political context is that he signals a way out of the maze of propaganda and control which enforces falsification and dehumanization, or simply put the theft of the soul by those who would enslave us.
If fictions can enslave us to the ideas of other people, our own fictions can also liberate us from them.
At its best, true art allows us to transcend the limits which ensnare and diminish us; to rise above the troughs of our social position and of exclusionary categories of otherness and divisions from each other and to see the true shape of our possibilities and the seas in which we must swim from the crests of its waves.
Art is revolutionary struggle which reconnects us and transforms human relationships, reveals new possibilities of becoming human together as yet undreamed, and with these functions of vision, self-ownership, transformation, and seizure of power becomes an instrument and process of Liberty.
Let us forge an art of being human which returns to us our true selves.
As I wrote in my post of August 3 2019, The Age of Lies and Illusions; We live in the funhouse of mirrors, images which reflect lies and illusions and which steal our souls through falsification. The truth is the frontline in the battle for freedom against tyranny and fascism, requiring new definitions of freedom in the age of digital propaganda and subversive disinformation targeting social media microcommunities.
Part of our vulnerability to influence messaging is its ability to disguise its source and masquerade as communication from friends; another dimension is the ease with which big data can be gathered and deployed against an electorate with precisely targeted messages, as for example Netflix benignly and brilliantly uses viewing habits to sort people into thousands of preference categories and suggest other shows they might enjoy. These first two vulnerabilities can be rendered harmless if we have the political will to do so; but what truly terrifies me is the context in which modern propaganda occurs, in an overwhelming and pervasive environment of lies.
Ours is a world in which Big Brother is not only watching, he wears the masks of our most trusted friends and lives in our pocket, following us everywhere, listening, reporting our location constantly, and sending our information home to whoever buys it. We have become commodities and resources as well as markets; we are the greatest frontier of our age, gold mines for oligarchs and tyrants.
Information is not only the best defense of democracy; it is also its greatest existential threat. How we balance these dual aspects of our freedom will determine the survival of freedom, and the possibilities of our future humanity.
As I wrote in my post of August 25 2020 Welcome to Bizarro World, Where Truth and Lies Change Places and All Our Values Are Reversed
The Republican Party held up a mirror to America in the figure of Trump at last night’s National Convention, and I’m hoping most of us didn’t like what we saw.
A funhouse mirror, filled with distorted images, a thing of surfaces without substance which offering a mirage of illusions, lies, and reflections into infinite regress of our atavisms of fear and hate, shadows which we drag behind us in our wake like an invisible reptilian tail, and which like the picture of Dorian Grey reveal our disfigured souls and our failures as Americans and as human beings.
It is an image designed to terrorize us into submission, and to steal our souls.
Among the freaks and monsters, the litanies of victimhood and retribution, of dominion, white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil sung by the barkers and screaming johnnies who warmed up the main show, among all these and reigning over them like a ringmaster was the tyrant himself, Traitor Trump, spewing abominations and depravities as the puppet of the demons he worships, the lies of those who would enslave us.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Trump’s God: Moloch the Deceiver, Demon of Lies
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1 episode 8, I Robot You Jane
Torch of Liberty 