Psyche, Death and Empire

I  “steal from the page again and again”, to learn and internalize this material so that I may make it my own and yet still recognize that I am a offering service to ideas and ideally, to those who stumble across this page.

Suicide and the Empire is a overwhelming image to consider, much less  behold: A nightmare spectra through the lens of Media and national security. The consequent violence of global corporate capitalism is no longer shown on national television every night, with body counts and narrated by Walter Chronkite.

The violence of capitalism, or more palpably, the vested imperial “interests” of the “Allied Forces” as we collectively (morally speaking) take our daily toll, or perhaps "daily bread" literally every day harvested from the forests, oceans and underworld of human suffering that now taint the legacy of our progeny.

Our suicide is that of both species and individual. the toll of death spans the worker in Calcutta and the miner in Alaska as well as the veterans and the active duty enlisted souls fighting “on” any side in the conflict that mirrors our psyche.

This is in how we either confuse or deny the outer and inner, or the soul unites them in death, is a failure of our imagination and courage more than our desire to experience "wealth" or deny our mistakes in any way; imaginal, constitutional, or racially, or in a religious war that mirrors our inner conflict with out global suicide.

How we simultaneously as a species, and as individuals are to find redemption in these apocalyptic times is one of the primary issues of this writing and my interest. It is only through the separation of psychically felt experience with the daily deluge of travesty and deception we all find ourselves either fighting or perpetrating, every morning we return to the world from the realm of Hypos, brother of Pluto. We are living in a expanding invisible "world" that is Hades realm.

I’m re-reading and ingesting one of my favorite books by James Hillman.
I thought this excrpt might evoke a new vision, or, perspective.

“Analytical despair is nothing else than facing reality together, and the a priori of all human reality is death. The individual is thus encouraged to meet his overpowering need for the transcendent and absolute. We are back to Spinoza’s proposition that the liberated man thinks of death but his meditation is of life.

Transformation begins at this point where there is no hope. Despair produces the cry for salvation for which hope would be too optimistic, too confident. It was not with a voice of hope that Jesus cried “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” The cry on the cross is the archetype of the every cry for help. It sounds the anguish of betrayal, sacrifice and loneliness. Nothing is left, not even God. My only certainty is my suffering which I ask to be taken from me by dying. An animal awareness of suffering, and full identification with it, becomes the humiliating ground of transformation. Despair ushers in the death experience and is at the same time the requirement for resurrection. Life as it was before, the status qua ante, died when despair was born. There is only the moment as it is— the seed of whatever might come—if one can wait. The waiting is all and the waiting is together.

This emphasis on experience, this loyalty to the soul and the dispassionate scientific objectivity towards its phenomena, and this affirmation of the analytical relationship may release the transformation the soul has been seeking. It may come only at the last minute. It may never come at all. But there is no other way.”
Pg 92-93  Suicide and the soul: James Hillman

To suggest that this excerpt offers hope or meaning in the conventional “feel good” sense of the modern social context would be absurd. What is does attempt to emphasize or address is the collective despair that seems to be acted out unconsciously by the species in our collective action and in-action.

I  write in the endeavor to  re-frame or re-vision what is both happening and imagined in life; in this crucible of intimacy and evocative exposure, inherent in life and experience. As we aparently casually ocupy seperate and distinct spaces on the planet as well in the social order we find ourselves inevitably isolated by the rules of the market, class, gender and fate.