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.

Reflections

Emotions perceived: Dreams and Visions

know the “score”  feign calm an apathy

not wanting to feel, or to to heed

 the call of soul unsaid lacking privacy

Emptiness / tears, w’not belie, the ancestors. 

Cannot hear of their voices in 

the light of day I'll not dismay, though few know

who will make through each day 
 in despair or joy

Fall to addictions, belief, consumption

hope, and  media democracy

Five or a‘hundred to one, 

their not coming for guns

 I’m no fucking slave

nor die on knees.

I’ll not kneel to any god that I don’t see:

we seem to this agree: not bother one another

Yet Hermes, Hypnos and Hades are all visit  me

Have danced this round before

Many voices raised in song

Yet all I see if fucking war

Must be a cacophony

Sundry mourning (revised)

Lust in Reverse, compelled and enraged,

Suffer the rage of of one's shadow

We must disengage

Too much to feel this way.

Storm passed: Wonder at the sun

water vapor all is discuise'd

we shall see but shadowily and unknown

The World storm has begun

Blade Runner has come

The corporate Deity

commerce and destruction

Greedy hands and 

empty souls conspire 

minds to make bombs.

Kill the innocent 

the poor alike

"Fuck em"  

They don't surf or sing for 

your tax refunds.

For the deaths 

we've paid.

The country's soul is bankrupt

No honer in refusing to face

Our mercenary sons,

The dog's of war are 

Loosed nay, not return 

In my lifetime

Nightmare

Jealousy and regret 
feelings of this age

Wrinkles above an below 
 result of a furrow’ed brow

Raging storms always come:
Nyx at night and Hpnos in day
Sober in the  mourning yet still
grumpliy amazed

Wonder at the sun and the sea.

Vapor and shadows fill my eye
haps no future to be

Central mthemes and melodies
shadowily and ghostly shades 
dance on the beach whispering under
 the red moon and clash o' the sea.

Excerpts form The Dream and the Underworld: credit James Hillman

the pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and [psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus’ fragments  (85): “. . .  whatever it [Thymos]  wishes, it buys at the price of the soul.”  Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul. did not belong {or too} words added in the underworld. (Pg 42-43)

“What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. we are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it.” (Pg. 43)

The other side of the mysterious identity, of Dionysos within Hades, says that there is a zoe, a vitality in all underworld phenomena. the realm of the dead is not as dead as we expect it. Hades too can rape and also seize the psyche through sexual fantasies. Although without thymus, body, or voice, there is  hidden libido in the shadows. The images in Hades are also Dionysian— not fertile in the natural sense, but in the psychic sense, imaginatively fertile. there is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that reveals and makes music. there is a dance in death. hades and Dionysos are the same. as Hades darkens Dionysos toward his own tragedy, Dionysos softens and rounds out Hades into his own richness. Farnell describes their fusion as a “mildness joined with melancholy.” (pg. 45)

To be raped into the underworld is not the only move of experiencing it. there are many other modes of descent. but when it comes in this radical fashion, then we may know which mytheme has encased us. we are dragged into Hades’s chariot only if we are out in Demeter’s green fields, seductively innocent with playmates among flowers. That world has to open up. When the bottom falls out, we feel only the black abyss of despair, but this is not the only way to experience even this mytheme. 

For instance, Hekate was supposedly standing by the whole time, listening or watching. There is evidently a perspective that can witness the soul’s struggles without the flap of Persephone or the disaster of Demeter. In us is also a dark angel (Hecate was also called angelos), A conscious (and she was called phosphoros) that which shines in the dark.  P(pg. 49)

These circular states of receptiveness, turning and running in the gyres of our own conditions, force us to recognize that these conditions are our very essence and that the soul’s circular motion (which is its native motion, according to Plotinus) cannot be distinguished from blind fate. It is as if the should frees itself not from blindness but by its continuing turning in it. Ultimately, if the spontaneous mandala heals, it does so because it compels a recognition of the limitation of consciousness, that my mind and heart and will turn only in a circle, and yet that same circle is my portion of  an eternal necessity.

excerpts from social mediia on human rights

As "for the issue of aborting a fetus diagnosed with a congenital condition is concerned. It is high time that we accept that a woman’s right to choose is sacrosanct at all times and in all circumstances. Even at those times that one might personally disagree with her choice or her reason for it. Perhaps especially at those times."

So rarely do I expect to find another man sharing my imprinted feminist / humanist perspective. I was actually hoping a woman wrote it. I'm sure many have written better such as "keep your laws off my body"!

Which speaks volumes of the loss of rights humans "suffer" (allow) to be taken or wilingly surender for the destiny of one's body, soul and spirit.

The idea that someone really knows better than the person experiencing the body is so obscene it makes most evil look prosaic.

Another ay of denial

I am awed at the #ecommunity
Particularly the slight interest from Singapore,
I don't know, what  to believe
About the waters I am stepping in too.

I know: I cannot step into the same water twice.
We can pretend their is nothing to be troubled by;
as we watch our children die.

I don't have to be a Parent:
to know the loss of a child.
A wound that never seals.
a voice, a life,
that never dies.

Water from our eyes, washing the ground
release the bones of our ancestors,
and those they killed in fear and greed.
To whom we owe amends.

Knowing nothing brings back a child's smile
Once the eternal love of a child's trust is broken.
Our absolute powerlessness in this love
goes on beyond anything we ever imagined.
Perhaps makes it all possible.