I haven’t been writing anything for a few days. Something came up. I know it’s my friends who read this so I don’t worry about losing them through sloth, for if they are my friends, they know why the sloth crossed the road, and how long it took. Linda said I pull people in by being heartwarming and then shock them with something offensive. I have no response to that other than what offends other people is none of my business.
I write in public to satisfy an exhibitionist tendency. But I have to apologize to Duo the Búho in order to make the headline speak to the story. As soon as I do that I’ll put the pads of my fingers on the key sensors and let them dance naked.
I deleted a post which was angry about my studying Spanish and not learning fast enough. I am surprised I can remember any Spanish at all, as English has begun to escape me. Yet I can see gradual progress, and get a glimpse of myself speaking adequately, if not like a native speaker. Complaining, however, is a lot easier. What came up when I was savaging Duo the Búho was that I have a long habit of sabotaging myself. This is an important thing to realize, that what to the ego is self sabotage, to the shadow, is keeping all possibilities open and calling it freedom.
Okay, naked fingers, dance back in time to when I was about 27, and the editor called me into his office. He was with a freelancer who’d queried the idea of posing nude for an art class. The freelancer was about two hundred pounds, with a square face and thick black hair. Bud DeWald, the editor, was a short, well-built man with red hair and freckles. He had already assigned the piece and now the guy said he was afraid he might get an unwanted erection. There was a hole to fill. I had no such fears and agreed to model nude. I told you I have exhibitionist tendencies.
I had read the guy’s proposal and knew that what was supposed to be funny was the fear and embarrassment aspect, which is just as trite as complaint humor. I turned it on its head and made the humor an obliviousness to being naked or having any embarrassment, to the point of absurdity. For example, walking around looking at the sketches, telling one woman, whose sketch was flattering in a particular aspect, that I wanted to buy it, but was missing my wallet. This absence of concern for social norms is “tricksterism,” a manifestation of the Puer Aeternus, archetype of the eternal child.
The older a man gets the more essential is the god of eternal youth. It keeps him young at any age without getting transfusions of the blood of infants. The downside of the puer is that he’s a hard dog to keep on the porch, and violates community standards. I violate standards when I write, as a way to express the trickster archetype in a safe place. It’s like a detective solving a murder case in which the murder has been described in a book. The writer becomes the chief suspect, except the detective has the genius to know if you write about murder you don’t need to do it. The shadow has been recognized and incorporated without any need for earlier methods, such as ritually killing one of the neighbors. My favorite depiction of this kind of ritual killing is, “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.
Moving to the abstract was the genius discovery which made Christianity so powerful, before it filled up with lay preachers. The ministry became a profession that anyone with a calling could do, like life coaching. They didn’t understand actual Christian philosophy, and often misinformed or just threatened people. We are seeing this happen now. The great realization was that the psyche is a pattern reading device. If you act out a murder in ritual time, you don’t have to actually murder anybody to restore balance to the community. The psyche reads the pattern. Create an archetypal figure just begging to take on the community shadow and pretend to kill him. Then bring him back for next year. Voila! He’s the Prince of Peace.
We know to live as a society has in the past required some kind of shadow removal device. This Christian ritual method was genius in its time. Times change. After WWI, European intellectuals realized we won’t ever get rid of evil by attacking it head on, because it’s not separate from us. It’s not an aspect of other people we can eliminate by killing them or deporting them. We each have to accept our own evil, and then we have to keep that puppy on a leash so that it doesn’t hurt other people, and we have to elevate only the best of us to leadership.
“The worship of God is honouring His gifts in other men each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.’” (William Blake)
Nobody is just one thing and we all have aspects of everything because we are human. We are ruled by instinctual energies, amorphous until they are organized with archetypal images. All wolves contain the wolf archetype, and all people contain the human archetype. That’s nature’s god. God can’t be removed from nature and made into a possession, even by those who turn everything else into a possession.
“The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the Genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.” (William Blake)
The famous painting of Saturn devouring his son (Goya) reveals not savagery or hatred, rather, there is a look on his face of helpless obedience to authority. He hates obeying, but can’t help himself. That’s the way it is. Patterns reach back generations. People carry a burden of guilt because they think they could have acted differently. They couldn’t have.
Maybe you’ll spoil a child by failing to impose enough discipline, I don’t know. But I know that discipline is best taught by example. I have been in a country church house in Marion County Tennessee, where the preacher urged parishioners to beat their kids in order to save them. “The blueness of wounds,” he said. “It’s in the Bible. If you don’t beat your kids and they go to hell, it’s your fault.” He added that nobody was going to do anything about it because the sheriff was his brother, and a member of the congregation.
“It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.” (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence)
A boy tries to become his father because that’s what being a man means. Like Peter Pan, his rebelling against the father risks his being split between a conscious ego that never grows old, and the shadow side of defining oneself in opposition to authority, which is the revolutionary who overturns it. If conforming to authority is conforming to misogynistic or violent, masculinity, then not conforming can be the esthetic/ethical, choice.
“Morality and performance of duty are artificial measures that become necessary when something essential is lacking. The more successfully a person was denied access to his or her feelings in childhood, the larger the arsenal of intellectual weapons and the supply of moral prostheses has to be, because morality and a sense of duty are not sources of strength or fruitful soil for genuine affection. Blood does not flow in artificial limbs; they are for sale and can serve many masters. What was considered good yesterday can--depending on the decree of government or party--be considered evil and corrupt today, and vice versa.
But those who have spontaneous feelings can only be themselves. They have no other choice if they want to remain true to themselves. Rejection, ostracism, loss of love, and name calling will not fail to affect them; they will suffer as a result and will dread them, but once they have found their authentic self they will not want to lose it. And when they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it. They simply cannot.”
(Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence)
What we realize when we own all of it, including our own (hopefully well managed) evil, is that we can integrate the shadow by not projecting it onto other people. It is only evil if it is rejected, and goes unconscious. We have the capacity to bring our essence into existence through becoming conscious of the patterns, and freeing ourselves from entanglement with them, thus becoming, at last, essence.
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