Where Seas and Fables Meet
Page 4
Babylon had moats with skiffs that had decorated sails, terraces with flowers and date trees. The huts were made of shining sand and stone. Ziggurats rose up like the pyramids. Their levels were adorned with crystals. The towers glistened in the sun. Under the moon they looked lit up with silver. But the exiled people were unhappy. They were small in number. The great city held no allure for them. They’d been desert people. They were used to the wilderness. Strangers to the streets, they’d been surely welcomed but they knew, deep in their bones, that they didn’t belong.
Slowly they were asked to give up their possessions to survive and prosper.
First, it was their God. (There were many that protected the city.)
Then it was the promise of a return to the desert.
Third, it was solitude. (Each of them had been a desert wanderer. Each had known the solitude of the wilds.) Then it was the subtle companionship of each other, the company of fellow solitaries. They were told to find new partners in the streets, in new communities.
Fifth, it was the heart’s longing for another kind of place, another way of life, different from the one they’d found in the city.
Then it was their capacity to dream and to interpret dreams.
Seventh, it was the circle of their dance. (There were other moves to learn.)
Then it was warmth and affection. (They may have been desert solitaries, but they knew what it meant to touch one another, to sleep beside a loved one. In Babylon love could be bought and sold.)
Ninth, it was to understand that slavery is a form of necessary employment. (It wasn’t essential to work with passion or desire or hope or the discipline of the soul’s aspirations towards a just way.)
Then it was their poetry and music.
They were asked to hang their musical instruments in willows by the river that curled around the city. They heard them tingle like wind chimes from a distance. But they weren’t to recite or sing.
•
Their voices were often lost in the tumult of prosperous streets. They learned it was better to speak briskly for commercial transactions.
The few who refused to give up poetry gathered by the gleaming river at night. They let the river and the willows sing for them.
In their exile they learned that love and poetry could happen outside the city ordinances. Their singing would have to continue in other ways by secret means.
•
The exiles developed a sign for their wandering. It was shaped like a stark tree with two branches slanting and yielding upwards. It looked like a dowsing rod, an instrument for finding underground streams or pools. It would also, so they agreed, resemble the harps they’d hung in the willows.
It resembled a fork in a dusty road. You could go this way or that. Your choice shaped you. The shape of the sign suggested a reply, too. If you followed one way or another – both were possibilities – then you’d step off the line and into freedom. In this space you could scatter seeds and make other signs.
They hoped this sign would become the sign of exiles everywhere. And because it was a symbol it could signal poetry and a return to song. What the journey would be like no one could say.
•
Meanwhile Babylon grew. With its growth came attractive forms of slavery. Many who had been taken forgot their origins. They obeyed the city’s law.
A few escaped.
They left behind a trail of symbols. These would become increasingly difficult for others to read. The search for the symbols became like a wandering in a desert where nothing was known.
The few who escaped hoped that someday others would follow the tracks and hear the songs that had been reduced to rumour-like whisperings under trees that no longer had instruments in them, beside the river.
But it would take generations.
And the songs and signs that the wanderers carried lost their origins, and people found the city protective.
There were nights set aside in the city when the thriving slowed and people felt a need to pray or sing or recite or dance. But they weren’t sure what these expressions meant, though the gestures and sounds were sometimes bewilderingly beautiful.
The next day Babylon roared.
The Monstrous
1.
Monsters mostly fall from above. They descend and prey. They pounce. Monstrousness comes from the act of looking down on our desire to love and to be respected.
2.
I can no longer abide those who sneer and stoop as if from a tremendous height.
3.
The gargoyles set on cathedrals always look down. They are forbidding, heartless beings, stuck in their observing contempt. This is why medieval craftsmen made them out of stone, rather than painted them on walls or ledges, on windows, or frescoes. If they had painted gargoyles on illuminated windows, they would have transformed in the flooding and shading of the light from the sun. By placing them above us the gargoyles were unwavering in their scorn.
4.
Pilgrims are invariably shown to be wandering on the earth with others, their hearts set on a destination, the fulfilment of a destiny. They aren’t frozen, looking down.
5.
An era becomes monstrous and stony when people side with those who look down.
6.
In a time of satellites, everyone has the capacity to look down, to listen in, to connect, and to spy on everyone else.
Blood Sacrifice
1.
Ancient rituals carry a bloody memory of human sacrifice. When the Mysteries emerged in Ancient Egypt and spread to the Middle East and to Greece, we see the beginning of symbolic replacement. A sacrifice can be made with animals, or through offerings of blessed food, through gifts or totems. Eventually animal sacrifice was transcended, too. A statue, or an image, of a creature was allowed: a stand-in – a symbol.
2.
The Christian symbol of the sacrificed saviour moved the Mystery process forward. It was an attempt by the early people of the church to remove violent sacrifice from humanity’s vicious bloodletting. The first symbol of early Christendom was the fish, not the cross. But you’ll find the sign of the cross in the fish’s tail. The symbols signified that the blood sacrifice had been done, once and for all. There was no need to let blood flow again. It meant an end to “to an eye for an eye,” the slaughterhouse of history. Incarnation, on one level, surely means that the sacred has become human, here, now, at one with all people.
3.
How ironic, and how terrible, that the Christian symbol of sacrifice is often used to ensure that the violent sacrifice of lives must continue.
How is this perpetuated? In unjust wars... Many wars are justified by leaders in terms of sacrifice for nation, for liberty, for gain, for glory, for security, for a political system, for our future happiness, for territorial imperative, for the spread of an ideology, for the protection of economic or resource interests.
Can there be a just war? Yes, if the conflict means the removal or the limiting of the spread of an evil energy. And yes, if the conflict means the war of contraries within the soul, where passionate expression must fight its way towards awareness.
4.
The most terrifying words can become these: duty, obedience, sacrifice and responsibility, if imposed from without by unjust, tyrannical systems. These words can be easily bent towards others’ definitions. (They’re already vague enough.) Still you know that death isn’t far off when someone begins to speak of your duty, the need to sacrifice your life for the higher ideal – an ideal established elsewhere, not in the heart.
5.
There have been great refusers in the tradition of civil disobedience. Think of Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Aung San Suu Kyi. These are people whose duty, whose responsiveness, is to something other than what present political or authority systems insist on or see.
6.
The demand
for sacrifice always comes from above.
7.
Leadership often watches the slaughter on the fields from the safety of walls, from the admiral’s chair on a ship. The heroes of The Iliad fought and died at the foot of Troy’s walls, observed from above by the gods and goddesses, all of whom believed that this sacrificial slaughter was necessary (and deliciously spectacular).
Leadership can become the power to look down on the destruction below, asking others to do their duty.
Leaders often refuse to join with others on the plane of the human, where blood is being spilled.
It’s all too easy to ask for dutiful sacrifice if you’re reigning from above, gazing from a perch, outside of suffering, seemingly removed from death.
8.
Once leaders begin to call for sacrifice, there could be no end to it. There would always be the call for sacrifices. Life would be offered at altars. Deny yourself, the powers of the Structure say: there must be libations and slaughter. In return for the protection of the Structure, you must give up yourself. How did it come to be that the Structure – what people in the hippie 1960s called The System – was endowed with authority and weight?
9.
If there would be no call for blood sacrifice, then there would be its replacement: duty. Duty could come to insist that what the universe wants is atonement and revenge. Duty implies that no breath, no voice, is truly different or special. The universe, the Structure, would then demand that your breath be returned to its fold.
Psychotic Institutions
When the Structure turns psychotic –
We are in a place and time in institutions, in corporate systems, when they’ve turned paranoid. Call these with one name: the Structure. You can tell it’s turned paranoid when the Structure asks you to suspend your faith and beliefs, your passions and visions, for the sake of security or its order or its power or its advancements. The Structure can appear human or like a monster (Leviathan). People may even begin to grant it “rights.” The Structure turns psychotic when it makes people justify its existence over the respect and love and imagination and dignity and liberty of a person.
And the personal should be everything.
It is through you (your incarnation) that the cosmos flows. But when the Structure prevails over the person, the Structure can become more than oppressive, more than a weight: it can become deranged. It will ask you to sacrifice what is meaningful to you: your time, your vitality, your love, your dreams, your ability to be in your own world (your imagination), your quest to be honoured, your opportunities for a good life, your hope for the future.
Kafka on Psychotic Institutions
1.
The outline of the Structure is eerily clear in Franz Kafka’s prophetic unfinished novels, The Trial and The Castle. The Structure is called the Law or the Castle in those fragments. The labyrinthine Law snares the individual. The enigmatic Castle demands obedience but refuses entry to the individual (everyone waits outside for the word that will give them permission to enter). One aspect of Kafka’s genius is to give us parables of the Structure becoming the tyrant God. The Structure is so absolute that people automatically snap into slavishness. The Structure has names, the Law, the Castle, but they are both aspects of the one on earth, the power that the Structure has to make you feel small, dis-honoured, incapable, unimaginative – unloved.
Kafka makes banal bureaucratic operations appear like the sacred. There’s transcendental light in his world and there are voices from elsewhere (the mysterious voices on the telephone line in The Castle). These seem beyond the realm of the personal: they’re part of a sublime but terrifying impersonal splendour thriving out of view.
2.
It sometimes seems that his parables of power are more than tales: they’re blueprints for how institutions run when they turn psychotic.
We feel at fault for crimes we didn’t commit. We feel at fault for not following the rules set out in advance by the Structure (which, after all, we’ve been told, is there to help us).
But what’s the crime we feel we have committed? Being here. Being a person. Being me. Being you. Being flawed. Being wrong about things. Wanting to be alive. Wanting to love, to be the beloved.
3.
Maxim on any institution you may happen to work for that seems Cosmo-Demonic: It’s run as if by Kafka, but minus his sense of humour.
Soul Crushing
1.
Why do some people gravitate towards the systems and mechanisms of the Structure? They crave its protection. They want its blessing. But those who truly become part of the Structure do so to screen the personal (you, me) out. This is the fear of people and their energies – intellectual, imaginative, spiritual, erotic, passionate.
If you truly wish to follow your pilgrimage, your path, then it’s likely you will collide with the blocks and mazes of the Law and the Castle (Kafka’s enduring metaphors for the ravening entity I call the Structure).
2.
If someone keeps trying to stuff you in a box, then make sure that the box isn’t a coffin.
3.
The Structure presses us. Its brutalizing imprint we often call depression or stress. These are presences felt on our souls and on our bodies. The pressure can be so intense it can crush and sicken.
You can feel squeezed and restricted by authority, by accreditations and precedents.
“Why should we make an exception for you?” One of the most oppressive of all questions...
4.
When tradition should be a ground from which we leap... When sequence should be the order from which we break... When accreditations should be used only for an acknowledgment...
When authority should be merely a guideline...
5.
What accreditations did Socrates and Jesus possess?
The Wages of Fear
1.
The way of fear in the Structure –
It works by withholding.
What is withheld? Finances and respect... In an abusive relationship, a person damages the other by withholding love. You experience this abuse when what’s withheld is affection, tenderness, kindness, intimacy, mutuality of touch. The abused one hopes this will stop. If you’re just good enough, patient or quiet enough, if you forgive all this time, the abuse will end.
This becomes the same arrangement of abuse we find at work in institutions. We hold out the hope that the abusiveness will end – most likely when you retire. But if for one moment you think you can exist without their protection, you will be made to feel you’ll die of exposure in the wilderness.
The Structure says: better abuse than loneliness.
2.
The pilgrimage lesson: we’re all in the wilderness. Every step outside of the Structure is into a frontier. “Breakdown leads to breakthrough.” – R.D. Laing, Marshall McLuhan
“No breakthrough without breakage.” – Norman O. Brown
3.
Origins. This is what the Structure fears in us: that we will wake up one day to find ourselves at the start, in the now,
here, beginning again.
Anything original could break out.
You may find yourself receptive and enthusiastic.
You may find yourself rolling away the stone that’s been
rolled over your heart.
“Exuberance is beauty.” – William Blake
4.
The more powerfully repressive the Structure, the more likely the desire to breakout will appear in alternative life- styles and practices.
This is where we may find the hunger to tattoo the body, to pump the body into muscle-bound shapes, to seek out different sex activities, to find moments of liberty in sex clubs and strip joints. These are often expressions of the imprisoned spirit and soul.
5.
The more mechanized and codified, rule-bound and closed, is the Structure �
�� the more an openness will be sought through the panorama of stars (astrology), individual spirituality (seek and you will find), homeopathy (the herbs of the world will restore you), and the stretching and heating of the body (yoga).
Doing anything to keep your breath and blood flowing... Going outside the walls of the Structure, the walls that we’ve built to prevent the Spirit from seeping in, seeking soul chaos...
The Names
1.
The Structure has many names:
Moloch
The Dark Satanic Mills
Urizen (Blake’s dark, limiting horizon)
Big Brother
Hitlerism/Stalinism
The Party/The Committee
Force (Simone Weil’s description of the energy that “turns man into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” This is not to be confused with the benign Force of The Star Wars Saga.)