Witness to the Workings of a
Colonized - and Wounded - Psyche
Sex, Rage Displacement, and Ecocide:
Wanderings In An Interior Archipelago Of The
Colonised
By Phil Rockstroh
October 25,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Human sexuality mirrors
human culture. Mating dances of seduction and
refusal, and acts of non-consensual aggression
cannot be separated from traits witnessed, practiced
and internalized by the people of a particular
society. It is impossible to close the bedroom door
to the culture at large. Eros not only inhabits the
genitals and the heart but Anima mundi as well.
Sexuality is not going to go away
because its nature, which is sublime in the sense of
the beautiful and the monstrous, makes people
uncomfortable. The phenomenon brings all things
human to the fore of consciousness. Therefore, it is
imperative we talk about it all, and without
mind-negating shame and heart-freezing hysteria.
The late, archetypal psychologist James Hillman,
in his final book, the brilliant but under
recognized, A Terrible Love Of War, noted
the consort, the backdoor man, of the Goddess of
Love and Beauty is Ares, the God of War. Moments
after her practical-minded husband Hephaestus would
leave for work, Ares and Aphrodite would be
ensconced in the lover’s bed, locked in intimate
embrace, under the very roof constructed by her
craftsman spouse. Withal, libido translates, often,
into impractical, irrational and dangerous
phenomenon.
Hillman asks, “where else in human experience,
except in the throes of ardor – that strange
coupling of love with war – do we find ourselves
transported to a mythical condition and the gods
most real?” — A Terrible Love of War (p.
9).
When human beings evince the erotic, we are
gripped and grappled by primal forces. The ancient
Greeks traced the phenomenon to the heights of
Olympus while the lurid, Calvinist/Puritan
imagination places it in lakes of torment-inflicting
hellfire.
Under capitalism, the activity will be
commodified. Sexuality is deemed a “human resource.”
And, as is the case with the finite resources of all
things on planet earth, designated as fodder for
exploitation by ruthless profiteers. The genitals of
an individual are but another precinct to be
colonized. One is advised to be ready with a local
insurgency of the heart, mind and body to retain
self-rule.
If only it was that easy. Where are the mountains
of the heart from which to stage a guerrilla war?
The option is possible. But expect a long struggle,
and for your heart to receive all manner of wounds.
Yet the pain of struggle provides us with a common
tongue that limns the radiance of everyday
catastrophe, including catastrophes attendant to the
realm of Eros, son of errant and erratic Aphrodite.
Thus we blunder into self-knowledge, are privy to
our own biography, read by pressing fingertips to
the braille of one’s scars.
Taking It All
When sexuality has been degraded by inequitable
power, and the powers at large have decreed all the
things of the world theirs for exploitation then the
system from which the predatory class gains their
power over the individual must be challenged and
dismantled. But the setup cannot be changed from
within its own self-sustaining, self-defining order.
The notion is as risible as a yellow fin tuna
joining the crew of a massive, sea life-decimating
fishing trawler, the tuna claiming it plans to
reform the system from within.
Men who callously disregard the autonomy of
others are only as powerful as the societal
structures in place that not only protect but
lavishly reward their hyper-aggressive mode of mind
and attendant modus operandi — apropos, the spoils
gained by the capitalist class by means of their
acts of perpetual plunder perpetrated against all of
humanity and the whole of nature.
Speaking of which, the coal and steel processing
company town, Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born
was a colonized place. The small, Southern city,
squatting at the foothills of the Appalachian
Mountains, was founded, built and controlled by
Northern industrialists. The homes of the city’s
affluent management class, known among us economic
lessers as the Big Mules, luxuriated in the clear,
fresh air upon Red Mountain (on which stands an
imposing, iron ore cast statue of Vulcan, the Roman
version of the Greek’s Hephaestus) while the white
laboring class and city’s Jim Crow-shackled
African-American community were relegated to
dwelling in the industrial smog below.
As is the case with colonialist socio-economic
structures, worldwide, in which a region’s wealth is
generated by a local, under-compensated labor force,
it was imperative for the anger and resentment of
the colonized masses to be shunted away from the
colonizers. The time-tested method of racial animus
did the trick. In my memory, the air of Birmingham
was ridden with a heavy industry-generated,
sulfuric, rotten egg-smelling reek that was
inseparable from the miasmic rage of white
working-class men such as my father.
The reasons for their fuming resentment included:
When my father would ask for a raise, the stock
reply from management was, “You know, I can go over
to Colored Town, right now, and hire five n*gg*ers
for what I pay, your narrow ass.”
Thus the anger of Birmingham’s Jim Crow era among
working men was always close to the surface, and, at
the slightest provocation, would come boiling forth
like phalanxes of fire ants from a disturbed bed.
Exposing the hateful social milieu of the Jim
Crow-ruled South to the world at large was a primary
factor in the decision of Martin Luther King et. al.
to bring the Civil Rights cause to the city of my
birth.
Denuded Empathy
For the maintenance of a colonized order to be
maintained, empathy must be denuded, fear and
antipathy of the alien other must be perpetuated
thereby obstructing any inclination towards mutual
respect and incipient feelings of affinity between
the tribe granted a favored, dominant position and
the tribes subjugated into positions of low status.
Alliances among the exploited would prove dangerous
to the elites whose fortunes are dependent on
perpetual racial and ethnic division and
divisiveness. Then, as now, class consciousness must
be suppressed by the fomenting of racial
resentments. When one gazes upon the sorehead
denizens of the so-called alt-right, one becomes
witness to the workings of a colonized — and wounded
— psyche.
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants -
This Is
Independent
Media
|
In my father’s case, the following reveals how he
transmigrated the howling abyss of his displaced
rage into the precincts of empathy.
My father injured his back in a fall from a
freight car while loading a cache of pig iron; as a
consequence, he, on a permanent basis, could no
longer perform manual labor — the primary type of
work available to the working-class men of
Birmingham. During his convalescence, he taught
himself photography, and, by the advent of the Civil
Rights Movement, he was freelancing to Black Star
Syndicate and became Life Magazine’s primary
stringer in the region. I have memories of him
arriving home from work, his clothes redolent of
tear gas, his adrenal system churning, his mind
buffeted, unable to process the brutality he
witnessed being perpetrated by both city officials
and ordinary citizens on the streets of the city.
On a Sunday, in late summer of 1963, my sister
and I were immersed in Blakean innocence playing in
the sandbox in the backyard of our family’s
apartment when he returned from the site of the 16th
Street Baptist Church bombing. There was a quality
about his stare that I found unnerving. His gaze
kept returning to my sister and me. Being a father
now myself, I know what thoughts were gripping and
grappling him… “what if it had been them. My god …
what if it had been them.”
Empathetic awareness has its starting point by
evincing a sensitivity to the feelings, hopes, and
aspirations of those close to one’s heart yet cannot
stall out there. The quality must ripple out to
distance shores inhabited by the alien other. In
this manner, the process of de-colonization of one’s
mind can begin.
Denial of the reality of Climate Change, albeit
outside the cynical ranks of obscenely compensated
Big Energy Industry lobbyists and shills, is borne
of a similar, life-negating dynamic, i.e., an
ossified egotism winnows down awareness to
manageable bits of casuistry:
“I just shoveled three feet of snow from my
driveway. Global Warming…my frozen butt.” “I think
too much political hay is made from weather. Our
ancestors braved it and it was part of their lives,”
arrive the (verbatim) quotes as seen on my Facebook
newsfeed.
The declarations reveal an inner colonization,
manifested by a monoculture of the mind. Because the
natural world and the human psyche emerged from the
same evolutionary schematic, circumscribing down
one’s consciousness to ad hoc rationalizations for
maintaining a destructive status quo, as is the case
with climate denialism, amounts to psychical ecocide
thus mirrors the fate of the earth, now in the
throes of the sixth great extinction, due to the
predation attendant to hyper-industrialization and
consumerist addiction. The exponential loss of
biodiversity is mirrored in the collective psyche of
the consumer-scape, as if a massive fishing trawler
has stripped all signs of life from the oceanic
heart of humankind.
Going On
“I can’t go on…I’ll go on.” — final two sentences
of Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable.
Yet, at times, I’m baffled as to how we, the
scant and scattered few, who refuse to close our
eyes and block our hearts to the realities of the
day continue to go on. What force restrains one from
reeling into the street seized by lamentation?
One foot is placed before the other. One word
follows the next on the page. An ineffable
understanding draws us into communion with the world
and each other, even as the din of disconsolate
angels braces the mind and cleaves the heart.
I know I am not alone in this. Nor are you. Even
though, it seems so. What is the common prayer for
those who cannot close themselves off from the
agonized soul of the colonized world — for those of
us who are ants who dream we are Atlas, and our
visions crush us as if it were the weight of the
earth itself upon our shoulders?
We face a vast aloneness together. An affinity of
isolation binds us like a prayer of sacred
vehemence. Empathy enjoins us thereby bestowing
preternatural strength. Otherwise, the immense
sadness of the earth would crush us into oblivion.