Slogging Toward Bethlehem


Looking at the news coming out of the Middle East -- and it has settled on us like an oil slick -- I am struck by a duality. If you've never been struck by a duality you can't understand the mixed emotion it elicits. A duality doesn't deliver just a blow, like a rifle butt to the kidneys for example. That would be a singularity. A singularity is something which takes all your attention and focuses it to a single point, exposing everything else as of only relative value. If somebody shoots you, for example, it overshadows the fine points of political ideology.

I remember reading that Hitler at some point was committing Germany to suicide, but he was obsessive enough he wanted it without knowing he wanted it. There is a drive toward self-destruction, both in people and in nations. Mostly we don't want to look at the suicide question because it involves confronting death, and in confronting death, as in confronting life, it is out of our control with the possible exception of our attitude toward it.

Being struck by a duality doesn't hit one directly. At first it's just a kind of religious fervor that begins to take hold, and a feeling of being uplifted above those less fortunate. This is the same as ego inflation in an individual. One finds evidence for one's superiority, but it is, unfortunately, one-sided. This activates the other side of the energy field, and the other one-sided evidence supports a deflation, or depression. This is dangerous because it is "evidence" that the "dark forces" are winning.

Mr. Bush's support comes from the Party, and the assumption of his respect for his father. This was a projection. He is in competition with his father. I would tell you it's over Barbara but you can only take so much bad news at a sitting. Like Hamlet, he is beset with dark forces which, curiously, are born in his relations with his parents and interfere with both domestic and foreign policy.

When I look back at history it seems that the biggest mistakes are psychological mistakes. That is to say, the patterns unfolding in the person become projected onto the world stage. Hitler and his duality between Jew and non Jew could have been worked through in his art, in a warehouse, supported by his day job as a motivational speaker. Instead it became a grand plan to solve the ego shadow problem by "killing" the shadow and being rid of it.

Psychologically, this is insanity. The fact that it is so widespread a delusion doesn't make it any less insane. When it pulls the mass of people under the spell, you can feel it in the air. Well, you can feel it in the air in the expansion phase as a war fever and macho attitude, flags flying from gas guzzlers, and yellow ribbons on the old oak tree. But then when the regressive phase comes around, everybody shrinks back in proportion to their speed crazed expansion. People wander around with a hangover, a sense something is always not quite right, and they legitimately feel danger. Nothing is more fear producing than when there has been a break with reality. Nothing makes sense anymore. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Today I saw a piece in the New York TImes about Yeat's poem, "The Second Coming," and how the imagery of the poem has been working it's way into the attempt to find an analogy for the Iraq War. In the poem a half man half beast "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born." But it's not just any half beast. It's the body of a lion. A lion is, in literary reference, the personification of Christ in animal form. Sometimes the image of a bear is used in the same way.

When I searched the poem it came with attending interpretations. It's like a puzzle box of images and it's a great game to relate them to personal and cultural influences, like interpreting a dream. But is there a "right" interpretation of the poem? I don't think so. This is the text:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The reason poetry is different from other forms of writing is that it doesn't decide anything for you. It shows you a composition, like a painter shows you a painting. The falcon is making ever wider orbits and can't hear the falconer. This can easily be the duality of the body and the mind, where we lose touch with our instinctual center, and the center cannot hold.

When the actions don't fit the ego image, whether on a personal or a collective level, there is a communication problem, usually solved by disowning the offending actions. The shadow is composed of disowned material, which is then easily projected. This is behind the admonition to take the beam out of your own eye before seeing the mote in your brother's eye.

Even when we are presented with some startling news, such as that the President of Russia has pronounced us out of control in military adventures, and we know that we started an illegal war on fabricated evidence, we still want to "put the best face on it." The news headlines dismiss the charge in favor of stories about Gates' sense of humor in response to it. That isn't news. This is a People Magazine story substituted for a mature examination of how we are being viewed outside our borders.

It's like something Faulkner created from the Gothic decay of an old Southern family, where the body is covered in quick lime, rotting in the cellar, and the local boys come around to throw on more lime, to protect the fantasy that has been created upstairs. The loyalists close ranks and patch up the leaks in the bubble. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Yeats says that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

That doesn't really need interpreting, does it?

The vast image out of the Spiritus Mundi appears. This is what Brugh Joy calls the "Long Body." It extends back through the evolutionary cycles of mankind, and has a mind not confined to small cycles of time, such as the two thousand years of Christianity. This power contains all pretenders. This larger mind is the spirit of the world, and in Yeats' vision, it comes awake as the Second Coming.

The beast has a gaze "blank and pitiless as the sun." There is no human emotion in the beast, which also means there is no projection.

I recall a defining dream in which a lion crossed my path and the eyes were exactly like that. It was when I met those eyes I knew there was no lie which would not be observed as a lie. To survive the encounter with the lion required total presence in my body, to have eyes like the lion's eyes. And yet I still lie! I am still caught in the trap of duality, and sometimes the falcon cannot hear the falconer. But at least I remember that there is a unified state of consciousness, even if I failed to hold onto it.

Whatever is waiting to be born, it does not know ordinary emotion. It does know what it sees from it's own eyes, and what it sees passes through the barrier of the brain without being Photoshopped. That's a huge evolutionary jump from what we're getting now.

Posted: Mon - February 12, 2007 at 02:33 PM