Can't Miss Cowboy


Last night just before I went to bed I watched a couple of scenes from Cronenberg's, "A History of Violence." Linda does not like violent movies unless there is some elevation of the violence into the poetic, as in, "Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai." In Ghost Dog Jim Jarmusch mixes the violence with a certain amount of poetry, and Linda can relate to it. In some other movies she can't relate, or doesn't want to.

In films like "For A Few Dollars More," or, "A Fist Full of Dollars," the man is allowed to reach identification with a God of Justice. His story originates in the murder of his family by violent strangers, and proceeds toward final justice. The essential, underlying development of this man is the skill to carry the story toward perfect justice. He is the instrument of a higher power, and as such he gets to enjoy being one with a god who just can't miss. He can't miss because it's his play and his characters.

The first law of survival in the poetry of men is don't get too identified with the character you're playing, or you'll never absorb the entire play. You'll run out of time, and the mask you put on gets stuck; you can't get it off. "Mask Eats Man." The ultimate hero, detached from ego and encompassing the entire play, is the Man with No Name.

"What is it you like so much about that movie?" she asks when I slip into bed. Her voice is sleepy and I know she doesn't expect more than a grunt or unintelligible mumbling. "It's a classic story of a peaceful man being forced into action, like Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Paul Newman in Hombre. It's showing that inside peaceful, everyday men, there is a history of violence, and if you try hard enough you can get introduced."

Violence is only half the instinctual equation. Then there' sex, which also has history in the genetic makeup. Anyone who has done research into the subject understands that sexuality can get anchored to any number of things, most notably fetish objects. Krafft Ebing as I recall wrote about a man whose arousal was mixed up with the smell of rotted meat. Being offended by these things doesn't make them less true.

I recall reading an article in the New Yorker about a duck whose mated with a garbage can lid. There are people whose sexual arousal is connected to violence, certainly. That's pretty common. For others it is co-mingled with a particular object or environmental trigger. This is regarded as a moral failing, but in reality morality can only act to repress the energy through patterns of muscular contraction. This of course drains energy, and the more identity is sanitized through repression, the less energy is available from the only source there is, the body.

(Joanne Stroud, PhD):

Robert Bly, who spoke here to the Institute eight years ago, wrote a small, excellent book on the human shadow. One of the most effective metaphors he uses to describe the shadow is that of a long bag that we drag around behind us. He says we come into the world with a 360-degree personality. Then we start putting in the bag all the parts of our personality that our parents, our teachers, and later our friends do not like. Early in our development, sexuality and closeness to bodily processes are put in the bag. Then anger and, especially for the boy child in our culture, often tenderness and attachment to female values are also thrown into the bag. Other values hidden away include a love for the earth and respect for the sustainability of our planet. Fierceness and animal joy go into the bag, those wonderful sources of energy. Actually, everyone without serious health problems has more than enough energy. We waste our energy keeping the bag shut. We know that the aborigines in Australia or the Mexican Indians in Copper Canyon can run for days without eating. We have to go around the corner to Starbucks or Hagen Das to keep our energy up. Whenever we feel loss of energy, we can assume that energy is trapped in the bag. Whatever we have put into the bag regresses into a more primitive state as a result of being caught there.

I remember when I first heard Lenny Bruce. I was working as a writer, as opposed to a reporter, and the reporters in the entertainment department were afraid of some of the books and records that came through the department. It was odd, but they handled them like they might explode or something, and the only place they knew they could get rid of them was my desk. I was not raised to be afraid of ideas. So books or records that might call one's respectability into question ended up on my desk.

When I was a kid my dad told me about when he was in a psychiatric hospital in San Francisco after coming back from the South Pacific with his nerves shot after getting trapped behind enemy lines. He couldn't be released into society without some debriefing about killing people who piss you off. "They had a library," he said, "where they had good literature in one section, and in another one they had dirty books. They were trying to categorize us by what we read. So I would read a book from one section, and then from the other."

If that was a dream, or a scene from a movie, the library would display the split that is displayed by all of us, that of the high mind and the low mind, the inspiring words and the dirty words. And the split would repeat itself in the man. There is a knight and there is a troll, a hero and a villain. If these things are kept separated from each other they can forget that they are two aspects of the same person, one organic and instinctual, the other created by a diversion of organic energy into a mask intended for public consumption.

When they get too far separated from each other, like two obese people on a teeter totter, the weight at the poles is too much and the center doesn't hold. There is a nervous breakdown. If one somehow manages to get more weight on one side than the other, he or she "flips out." And if for some reason the Self has to jettison one side and save one, the beautiful, higher self is dumped and the shadow is saved. It has more energy and thus more survival value. (I am borrowing her from Jungian Robert Johnson)

That's why it's dangerous to get all that separation between good and evil, good men and bad men, liberals and conservatives, gay and straight. Anyone who reads Krafft Ebing or Kinsey knows that human sexuality is a daunting subject, and the surface is very different from the depths.

That was what I was thinking about when I was writing yesterday. I was thinking about all we know about ourselves is the ego we have created, and that it is paired with everything it rejected in a balance as delicate as the balance in the blood sugar. Move forward in one direction, and the shadow compensates exactly. It has to be this way to stay in balance.

So it should not be surprising when somebody who is very conservative and restrained in their behavior travels to Sioux City once in awhile to rent a room and guy a bottle of whiskey. No matter how much a man might want to believe he is just what he has chosen to be, there is always the Secret Sharer.

I think the big difference in attitudes might be whether or not you get away when you're young and have anonymity. I know that when I was a sailor in Japan there was nothing I wanted to do that I didn't do, because nobody cared. It must be awful to have to always have to look at yourself through the prism of other people's judgments and expectations when you're first exploring the world.

I think there are a lot of people like Senator Craig, who live a split life. But I don't think it is an individual problem, but a societal problem. If the society splits the people in it are split. Conservatives and liberals aren't two different species, and the one can shift to the other. They are simply defining each other by the ego position and the shadow position.

I wasn't trying to make fun of Craig. I was making fun of the entire idea that any one of us can know what another person's path is. I suppose Brugh Joy was the one who taught me that people who are heart centered have compassion for others. That is not pity, and it does not try to save them or force them away from a painful path or experience. Compassion comes from the knowledge that each person if following a path that leads them to their particular completion, and doesn't judge it.

Personally I don't know Craig, but I don't think I'd like him. Tolerance isn't the same thing as aesthetic appreciation. Liking somebody isn't the point. We all have to put up with each other, and personally, I'm puzzled as to what would make Craig more gay than the interrogators at Abu Ghraib. Here is an excerpt from an article on what was going on there:

In the same period, reporter Seymour Hersh, who helped uncover the scandal, said in a speech before an ACLU convention: "Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok? Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men ... . The women were passing messages saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened.'
"Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out."
It seems odd to me that there is controversy over whether Craig is gay, or just highly sexed, while there has been very little attention in the media to the obviously brutal homosexuals who are setting up De Sade theater groups as part of our cultural exchange program. They are exporting to other countries what has developed in our prison system here in America. An excerpt from this article from History News Network:
The use of sex and sexual humiliation as torture in Abu Ghraib and the other American prisons in Iraq is endemic to the American prison. Psychological and physical sexual torture is exacerbated by the underlying policy of denying prisoners any volitional sex, making the only two forms of sexual activity that are physically possible--homosexuality and masturbation--both offenses subject to punishment. Strip searches, including invasive and often intentionally painful examination of the mouth, anus, testicles or vagina, frequently accompanied by verbal or physical sexual abuse, are part of the daily routine in most prisons.

This isn't a problem about who is homosexual and who isn't, because anyone with much psychological sophistication knows that everyone contains both genders. That's just the reality. The body, being materialized, is feminine, and the problem is violence against the body. We are exporting sadistic pornographic stage shows to the Middle East and other undisclosed production facilities from our American prison system. From the White House down to the media production team the decisions reflect sadistic homosexual individuals.

Betraying his roots in the "Butch" faction of the German "gay rights" movement, Roehm viewed homosexuality as the basis for a new society. Louis Snyder writes that Roehm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behavior pattern of high repute...he flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted that his cronies do the same. What was needed, Roehm believed, was a proud and arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in his eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals" (Snyder:55). "The principle function of this army-like organization," writes historian Thomas Fuchs, "was beating up anyone who opposed the Nazis, and Hitler believed this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals" (Fuchs:48f).

This isn't a German problem per se. It's societal problem stemming from a masculine ego inflation. And it's getting worse fast. Putting Larry Craig in the limelight is sort of like a kid pulling the covers over his head because the house is on fire. The escape from the crisis at hand is illusory. Maybe we can get some help from the Man With No Name. You know, the one who used to be God, before everybody became a name dropper.

Maybe we can get some perspective from Don Juan ...

Posted: Wed - August 29, 2007 at 09:47 AM