The Pied Piper of Hamlin
My message, put too vague in my previous post, overlaps with things Edward Hamiton communicated with me about cosmetic attempts to defy aging or airbrush oneself with an appearance of plastic youth. My thesis here joins with his, since it stands in mocking amazement at an entire culture's avoidance of or glossing over of aging and death (cryonics being the dead-end of such obsessions). I don't wish to misapply Freudian terms, but *obsession* (not mentioned above) figures centrally in my understanding of how the body is ... compartmentalised and delinked from the human being. I'm not letting global cultures off the hook in this regard, but I'm aiming my DARTS now at the very recent trend in Anglo and American world power, uncoincidentally coupled with Modernity (1820s - Present), in which the Body only ever exists in polarities. People (me included) never find a 'middle-ground' for Nature or the body - because our society never groundworked any ground in the middle. All ground is forced to the edges. Standing 'between things' means for us taking extreme sides, or reacting to the poles themselves, thus shunting you mercilessly to yet another pole. With something as culturally aged, forgotten and inconvenient as ... Your Very Own Body (!), Modernists did not know what to do but to start killing people with electric chairs and gas-chambers in their terror of crunching bones or pouring blood. So afraid of the Body had they become. And the poor children! The children, like separate non-human creatures because they're not adults (no, not allowed!), these amputated kids & teens absorb and court some occult Adult world by playing doctor and hiding everything they do in the barnyard until they finally leave Body-taboos behind to become the raving psycho adults their parents were, rushing marriage (or free-love!) because they had no outlet for eating, drinking, sleeping, or pursuing their sexual love in peace, moderation, sacredness, adult morale, and commitment. There is no extended communal family to foster any integration of the body. You are stuck with people too biologically close to you to receive any real comfort or guidance. You need bredth and distance, but shall not get it. The kids therefore have to martyr their bodies all alone, like jilted bulemics, throughout puberty itself, ruining the greatest discovery period of their lives, then later joining ranks with the half-imagined world of their betters in which they themselves, locked and jailed inside the xenophobic Nuclear Family, toss aside the Old Grandparents and corral (with steel cables!) the next group of Little Innocent Kids, and disrespect everyone's body around them. You see - you must shun your yucky body or just go nuts with it, breaking every law! Thou Shalt Not receive any Middle Ground. Everyone has a gross yucky body, a body very awkward to deal with. The body in this culture of physical debasement always comes compartmentalised, non-integrated with the mind, with the heart, with one's convictions, with morality. The body in this culture is a riddle for moral law instead of a reason for the same moral law to protect throughout larger, integrated multi-generations. At the root of these harmful Modernist obsessions, speeding arrows stray of any target, is the Adult World, 'sensational', occult, segmented from the 'Pure Child's' world. All the ridiculous and life-segmenting values of the bourgeois Modernist Protestants and/or Atheists hemmed the poor Child in like a paralysing Idyll. Puritanical society fears 'corruption of our poor poor kids' (!) above all things, making `The Pied Piper of Hamlin` the most terrifying fairy-tale known in America. This gross 'ex-corporalising' of one's own offsprings or life-pupils is a deeply anti-body tradition (strangely overlapping with ritual school spankings, taboo school sex-fetishes, bodily sadistic teachers and headmasters and parents.)
It's not so much that Anglos & Americans simply do 'transgressive things' with the body - it's that they have compartmentalised the body and grown up obsessing about it like a sundered finger or an ear they lost as a child, or which some rule forbad them use for touching or hearing (!). All this loss and taboo and discomfort and the making 'gross' of things sacred and ancient, results in only one thing: The body as a disjointed, disfigured object like a project for a cosmetologist, per Ed's perceptive paragraph. The nuclear family, the Modern Nuclear Family (who controls the world in a material empire), is overly protective by nature since it's too narrow and small a social group to feel secure. The empire is materially strong, socially very weak. It looks out over its vista of materials it needs to continue this flawed experiment in unnatural consumption and child-rearing. You see, the tiny tiny nuclear family must protect ....the Children! Those innocent Children! Insidiously, for those who grow up inside this world, those people never get a sky-view of the amputation of their very body-heart-selves as they grow into 'Adults'. You grow up with your body, and with the body of your friend nearby, or that of your mother, or your bride hoped-to-be, but you are told you must amputate your body from your career, from your routine, from your relationships, and (most importantly) you must privatise any of those more 'gross things' like too much focus on food, sleep, exercise, sex, helping the sick, or easing and honouring and communalizing the passage of the dying/dead.
What is left when one is forced to amputate one's own body - only this: A lot posturing on a stage. A lot of acting. All this grossness (magical miraculous nature made 'gross'!), all this unholiness is perfect material for the Modern artist's templates. In a world grown unfeeling and deadened, things like bleeding or digesting food or reproduction or giving birth become sizzly sensations on the artist's lurid stage. Life itself is not respected - so of course Dying and Death are not either.
