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.

Past the Poles

We don't want women. We don't want men. We want interactive women and men.

We don't want hard workers. We don't want hard players. We want people of lasting intimacy.

We don't want vacation. We don't want overtime. Every hour is holy.

We don't want recreation. We don't want boredom. We want delight in each other's presence.

We don't want 0-tolerance. We don't want payback. We'll take things with a grain of salt.

We don't want Black. We don't want White. We want everything inbetween.

We don't want surface. We don't want varnish. We want everything underneath.

We don't want Victorian. We don't want skank. We want a giving lover.

We don't want silence. We don't want talk. We want bonding.

We don't want puritans. We don't want debauch. We want people making pleasure.

We don't want to conserve. We don't want to rebel. We want things that matter to last.

We don't want to compete. We don't want to stagnate. We want things that matter to last.

We don't want slavery. We don't want free. We want privacy to make moral choices.

We don't want war. We don't want peace. Our lives surpass your state.

We don't want life. We don't want death. We want you not to fear them.

We don't want to work. We don't want to retire. We want a life worth working and spending for.

We don't want Republicans. We don't want Democrats. We want our neighbours in office.

We don't want condemners. We don't want avoiders. We want leaders who face our face.

We want leaders who relate to people. We want governments who love the world.

We don't want Team A. We don't want Team B. Learn to play ball with F.

We don't want your goals. We don't want your data. We want your living soul.

We don't want security. We don't want control. We will risk the unexpected.

We don't want growth. We don't want markets. We want new seed every Spring.  

                        ~NpH

You're Not a Self, You Silly Elf

`Self-discovery` is a mutual, mirroring act. The self can see the self, to a degree, better than another can, but not without the mirror of the Other. Self is not a reference point for itself. Insofar as it is, it's equally a reference point for Other. Self exists only with recourse to an entity outside of itself which interacts and overlaps with it. If self interacts only with Self, there is no awareness, identity, unity or evolution. In real life, there is division, there is unity: Without the one, you cannot have the other. The joy of unity is meaningless if there can be no mystic mingling between related but simultaneously distinct selves. Absolute selfhood is a delusion, a blindness to Self and Other, a distortion of reality. It is not only because of communities that we see or have Self. And yet we cannot see or have Self without other intercoursing selves.

Brought to you by another Quiet Sunday Evening.

~NpH

Sun upon Sea-Green

After a walk, I saw Ranfax briefly. I was dangling from chinup bars and she tickled me from behind. Wanted to take her and hug her like mad. In the evening after work, she finger-stalked my side where I sat on a chair near M.G. I caught her hand. With a squeal, she pulled back heavily and I held my grasp. The entire chair moved, rotating. She slid in a circle, her nightgown slipping on the smoothe floor. She rolled round in front of the chair, her back to me. I tickled her sides. She flung her legs up in the air and wriggled wildly. The golden sheaves of her hair fell undulating across my lap, silkily splayed out and scented with bath salts. Her sunlocks crowned a satiny green blouse: Bright gold and the green silk flashing. Her cheeks flushed like red wine filling a glass. Her eyes were as blue as hyacinth, her lips crimson. M.G. kindly condescended, fatherly like. I kept silent. Couldn't speak. She shied off as he blustered: "What a bread-baker, what precocious intellect (for her age). She's a good kid." I looked at her squarely: "I never thought of her as a kid." 13 March 1996

Your blush-hue makes me fill wine-red to the top like a poured glass. The venison-rich kineflesh - life-fattening, grassfed - makes our cheeks flush red. My skin stains crimson in the sea-wind. My nose fills with reek of lambwool, saltwind, grass-cud, cow udder, kine-dung, heather and whin on the wind. Wombsap and springseed, autumn sweet and winter salt, tears and laughs. Deerherding storm girls roll wind-high over sea-cliffs. Willow-wallow-haired woman, winsome, toothsome, resinous, sustaining. Sun-locks over greensod. 24-25 October 2009

Wombsea

When i was a little, i had a name for the faucet and flood which filled a hot bathtub while i sat in it: Birth Dreaming Death. What did i feel? A birth, a dream, a death. I'd taken the words from a George MacDonald fairy story. Today, September Twelfth, the breath of autumn blew me under a hot showerhead where I stood in a dreaming daze, almost hypnosis. What did i feel? Hypnotised by WHAT? No hypnotist ever encircled me. But this hot water swarms and wraps me. Waves of hot collide with the chill of Death, and whispers of comfort and stings of pleasure. I stand and sway, racked by surges of sating vulnerability, the nakedness of a newborn with skin exposed to February frost. What did i feel? My mother once folded me in the warmth of her feminine flesh. I was lost in love. I knew no other wind nor heat save her breath and skin. Once more, my body bleeds the truth, and Death and Birth kiss at the Chasm Lip. My blood is taken undersea, or through ice-air, or into fire. Clothless i slip into slicksea as age grows sage over my flesh. Hot chills and cool heat ride me to the brink. Gooseskin shivers in ancient conviction, vindicated by numinous awe. All my body is bare to the breadth and bulge of Wombsea.

Ravencare

March Fifth, I dreamt. A raven reeled in front of me. Wore a neck-chain, blinked blue eyes. Startled, I started to swat. "Stop. She wants to feed you", says a voice. My arms sank. I opened my mouth. Quickfood sure-aimed shot from her beak. She fluttered and fanned, her wings fell feather warm on my naked neck.