Culture, Evolution And Perpetual War:
Post Modern Critique
1: Introduction:
Laocoon: The Perils of Knowing
Striving to rise, Laocoon is pulled down. Attempting to break free, he is confined–snakes coiling round arms and thighs ever more tightly, so that no amount of effort can set him free. Around him, the citadel of Troy erupts into flaming ruins, and its people shall soon be slaughtered, or marched into ignominious captivity.
2: Hijacking the Future: This Mortal Coil
Brain and body are the inventive, but odd couple of evolution– one riding high, head sometimes in the clouds, perched atop the powerful, appetitive and controlling shoulders. The other pushing off heroically, muscularly in pursuit of strategies that mind had targeted as means of maximizing fitness and gaining more life…
Together they swam, slithered, trotted or stumbled forward through the eons, undergoing the periodic costume and scenic changes scripted by chance, death and change: as filter feeders, bloodsuckers, or toothy sets of murderous jaws; now amphibian, now reptile, and most recently as mammal…replicating the digestive tube format in myriad variations until together they arrived at last as Australopithecus, somewhere very near the threshold of this modern world.
3: Masters of Illusion: Ascending-Descending
Each generation, a new cast of characters queues to be baptized at the banks of the river Lethe. Under the spell of forgetfulness, they wade out yet again to commence another rudderless drift into war.
4: How Humans First Stumbled Upon The Gods
The idea of a god who looks, acts and thinks like humans was a boldly successful power strategy. It was bold because it was so risky, so logically preposterous, so easily exposed by the critical faculty as a fabrication.
5: Akhenaten vs. Henry 8: Hellions or Saints?
Much like the Northwest Indians who believed the ground they trod upon was the composite of the spirits of ancestors long gone, modern humans also tread upon the ancients. The corridors of the Pentagon, the doorway into the oval office, the coiling spires of the Kremlin, the hypnostyle hall at Karnak–these are the stone flowers that spring from the fecund, ancient earth, reminding us that the secret of all renewal is return.
6: Post Modern Oedipus: Masquerade…Or Farce?
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is not a biography, is not tied to reality in any way. It is not about justice, not about merit, not about Laius’ misbehavior, not about Apollo, not about rashness or egotism, not about the consequences of over-reaching…It is a dumb show whose masked, puppet-like actors go through the motions of a bizarre legend in order to lead us to a single, overwhelming question: Should a man dare to take control of his own life?
7: Erda’s Ring: Sleep Tight Wotan
In a moment of climactic irony, Donner hammers away the storm clouds and a Rainbow Bridge opens up, inviting the gods to cross from this cursed world to the security of their newly built fortress, Valhall…Spellbound, they gape in horror as Erda rises from the depths to deliver a prophecy from the heart of a bluish flame…
8: Panopticon: Welcome To Your Portable Prison
Carried atop powerful the shoulders of a muscular tyrant, each captive brain is borne forward on a personal Exodus out of Egypt. Their vehicle is steered by a Read-Only program of terrible Commandments…Remembering the fate of Uzzah we must ask: can we dare to approach this Ark and touch it?
9: Sigmund Freud: Tear Off The Masks
Bumper to bumper, the shimmering heat waves rising off windshields and hoods, they were going nowhere. Nowhere, that is, except back to the single footpath in a mountain defile that united Cithaeron and Thebes; nowhere, but back to the place where three roads meet; nowhere, but back to the repetition compulsions that mitigated prolonged infantile dependence and had become the organizing bases for adult life; nowhere but back to the strange evolutionary adaptations that had made culture possible and simultaneously pinned humanity’s collective, Oedipal heels.
10: Mythic Engine of U.S. Culture: Epigenesis of Totemism
From his seat within the womb-like sanctuary, Lincoln gazes out over an enormous reflecting pool–a national birth canal–to contemplate the distant, Moby-like immensity of Washington’s engendering obelisk. Dozens of times larger than its pharaonic progenitors, this icon towers erect from its artificial mons in primal, phallic triumph over the fecund marketplaces of a capitalistic, postmodern world…
11: Ecce Homo: Nightmare in Eden
The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leap frog on his thighs. They were black, and iridescent green without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned…
12: Why History Must Always Repeat…
Not even Robespierre, clad for the Feast of Reason in his new coat of Robin’s egg blue, could make humanity over. Not overnight–no matter how sharp he kept the guillotine.
13: Bernini: Erotic Religious Seduction
Bernini’s St Teresa swoons languidly upon a coral-like bed of dreams that floats above the altar of the Sta. Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Head tilted back invitingly, throat beginning to emerge from a ravishing swirl of polished drapery, Teresa seems about to fall into a perpetual unconsciousness while, poised above her, Cupid thrusts a golden arrow again and yet again deep into her heart…
14: Hamlet: Into The Abyss!
The doors unlock and swing wide. Women swarm into the department store, their purses acting as cudgels, their high heels spiking into enemy ankles and calves. Watch as these fierce maenads struggle in anguish to lay hold of a scarce pair of nylons. Two, like famished robins struggling for a worm, tug and tug at one precious stocking which sadly stretches to three times its length and then expires. Still more women surge in through the open doors, a tidal wave of human desire.
15: A Plague of Dreams! Death of a Salesman
A fragile vessel bobs like a sodden cork beneath heavily threatening clouds. Some of its passengers are resigned, others near to expiring, and still others are intent on keeping watch, perhaps believing in the imminence (or immanence) of rescue. They have gathered at what they believe to be the front of the raft, near a makeshift mast. But they have no rudder to steer by. Great blasts of wind impel them in the opposite direction from that which they imagine their rescue might come. A dead man, his legs dowsing the surface of the shark filled sea, leads them on their way.
16: Schizo-Philosophy: The Sirens Beckon
At countless junctures upon its journey, the Idealist tradition skates perilously close to the edge of the wood–the edge that all along we have insisted we must come to see. The ice is thin; the darkness of the shadowy trunks looms ever closer. But the deft skater salutes, then turns and glides out into the sunlight once again…
17: Counter Reformation: Plato’s Attack On Reality
Crassus, I suppose, is the supreme example of the ambition to acquire. Already the richest man in Rome, he clamored after more honors, finally securing the command of an expedition against Parthia. His choice turned out to be a spectacular disaster. His son Publius was captured and beheaded in the first engagement, and Plutarch shows us the great man on the eve of the final, futile battle…unable to rouse his soldiers who had marched into Parthia with such bright confidence.
18: Tragedy Unmasked: Beware the Trojan Horse!
Our psychic history has been the story of two contradictory metaphysical positions struggling for dominance within the prison of the skull: Idealism, with its faith in eternal life, and Materialism, which accepts chance, death and change as the law…
Tragedy begins as religious affirmation, then rejects delusion and turns its face toward existential independence. It replaces the image of heaven with a handful of dust, and the promise of the superseded myths is re-directed and firmly bound to earth.
19: The Monomythic Roots Of Everything
Osiris, Haoma, Tammuz, Dionysus, Persephone, Quetzalcoatl, even Jesus, whose Easter festival reminds us Eostre, Germanic goddess of spring. These are a few of the gods who participate in the monomythic pattern of Loss, Journey, Test and Return.
20: Dionysus: Stampeding the Gods!
Dionysus comes from the depths of the psychic past to teach how and where the gods began. But who broke the locks to the door of the repressed unconscious? Who then aroused this monster from his slumbers and led him up and out into the sunlit, Apollonian world that the reason had arranged into coercive celestial hierarchies?…Dionysus threatens to kill off the gods–unless they can kill him first.
21: Prometheus, Satan & Jesus:
Even today, some two thousand years after their leader was proven so dreadfully wrong, one still hears of fanatical bands who sell all their property, resign their jobs, and retreat to some common home and barricade the doors–all in the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return. That he never came as predicted must have been an agonizing disappointment for the believer, who was forced to repeatedly reinterpret scripture so as to justify the delay of the second coming.
22: Kansas Forever: Finding Your Way Back Home
Inexplicably, the second-hand, un-witnessed Resurrection occurs off stage. What was the mythologist up to? Why not have Christ rise before gaping millions? Why not have the stone that blocked the crypt blasted to smithereens, or even better, suspended aloft by magical force fields as in a painting by surrealist Magritte?