According to the AFP, Iran secretly tested ballistic missiles "capable of delivering a nuclear payload in breach of UN resolutions" on Tuesday. Western Governments fear this is the next step in Iran's goal of producing an atomic warhead and is a dangerous escalation of tension in the region. On the second day of Iran's 'Great Prophet 6' or Mohammad annual celebration, the Iranian general Ami Ali Hajizadeh told Fars that the war games were a "message of peace and friendship to countries of the region". If the Islamic states aren't picking up on the message, then the Americans and Israelis certainly are. These actions are the posturing of a nervous country trying to establish a clear message: stay out of Turkey and Syria's affairs. The missile with nuclear capabilities was tested by the Iran's Revolutionary Guards and was an "Iranian-made surface-to-surface" medium-ranged missile. An SSM is a "guided projectile launched from a hand-held, vehicle mounted, trailer mounted or fixed installation or from a ship" (Wikipedia). "Short- medium- and long-range missiles will [also] be fired, especially the Kanlij-Fars, Sejil, Fateh, Ghiam, and Shahab-1 and -2 missiles," the general was quoted. "The range of our missiles has been designed based on American bases in the region as well as the Zionist regime." It was reported by the Iranian media that they had fired "nine Zelzal missiles, two Shahab-1s, two Shahabs-2, and a single medium-range Ghardr" (AFP) at the same time and a single target.
This newest threat came on top of news from a Russian diplomat, Sergei Ryabkov, that Iran's first nuclear plant at Bushehr would start up in August. The West warns that this is in an attempt to build a nuclear weapon, but the Iranians claim it is a peaceful pursuit of cheaper energy. Some believe that the Islamic country has been emboldened by "what it sees as U.S. military defeats in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan" as well as planned American withdrawal of 33,000 troops in Afghanistan by September 2012, which has been controversial with top US Military brass. Both occupied countries still stand on the edge of chaos, with suicide bombers hitting a Kabul hotel, and a man in a wheel chair blowing himself up in front of a police station north of Baghdad on Sunday, wounding 18 people and killing 3. 15 US troops died this month in the embattled Iraq, the highest number since May 2009--4,465 American military personnel have been killed overall since the beginning of the war in 2003, not including civilians (an estimated 1,000,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict). Many in the military believe that the bulk of these casualties came from Shiite militants backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who have been funneling more weapons into the Iraq and Afghanistan in a push to get the Americans to leave. Iraqi militants have been caught with "smuggled rocket assisted exploding projectiles" (Solomon - WSJ), and in Afghanistan, the Taliban have been using rockets which have doubled their range of attack--weapons which have traced back to the Persian country. The Iranians, for their part, claim that this is American propaganda to continue to justify staying in the region.
The Iranian exercise is reported to last for 10 days, which is "unusually long" for a military game. This just adds pressure to an already boiling region. The Iranians want the Americans and NATO to stay out, especially with a potential conflict headed between the Turks and the Syrians. General Hajizadeh told Fars, "[The American's] military bases in the region are in a range of 130, 250, and maximum 700 km in Afghanistan which we can hit with these missiles" and on Monday revealed underground silos which, an officer claimed, were "numerous" and couldn't be detected by overhead satellites. In the video released, these silos appear to hold the Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, which can reach a range of 1,250 miles (2,000 km). Iran has been accused in the past of receiving assistance from North Korea in arming these silos. Just two years ago, the UAE seized a North Korean ship carrying embargoed arms to Iran. A Maj. Gen. in the Israeli airforce, Ido Nehoshtan, has claimed this "frantic arms race" is happening across the entire Middle East, saying "the race is going on in almost every country in the region, including organizations like Hamas and Hizbullah [an Iranian proxy]", with an official close to the Saudi Arabian prince Turki al-Faisal saying, "We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don't. It's as simple as that. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit." Israel has responded to the war games by "positioning one of its new Iron Dome rocket interceptor batteries in the northern city of Haifa" (DEBKA), and the US has moved the USS Enterprise away from the Persian gulf, and replaced it with the USS George H.W. Bush, which has far greatest fire power and carries "a crew of 9,000 and 70 fighter bombers". According to DEBKA, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Bremerton was also detected off the coast of Bahrain and reports if Turkey and Syria do go to war that "Tehran expect[s] the Turkish army to have US air and naval support in case of Iranian reprisals". Iran's game of antagonizing Washington and Ankara doesn't appear to be working. Instead, the West seems to be gearing up for war, even though it could lead to Iranian missile strikes.
Western propaganda against Syria's president Assad is being revved up for this possible conflict. An article titled "Syria: a cornered Assad is losing his marbles" was in the telegraph news Sunday. It quotes him as comparing protesters to germs: “Germs are present everywhere, present on skin and present in the organs. Never through the history of scientific developments did scientists think of eradicating germs. They only thought about how to strengthen the immunity of bodies. That is what we need to think of, more important than analyzing the conspiracy.” The unrelenting government opposition is entering it's fourth month, with "larger protests erupt[ing] throughout the county, including Aleppo and Damascus" (Telegraph's Michael Weiss) and over 1,300 dead and 10,000 arrested. A once blossoming relationship between Syria and Turkey is turning tense. It was reported on June 18th that Turkey had dispatched an envoy to the embroiled country, demanding that Maher Assad, the president's brother, be relinquished his control over Syria's Fourth Division and Presidential Guards, Al Arabiya. The enjoy also included a section calling for "reforms, among them the freedom to protest, freedom of expression, the lifting of a ban on creating political parties, and an end to the 1980 law making membership in the Muslim Brotherhood group an offense punishable by death" (Avi Issacharoff) and promising to protect Maher if he decided to step down. So far, the envoy has been ignored. Meanwhile, the US and EU are also condemning the crackdown, partitioning the UN Security Council to condemn the actions taken by the Syrian government and levying sanctions against it, as thousands of refugees head to the Turkish southern border (over 12,000 are now sheltered there). Both Syria and Turkey have responded by sending more troops, amassing where the refugees are crossing. Ankara is now demanding that the "Syrian military retreat from the border area" (Pakalert), and Damascus says the Turks are acting like Western puppets, being used for outside interests. Pakalert adds that "What makes things even more controversial is that the area where many of the Syrian refugees are encamped actually used to belong to Syria. In fact, many of the maps currently in use inside Syria still show that the area belongs to Syria." Meanwhile, Sectretary of State, Hillary Clinton released a statement, saying, "Syria is headed toward a new political order — and the Syrian people should be the ones to shape it. They should insist on accountability, but resist any temptation to exact revenge or reprisals that might split the country, and instead join together to build a democratic, peaceful and tolerant Syria." You got it. War is brewing.
Iran is dealing with turmoil in it's own political system. It is looking increasingly likely that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be ousted as the Persian president because of his support for "deviant" adviser, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaee. Some see this move happening in weeks, and it could be an ill omen to such a structured state, especially with war on its door steps. The globalists in the West could use any show of weakness by the Persian regime to continue their brush fire across the Middle East. We are already seeing moves by Western-influenced Turkey to restore its military and intelligence collaboration with Israel and reports that Turkish officials are informing Western Powers that it might "launch a military operation in northern Syria" to take down Syria's Baath party in which the Abbas brothers are members. This campaign would include an offensive against the cities of Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Latakia. This of course is happening the same time Libya is being bombed daily by NATO drones, and the British, French, and Americans talk about a full scale ground war in Libya and Syria. Gaddafi has recently been threatening Europe, saying he will attack "homes, offices, families" and Libyans will swarm like bees in the Mediterranean, if NATO doesn't pull out. Clinton responded, admonishing, “Instead of issuing threats, he should be putting the wellbeing and interests of his own people first. He should step down from power. We need to see this through.” The DHS head, Janet Napolitano, further warns of Libyan weapons being used to strike inside America, rallying the people in support of the controversial "kinetic action", and on Wednesday, Obama opined any fuss about the air strikes were "politics" and that “There may be a time in which there was a serious question as to whether the War Powers Resolution was constitutional. I don’t have to get to the question.” France has also started arming the rebels in Benghazi, which is a break from the rest of the countries bombing the country. In Syria, the Obama administration has moved "the USS Bataan amphibian air carrier strike vessel, along with 2,000 marines, 6 war planes, and 15 attack helicopters to a location just off the Syrian coast" (Chapman, Infowars) It is important to remember that if the US, NATO, and Israel decided to go to war against Syria, Iran would probably decide to enter the fray to protect its ally, as well as their proxy Hizbullah in Lebanon. Hizbullah now has a world presence, especially in Latin American countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. It is very possible agents embedded in the United States and Europe would go active and start igniting bombs and killing people. Lebanon, Venezuela, North Korea, and even Russia and China might eventually be dragged into the conflict. China is especially flirting with war in the South China Sea, and Russia is active in selling arms to Syria and Iran. What makes this so dangerous is that if Syria retaliated against Turkey, then the NATO countries would be obligated to intercede.
Egypt also entered a second day of clashes on Wednesday. Over a 1,000 people have been injured since they began on Tuesday night with protesters demanding that the country's rulers "speed up the prosecution of police officers accused of killing protesters" (CBCnews). Police and demonstrators clashed on the streets outside the Interior Ministry--the protesters threw stones and firebombs, and the police responded with tear gas. Even so, a police officer was sentenced to death on Monday for shooting at protesters in the uprisings last winter; however the former Interior Minister Habib Adli's trial, who was accused of ordering the state security forces to "violently crush the uprising", was adjourned yet again, and Mubarak's was delayed until August. John McCain and John Kerry toured the country on Saturday. It was McCain's second visit since the overthrow of Mubarak. The two senators traveled with American industrialists including the CEO of General Electric, and the upper echelons of Coca-Cola and Exxon Mobile. It is clear America's support for democracy goes as far as wanting to con the Egyptian people out of their resources. This on top of news that globalist George Soros is funding a draft of a new constitution for Egypt. Across the Mediterranean, huge protests erupted in Greece as the parliament decides on new Austerity measures.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
The Work of Giants, Part 1
It is common in medieval literature for the hero to encounter the giant—Beowulf fights Grendel and Grendel’s mother in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, in the Arthurian legends Arthur confronts Mont Saint Michel, and Gawain takes on the Green Knight during the Norman rule. The man who represents the order must destroy that which threatens it—nature, chaos, and the outside. By eliminating the giant, he is upholding the order of the culture’s laws and rules. To the Anglo-Saxons, the emblematic pillar of their society was the Mead Hall. Cohen describes the experience ravishingly: “Men drink and sing and exchange the gold rings that serve as material articulations of the system of relations that bind them like brothers” (7). Banishment was worse than death to an Angle, Jute, or Saxon. It meant estrangement from the communal fires and feasts, to be lost in the chaos which the giant (Grendel and his mother) represented. In post-Norman England, this time period of unity was remembered with longing and despair. Many of the conquered wished to return to the “paradise” of brotherhood and manliness exemplified by poems like “The Wanderer” and “The Ruin”.
When Grendel, the enemy of the culture and “a cultural Other for whom conformity to social dictates is an impossibility” (26), comes a knock-knock-knocking, he represents the very force the Mead Hall is trying to keep out. He is a lover of “long pig” and consumes Hondscio, one of Beowulf’s men. Cohen suggests something more is happening in this act—that by consuming this man, “the traumatized subject will be ingested, absorbed into that big Other seemingly beyond (but actually wholly within, because wholly created by) the symbolic order that it menaces” (8). The wild man is thus hypnotic and desirable. He is the means of destruction, an escapist’s end necessary to those who feel abused by the current regime. In the epic of Beowulf, the giant is the ultimate evil, set to bring down an established kingdom—he is there simply to prove what an amazing king Beowulf is. By contrast, the later “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a good example of the need to unhinge a bad order. Anglo-Celts were a conquered people during the time this story was written. The giant becomes a means to destroy a corrupt monarchy system. He no longer is the enemy of the peoples, but a hero; he symbolizes all that was lost. This representation implies a growing paradox: “The giant builds the home, [...] but the giant destroys the home, too” (10). How can the giant destroy as well create?
Grendel, the Monster Jesus
Grendel is a creature who inhabits the dark regions of our minds. He slips along the edges, almost ephemeral like Bigfoot—alive in our collective imaginations. We picture him as we encounter deep caves hidden in shadow, empty alleyways in the middle of the night, or even under the bed as we sleep—“a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” (line 86, page 9). I remember when I first encountered the story of Grendel in my elementary library. There was a ghastly picture of him covered in blood, sneaking into devour people as they slept. It captured my imagination—this dark monster with yellow eyes who haunts the fens and marshes—a pariah, an inhuman force. Grendel is a walking metaphor for the horror of nature, in all of its capricious, formidable inscrutableness; and like the woods he inhabits, his origins are never made clear. All we are told is that, “he had dwelt for a time in misery among the banished monsters, Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts” (lines 104-107, page 9). Grendel, like his ancestor, is a banished soul. He is forever condemned to live in the forsaken haunts of the wilderness. He can never experience the laughter, the joy, or the cheer of the mead hall, and for this, he is jealous. He lashes out. It is believed by many scholars that Grendel’s origins are a later Christian interpolation. What then are his true origins? Where does he appear in the Nordic mythology? We are, perhaps, given a clue, when the writer continues, saying that from Cain, also sprung, “ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove with God time and again until He gave them their reward” (line 112-114, page 9). Is Grendel related to the giants of Jotun? They were said to represent nature’s forces of Chaos, unlike the Gods “who constantly tr[ied] to keep the world at status quo” (Halvorsen). It is also revealing how the passage describes the giants’ destiny, saying that they would eventually receive a reward. Is this in reference to Ragnorak where the fire giants massacre the gods and send the Earth into darkness?
There is an underlying tension here: how did the Anglo-Saxons deal with their cultural heritage of “ogres and evils and evil phantoms and the giants too”? The Norse myths of the Jotun was one of the more easily reconcilable tales. It intermixed well with the biblical giants, the nephilim, born of man and woman—Goliath and King Og. When Beowulf finds a sword in Grendel’s mother lair which was, “an ancient heirloom from the day of giants” (line 1559 page 107), it becomes difficult to distinguish whether the weapon refers to the Biblical or Norse tradition. Northern giants were renowned for their welding abilities, and there is a flood in both mythologies—Ymer’s blood destroying the clan of giants, and Noah’s flood killing off the nephilim. Hrothgar describes how the engraving on the sword “showed how war first came into the world and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants. They suffered a terrible severance from the Lord; the Almighty made the waters rise, drowned them in the deluge for retribution” (Heaney lines 1689-93, page 117). Because the text leaves this ambiguous, the reader must ponder whether Grendel and his mother’s history are later interpolations. At any rate, “Beowulf celebrates the death of the giant” (Cohen 28). By killing those who encroached on society’s rules, Beowulf kept back the Otherness which threatened the Mead Hall.
The Norse referred to the giants as Jotun. They inhabited the middle world known as Jotunheim and were “gluttons” and “man-eaters” (“Jötunn”)—from the Old Norse jötunn, related to eat (The Free Dictionary)—and personified chaos and destruction. Roald Dahl was not far off when he labeled his giants, “Fleshlumpeater”, “Bone cruncher”, and “Child chewer”. The Norse believed the world would end when Loki (the child of two giants) lead the forces of hell and a league of giants to Valhalla where they would defeat the gods in battle. The Hebrews and Christians carried a similar tradition. In theirs, giants were the offspring of fallen angels breeding with human women. The Bible tells us, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (Genesis 6:4). This passage seems to suggest that Greek heroes, such as Hercules and Theseus might be the descendants of the fallen. According the apocrypha, “The Book of Enoch”, these giants, “turned themselves against men, in order to devour them” (Enoch 7:13). God, disgusted by what his angels had besotted, destroyed the world by water and only allowed Noah and his kin to survive. Legends persist of the giants continued existence underneath the ground in such works as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Coming Race”—this could correspond with the separate world of Jotunheim to the Norse. At any rate, the mythological flow between the two was fluid.
However, later interpolations describe the beginnings of Grendel's clan with Cain who was “... branded an outlaw, [...] he moved into the wilds, shunned company and joy. And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits” (line 1263-1266, page 89). Grendel struggles to find his identity because he inhabits no culture save his own. It is against the Anglo-Saxon creed and echoes yet another biblical tale: Grendel could be seen as an antithesis to Jesus of the New Testament. Like Christ, he is a being born of no mortal father. He is also one of protest, descending upon a hall (Hesod’s temple for Christ, but also the symbol of a culture) and tears it apart. They are both left unkilled initially, but mortally wounded. However, Grendel and the King of Kings are also opposites—Grendel is a coward, running from his own death as Jesus approached his. Grendel is impervious to weapons, while Jesus dies by stakes. Jesus dies for mans’ sins upon a “tree” as in the “Dream of the Rood”, whereas Grendel only suffers in solitude. And also, unlike Jesus, Grendel’s corpse is discovered later, his soul un-resurrected. Grendel is the monster’s Christ. Like the others ghosts and spirits and monsters, he dies a lonesome death, discovering his fate by himself. He is nothing—a lone beast in his mother’s cave.
His mother, then, is the opposing Virgin Mary—the apocryphal Lilith, Adam's first wife, who causes young boys to have wet dreams. She is lecherous and violent, while Mary is chaste and humble. She is revenge-seeking and terrifying, while Mary is accepting and beautiful. Mary is often depicted cradling her dead son in her arms, but Grendel’s mother, brooding “on her wrongs” (line 1259, page 89), seeks to avenge her son. She murders Aeschere, Hrothgar’s favorite man, and lures Beowulf back to her “lake”. The battle which ensues is highly sexual in nature. She tries to use her talons to rip his mail off, Beowulf swings his phallic sword with little success, and she retaliates and grapples “him tightly in her grim embrace” (line 152, page 107). Even the “hellish turn-hole” is an ersatz vagina. Beowulf only overcomes her by chopping off her head with a sword he finds in her armory, dripping in blood (another reference to the lewd nature of the battle). Beowulf, in his own manner, also represents Christ. He has 12 thanes just as Jesus had 12 apostles. He comes to the save the children of Denmark, and later sacrifices his life for his own. What we have here is two “Christs” waging war on each other—Grendel, the giant-monster Christ, and his perverted mockery of the Virgin Mary mother, and the Christ of the Geats, Beowulf. By the end of these two battles, we find which one is preferred by the Anglo-Saxons: the good, gregarious king who is heroic, generous, and chaste—the opposite of what Grendel and his mother portray. It also allows a new context to the fornication/fight—the breeding of Beowulf and a giantess fits well into the Biblical Genesis story. Some traditions hold that Cain was not a child of Adam, but instead, a son of Lilith.
Grendel is a fallen monster, one searching for his identity, just as Jesus is a risen man with full knowledge of his. Grendel slams the door open on Heorot with terrifying shrieks escaping from his lips. Jesus walks through the streets with a crown of thorns decorating his head, approaching death with honor. Grendel has come upon his fate unknowingly while the Christ went forward in full cognizance of his inevitable destiny. If Jesus’ death represents the forgiveness of man for his sins in all his wretchedness and beauty, Grendel’s death represents just the opposite: the continued fall of Cain’s clan. There is no one to mourn Grendel but his mother. He has no disciples, friends, or thanes to stand by him. He is nothing, and he dies a coward, very different to how Christ’s death is portrayed in the “Dream of the Rood.” The Anglo-Saxon poem describes Jesus’ heroism as he approaches his demise as such, “There I saw the Lord of mankind hasten with great zeal [...] Then the hale young hero ungirded himself—that was God almighty—hale and great-hearted” (trans. Morgan). Jesus is preparing for battle while Grendel’s last retreat is, “regretted by no-one who witnessed his trail, the ignominious marks of his flight where he’d skulked away” (Heany line 840-842, page 57). Grendel dives into lake and drowns himself and “hell claimed him there” (line 851, page 57)—he descends into the abyss like Christ, but he does not come back.
In this way, the Anglo-Saxons found a way to reconcile their pagan past. A doomed monster is now rendered even more horrid because of his ancestry—no good can come from a clan such as Cain—and because of his relationship with the Lamb of God. They interpolated their mythic history to represent Christian ideals and imagery. The dreadful dragon that nests in Geatland can now become analogous to the red dragon in Revelation. The sea monsters Beowulf fights in the flashback can now easily be represented by the biblical Leviathan. And Beowulf—a representation of Christ himself—kills them all. The dragon, in particular, is fascinating. In Revelation, the great dragon is “cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9). Beowulf is not only destroying the dragon, he is also killing Satan. Beowulf also corrects Jonah’s mistake in the most glorious way, he destroys the mighty sea monsters and rids the world of them—the Book of Jonah is an anathema to the Anglo-Saxon world view.
Beowulf is filled with allusions to the Bible, almost as if the Anglo-Saxons were showcasing how they believed Christianity should be. Beowulf, the good Anglo-Saxon Jesus, does not turn his cheek when he is confronted by danger; he takes it on with full bravado. He is violent and hard-headed. He fights the great fish in Jonah’s tale and comes out the victor. He tears asunder the anti-Beowulf with his bare hands. He slices off the head of the wicked version of the Virgin Mary. And finally he destroys Satan, with the help of a loyal thane. These are all first-class Christian interpolations of a Pagan tale. In many ways, Beowulf would remind its listeners of earlier times—times before the onset of monotheism. It would allow their culture to flourish even when this new religious regime took hold. Tales like Beowulf are perhaps one of the reasons why the inhabitants of the islands were never fully converted to Norman culture. Still, the interplay between mono- and pan-theism renders a whole new layer to a pagan story. One with biblical call-backs, pagan values, Christian morals—it is amazing it is not a morass of intelligible gibberish. The monsters in Beowulf will always haunt our cultures, and in many respects, they are the reason why an over 1000 year tale is still read today. These beasts hold baggage of centuries of history, culture, and myth, and they will continue to for centuries to come. There “is something distinctly Anglo-Saxon,” claims Cohen, “about this fascination with giants conjoined to the formation of alienated, human identities” (18), and Grendel fits perfectly in this picture.
The Green Knight and Dionsysus, the God of Wine
The Green Man is a ubiquitous figure in many cultures. He represents the spirit of nature—the shooting of buds, the twirling of vines, the blooming of flowers, and that feeling we get as we dip our feet into a stream as a canopy of trees covers our heads in dappled shade. He is peace and seclusion from the wretched world of sin. A man completely made of leaves, shrubbery, and branches. To the different cultures that ended up inhabiting the British Isles, he represented many things. To the Celts, he was iconoclastic, a pillar to be held up in the face of growing Norman control. He represented everything that had been lost with the arrival of the French: the beauty of nature, their own vast mythology, the freedom from feudalism and patriarchal suppression. To the Anglo-Saxons, he was masculine and heroic, everything the Normans were not. To the Normans, he was a representation of life and death, echoing their allegiance with Christianity. In fact, the Green Man held characteristics similar to both Satan and Jesus. He is of the earth and “the air” (Ephesians 2:2), polluted and corrupt like the world in which we are forced to live. He is chaotic, morphing into many forms like in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—turning from a green giant to a red-bearded king (also similar to Dionysus, the god of masks, which I will cover in more detail later). How are his demonic qualities reconciled with his Christian ones? Is there any way he can be fully appropriated into a Christian, Norman culture?
For the Celts and many early cultures, trees were sacred. They saw gods and goddesses inhabiting the forests, living their eternal lives amongst the hawthorn, holly, and yew. The Green Man is another one of these immortals; personifying spring and summer, he disappears year after year, time after time, like the seasons he represents. His foliate face is often depicted as a bush of greenery with fruits and vegetables blooming along its crevices, his visage being popular on churches during the Middle-Ages. Because of his universal appeal as a vegetation god, the Green Man appears independently throughout many lands and peoples: Tammuz to the Sumerians, Osiris to the Egyptians, and Dionysus and Bacchus to the Greco-Romans. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, translated by Burton Raffel, the Green Man is described as “ghastly”. He is a truly massive creature, with a thick neck, burly legs, and so tall that he seems “half an ogre, a giant” (Fit 1, Line 140); however, his most striking character is not his size, but his color. He is green, and not just on a single part of him, but all of him: his armor and shirt, are “green, all green” (Fit 1, Line 152), the bands on his belt, the jewels in his clothes, his saddle which his horse wears, his feet, his stallion, his face, his hands, and even his beard are green. He is a spirit from the Otherworld, and forbiddingly, he carries with him a big ax and a branch of holly. Holly is a sacred tree to the Celts. Its fruit flourishes in winter, symbolizing death and rebirth. Much like Jesus, the Green Man dies and resurrects. His path follows the seasons—he is born in the spring and dies in the winter, only to be revived each year. This is cyclical and made a great deal of sense to the Celts. The sun rises every day and then sets. Flowers bloom then pass away. Maidens become mothers. Mothers become crones. We return to the image of the never ending line, a very popular theme in Celtic art.
The “dying-and-rising” myths are symbolic of the cycles of life. The ancients would see the seasons change--winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall back to winter--just as they would see a young boy transform to a man, to a geriatric and then die. His birth is just as the sun rises in the East, no different than that of spring blossom, and his later years, his twilight, winter, and death. Dying-and-rising gods are simply a vessel for this. They resurrect, just like the world after winter, and the day after night. Jesus is entangled with them. He is born close to the winter solstice like many other dying gods (correction: Horus, Attis, Dionysus, Mithra, claims the movie Zietgiest, were all born around this date, though I have found this information unverifiable). And he dies and is born again. Oddly though, there is something which separates Jesus from these other myths: Jesus’ affiliation with nature, sex, intoxication, masks, and vegetation. Gyrus, in his essay, “Dionysus Risen”, says, “When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two” (Gyrus). Jesus is a dying god, a never-ending line, but essentially, he has lost his balls; instead, Satan picks them up and wears them, displaying the characteristics of a hedonistic dying god—he represents “wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death!” (Gyrus). In Dionysus (the Greek Green Man), a syncretic reconciliation takes place. Gyrus claims that John M. Allegro “traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian." Both entities share an association with vines—Jesus as the “true vine” (John 15:1), Dionysus being “credited with the introduction of vine cultivation” (Gyrus). Jesus turned water to wine, something for which Dionysus is also famous. The god carried with him a thyris which he would strike into the ground. Roger Lancelyn Green describes the transformation as such, “at once it took root, sent out leaves, and grew great clusters of grapes. ‘The vine is my best beloved!’ [Dionysus] exclaimed in triumph” (Green 84).
I do not mean to belittle Christians in this essay. However, I do want to get at wider truths. Question or you will be deceived and led to your doom. No, do not believe everything your Government tells you. Do not believe everything your Church tells. Believe nothing until you have thought it through completely. That is why God gave you freewill. When Arthur goes to Avalon to mend his wounds, it was prophesied that he would return in Britain's hour of need. Likewise, Jesus is said to return at the end of world. Many foresee this as an imminent event happening on 2012, a fast approaching date--through a vector we move. It is imperative to understand, then, what is going on. The paganist, Satanist, Luciferian Elites believe there god Osiris/Apollo/Nimrod is returning, the Christians their Christ, the new agers the Maitreya, the Hebrews their messiah, the Raelians the creator aliens, and some Esoteric researchers believe Planet X is fast approaching. What do all these things have in common? They are returning super-creations who left and returned--just like the the dying-and-rising God motif. I want to cover this in more detail in future posts; but at any rate, I do not wish to offend, but to fully understand this universe we must explore it from all angles.
Terri Windling, in her book, Tales of the Mythic Forest, describes Dionysus as the forerunner to Green Man motif. His face was also often depicted as a mass of vines and ivy leaves, and “this compelling but dangerous deity was the lord of the wilderness; he was the god of wine [...], ecstasy, and sexual abandon” (Windling). He was worshipped by women known as maenads, who would be induced into hysteria. This activity is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the king of Thebes is torn apart (sparagmos) in a bacchic frenzy by a group of women which included his own mother. These maenads would roam “ecstatically through the forest, wearing the skins of deer and fox, suckling wolf cubs from their own breasts” (Windling), but would tear apart any older animal that dared to flee, feasting on their raw flesh (omaphagia). Dionysus was also associated with satyrs—arcane beings inhabiting the wilds, and specifically the Arcadian Pan. Many scholars believe that Satan’s appearance was influenced by this lord of the Satyrs and his horns. Dionysus was born “horned, and crowned with serpents” (Gyrus).
Dionysus, like both the Green Man and Jesus, is a dying god. When his mother, Semele, is killed after witnessing Zeus’ visage while Dionysus is still inside of her, the great god places the unborn child on his thigh, where he later is granted a “second birth”. Later in life, Dionysus is again killed, but this time by Perseus. He descends to Hades and saves his mother and rises from the dead yet again. Because of these incidents and several others, Dionysus is associated with resurrection. Many similarities have been found between the Greek god and the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos. Cernunnos was the “lord of the forest in Britain and Gaul”, according to Windling. Both are associated with the consumption of mushrooms. In Robert Graves’ essay, “Mushrooms and Religion”, Graves delves deeper in mushroom’s relation with the dying-and-rising gods. Dionysus’ festival, Ambrosia, took place during October, the mushroom season. Amanita muscaria, the red mushroom speckled with little white dots famous for being associated with modern garden gnomes, would be eaten, driving the revelers “mad” with its hallucinogenic properties. Amanita muscaria occurs throughout the European continent—including England. Gyrus, in “Dionysus Risen”, makes the claim that “the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory”. Before the invention of microscopes, spores were a mystery to humans, and mushrooms would “simply appear”, miraculously—“a virgin birth indeed” (Gyrus). He continues, saying, “there was a widespread belief amongst the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning” (Gyrus). The mushroom was a “perfect symbol” for the “miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter” (Gyrus).
Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to a god that at his foundation is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of nature; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest. To the Celts, the Apollonian system of the Normans was against the order of the universe, and we see this tension playing itself out in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
When we first see Camelot, it is a place entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. These are all mockeries of what the Green Man and Dionysus represent. Like Dionysus’ bacchic revelers tearing a man limb from limb, the Green Man’s Celts accepted death and hedonism as a part of life. The Celts would not play in a facsimile version of sex or death like these Normans participated in—they instead took this ersatz mimicry as an insult. Thus enters The Green Man as described above. He challenges these “beardless infants” to cut off his head. The man who was brave enough to step forward would receive his mighty ax. But there was a catch, in a year and a day’s time, the Green Knight would get his one clean swipe at the neck of the challenger. The crowd went into a hush. No one was brave enough to step forward save only Arthur, but Sir Gawain intervened, taking his place. After delivering a fateful blow, the Green Man’s head is severed, but the great green man still stood. Lifting his decapitated cranium, mounting his horse, he told Gawain, “be ready to ride as you promised” (Fit 1, Line 448). The next we see of The Green Man, he has switched forms and identities—similar to Dionysus, the lord of masks, theater, and illusion—for he and Morgan Le Fay play one hell of a trick on Sir Gawain, robbing him of every he stands for. The Green Man is thus directly linked to the Celtic mother goddess. Gyrus says, “Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate. [...] He was the god most favoured by woman, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites [...] were closely associated with the veneration of the mother” (Gyrus). He continues, saying that Demeter (the goddess of the harvest) or her daughter, Persephone, were sometimes said to be Dionysus’ mother. The conquered people of “the isles of the mighty”, thus made their comment on Norman culture. Christianity sees “women, sex, matter, and, of course, the Earth” as evil, and “intimately linked with Satan” (Gyrus). Gawain gets tricked by two women, teaching him a very Celtic lesson: do not underestimate the power of women—be it maiden, mother, or crone. They are closer to nature and matter than man—even the word ‘matter’ eventually derives to mater, or mother (Gyrus). This is paralleled by Gawain wearing Mary on his shield.
Finally, Gawain meets The Green Man for a final time in his “green chapel”. Instead of a church, it is a mound—specific to the Celts who believed hills are gateways to the Otherworld. Gawain comments that it is “a good place for a green knight, he could serve the devil properly, here. By Christ, it’s Satan who struck me with this meeting” (Fit 4, Lines 2191-3). Again, the Norman ties between Satan and nature are reiterated. After the Green Man reveals the horrible trick which has been played upon him, Gawain says, “in women winning men to sin, for Adam our father was deceived" (Fit 4, Lines 2415-6). He then lists through Solomon, Samson, and David as being ruined by fairer sex. Both women and the wild are now described in contempt, because the Celtic system has won—their god has humiliated the Norman’s God; women have defeated men; real men with gnarly beards have destroyed clean-shaven boys; nature has overcome civilization. In many ways, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is pointing out the conflictions in Norman society. They decorate their churches with leafy, pagan gods. They betray their own faith by participating in courtly love. They deny Jesus his vegetation elements. They even deny themselves the Earth’s cycles, shutting themselves off from the world. Dale Pendell, in his essay Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, writes, “The Greeks were wise enough to recognize that although Dionysus meant trouble, the suppression of Dionysus was even worse—that trying to suppress Dionysian spirit entirely, to end all licentiousness, all blasphemy, all risk, led to false madness, and the sacrifice of children” (Pendell 5). Pendell relates this to the modern Burning Man festival held in northern Nevada desert every year. The universe is a duality. William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”. By denying the oceans of lust, needs, and hunger inside, these desires will only manifest later as corrupt sickness. There is insanity inside society, a Dionysus, a Green Man, and by denying him, we “breed pestilence”. The Celts saw the Normans as a mockery, unable to understand the basic principles of being a man or woman. They were lost to internal strife, not knowing how to properly deal with it. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends sadly, with only Gawain learning this lesson, the rest of Camelot remaining willfully ignorant. They will remain separated from nature, from their own bodies. But by seeing the confliction play out in their god, Jesus, we have a little microcosm of the struggle inside the society as a whole. As Gyrus says in the opening sentence of his essay, “A split exists in us all, and we nurse it” (Gyrus).
The Foundational Giant I
Cohen claims William the Conqueror used giants to solidify his rule in Anglo-Saxon Britain: “the newly installed aristocracy found themselves in the difficult position of having no usable past” to legitimize their authority (xviii). Geoffrey of Monmouth invented a whole history in his Historia Regum Britanniae, therefore solving a pending ‘crisis’. His record detailed a made-up “Trojan settlement of the land under Brutus that culminates in the glorious reign of Arthur” (xviii). The English giants were said to be descendants of the daughters of the Greek king Diocletian, according to the Prose Brut. In this Norman-manufactured mythic custom, his 33 daughters refused to become docile housewives after Diocletian married them off. Albina, the leader of the sisters, decided it was in their best interest to cut their husbands’ throats as they slept. They were banished for their rebellion on the open sea, and eventually landed on England (named Albion after Albina) and there, bred with demons and created a race of giants. When Brutus arrived in Britain 800 years later, the islands were populated entirely by their exogamic offspring. Brutus was the great-grandson of Æneas and would come to be the eponymous founder of Britain. He destroyed the peoples of the land and took control, so he could install law and order, like King William. To the Normans, the Celts and Anglo-Saxons were lawless barbarians who needed to be brought into the advanced society of France (at a much diminished serf level, of course).
The mixture of matter-women and dark spirit is a tradition passed on to the Anglo-Normans. It was a tale told by the Hebrews, and it gives credence to the story of Albina and her sisters founding a new country. The Greek woman says, “‘because my name is Albina, this land shall be called Albion; by this our eternal memory shall live in this country’” (Cohen 58). Cohen claims that the essence of this manufactured history is male versus female. The feminine kingdom leads to demons, giants, and incest—a lecherous backwater that can only be solved by male ‘civilization’ and ‘language’. The giant in this tale is tied to the lawless female body which only leads to corruption and demoralization. When Brutus, his best man Cornieus, and the rest of the Trojans arrive, they track down all the giants and kill them save for one: Gogmagog. His name “is lifted either from the Hebrew Bible, where it has no connection to giants, indicating a leader and his people; or, more likely, from the Book of Revelation” (35). The giant wrestles Cornieus (also often depicted as being quite large) and is thrown off a cliff onto the sea stones below—“the place of his death now called Gogmagog’s Leap” (35). Again, the giant is excluded from society for being different, but his name is used as a foundational element for a structured language. The tale of Gogmagog is similar to the fall of Lucifer (who also suffered from the sin of pride as in many giant stories). The creation of a “new heaven and earth” echoed the new kingdom Brutus was founding—a land of paradise and plenty. Brutus “orders, divides, and peoples it, until nature is rebuffed by human architecture and its superabundance tamed into tidy fields” (34). He depopulates the giants, representing chaos, and Albina’s kingdom is left in ruins. Like Brutus, when the Normans landed on the British Isles, they found them populated by peoples with equal female rights. They took these away, returning Albina’s people to their rightful, preordained place. Denying their master husbands was not in the vein of a good Norman wife. The Normans established a new set of rules, laws, and regulations, just like eponymous Brutus. And they legitimized their rule by using the culture of the people they dominated.
There were no better tools for a monarch than monsters—figures already installed deeply in the culture. Cohen says that the father of enjoyment “is he for whom enjoyment was once possible, the one prior to, or outside of, this foundational Law, celebrant of the flesh and the enemy of the divine” and “conveniently, that figure is the giant in both traditions, and so this monster was a natural point at which to being the translation of early northern myth into the exegetical lingua Christianitatis” (Cohen 15)—the father of prohibition, of course, being the Christian Church and William. The giant is the union of three distinct cultures: the Classical, the Biblical, and the northern pagan. There was no better figure to utilize because, whenever a problem of origins came up in medieval England, “the giant lurks nearby” (16). Biblical history indicates that giants were monstrosities against God—an aberration created by fallen angels who decided to mix men with beasts. They were the result of pride and sin against God’s creatures. In the Greek and Norse mythologies, giants are always attempting to retake the home of the gods. In all three traditions, they are engaged in hubris against a higher power. The giant must be destroyed from within.
Ysbaddaden, The Celtic Giant
The Celts, another of the conquered peoples, also had a tradition of giants. The most famous of these big Celtic men was Ysbaddaden who appears in the Mabinogion as the primary antagonist in the story of “How Culhwch Won Olwen”. Culhwch, the hero, has a curse put on him at an early age by his evil stepmother. She ordains that he can only marry the daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden, Olwen. Ysbaddaden is renowned across the land for killing and terrorizing the populace, especially his brother, Custennin. His eyes are so large that forks must be placed under his lids in order for him to see. As Culhwch and Arthur’s men try to gain the giant king’s trust, they are repeatedly harassed. Ysbaddaden throws three spears at them, only to have them deflected back. The first pierces his knee, the second, his chest, and the last, his eye. Finally, the king agrees that Culhwch may marry his daughter if he completes a number of difficult tasks (much like Hercules’ twelve trials under Eurystheus). After the tasks are completed, Ysbaddaden’s head is removed and placed on a spike, freeing Olwen to marry Culhwch. This myth is in the Celtic tradition and plays a role in the character of the Green Knight in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. He is not only an Anglo-Saxon creation, but a Celtic one. This explains some of his idiosyncrasies; however, some are left ambiguous. The Green Knight still betrays the romantic tradition of the dismembered giant. Ysbaddaden, like the Green Knight, is well spoken. He is generally smart and cunning, but he is also distinctly of the Celtic Otherworld. This defines a whole new tradition of giants that interacts with the Anglo-Saxon, Hebrew, and Classical tradition. Gawain, like Culhwch, represents the order of Arthur’s court. They both confront monsters, but for entirely different reasons: Culhwch honors himself by winning his love, while Gawain humiliates himself.
The Green Knight, The Hero of the People
Across land and sea, giants are depicted as the worst of the worst, terrible monsters who roam across the earth, abusing it. They are the ultimate evil when from the pen of a writer inside the established system. However, the giant can also be used as a catalyst for change. He is the necessary force to take out a leader who is against the people, and like violence itself, he can be used for good or ill. As mentioned earlier, in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” he is depicted as somewhat of a hero. Striding into Camelot “grimly serious” and “full of rebuke toward its lightheartedness” (Cohen 144), the green giant demands that a brave knight come forward and chop off his head, on one condition: a year and a day from now, that same man must come to his “green chapel” and let the giant have a swing at the brave knight’s neck. The giant represents everything the culture lost in the transition to Norman rule. He is “huge, taller than men stand, so square and thick from head to knee” and his “thighs so broad around, legs so long, he seemed half an ogre, a giant” (Raffel, Fit 1, Lines 137-40). He is big, burly, and manly, and in the form of Bercilak de Hautdesert, he has a curly beaver-colored beard “as thick as a bramble bush” that fell to his elbows. He loves to hunt for deer, fox, and boar, spending “the days with his hounds” (Fit 2, Line 1102), and is described as tall and in the “prime of life” (Fit 2, Lines 844-7). Daunting and deeply frightening, Gawain is the only of Arthur’s knights brave enough to step forward. He grabs the giant’s ax and slashes off his head. It rolls along the ground, spilling blood across the floor as the knights laugh and kick it around; but the Green Man’s body is not done with it. He grabs his detached cranium and turns to Gawain: “be ready to ride as you promised [...] or be called a coward forever” (Fit 1, Line 448, 456) and rides off on his horse.
The description of the Green Man is opposed to the one of King Arthur’s court seen at the beginning of the story. As portrayed in the translation by Burton Raffel, it is an infantile place, entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. The Green Man plays for higher stakes in his games. He will kill the loser, or at least humiliate him until he wants to kill himself. He hunts real animals, fights real fights, and does not shy away from blood. When Gawain shows up at his court, the Green Knight dresses him in flowery gowns—“lovely and long-skirted”—and he is rendered more and more feminine. He stays behind as the king and his men do manly things like hunting dangerous boars. Gawain, on the other hand, is pursued by the king’s wife, who woos him as if he were a Courtly Mistress. He is even forced to kiss Bercilak, an exchange that “becomes as erotic as ceremonial”. Wearing a “luxuriant robe” and “standing with women”, Gawain wears the “habiliments of another gender” (Cohen 149). In this tale, we see a man robbed of his manhood, reducing the Norman culture to a joke. Gawain is a boy amongst real kings who hunt and have castles meant for real war, “with rows of battlements, and turrets, and beautiful towers for sentries” (Fit 2, Lines 790-1) covered in “bowman’s notches and watchmen’s places [...] so [the castle] seemed knitted out of paper” (Fit 2, Lines 800-2). Bercilak, on the other hand, is portrayed as a good king—a real king—not afraid to get his fingers dirty. He was a hero to the lower class Anglo-Celts who wrote the poem, exemplifying their ideals. Therefore, the force, the angel in the whirlwind, of the giant’s strength can be used for good. He is a paragon of revolution, class struggle, and longing for a lost world, and, according to Cohen, distinctly Anglo-Saxon.
The story of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” goes against tradition in other giant tales, highlighting its uniqueness. At the end of battles with behemoths in medieval England literature, the monster would be dismembered and paraded back to the hall in various pieces. In Beowulf, they celebrate the disembodied arm of Grendel by displaying his limb proudly “under the steep eaves” of the Mead Hall, and in the story of the giant on Mont Saint Michel, Arthur brings back the head, so that it can be gaped at by all. However, when Gawain lifts his ax and the Green Man’s head falls on the floor, it is not lifted on to a mantle and hailed as a glorious deed. The giant knight instead picks the head up off the floor, lifts it into the air with his hand, and rides off with it. Because the giant does not leave behind a body part, Arthur puts his ax on the wall, proclaiming, “a tapestry, a trophy for everyone to stare at” (Fit 1, Line 479). Cohen says the severed head “is supposed to become part of a powerful message about the proper extension of embodied masculinity” (Cohen 145). The fetish of displaying dismembered flesh is a reaction to the giant’s unordered entropic being, showing that this wild man can be taken apart and reordered. He is not beyond the measuring tape, the scale, or the Seeing Eye class—he is fallible and can be controlled. In Beowulf, the fractured body of the giant represents the triumph of authority over nature, the return to peace in the Mead Hall. In the tale of Mont Saint Michel, Arthur is showing his countrymen that continental Europe is not beyond their grasp, and that their culture does deserve to rule. Beowulf and Arthur acted as nationalistic leaders. They demonstrated traits of the ideal Anglo-Saxon and Norman. They fed the citizens who supported the ruling establishment a legend which supported their view of the world: necessarily that they lived in the greatest kingdom and held the most admirable values. “Sir Gawain” is not one of these tales. It shows the giant defying the ruling order, humiliating it, taking it down a notch. The foundational monster of Anglo-Saxon culture is destroying the new, so it can return to the old. Again, the giant functions as an agent of ataxia. He wants to upend the regimen and minute regulation—the great seething Other that wants to assimilate like the Borg, but instead of creating a hive-mind, turn everything into bedlam. Astrophysics tells us the universe is slowly turning to entropic energy. Someday long after days, this great muddle that is everything will be just that, a muddle. The giant is an agent of this: he wages war on harmony, beautiful forms, and equations—he wants only ugliness. By dismantling his body, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans were showing that their system would not collapse. They could harness the wilderness inside and outside. The need to annihilate, consume, crush, damage, and deface is not only an external impulse. By dismembering the flesh and presenting it as arranged (just like society and language), they are also conquering inner demons which want to burst forth.
In the case of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the giant is there to reinforce maleness. He tells Gawain that the Courtly Love system in which he participates is just a sham—“a kissing game”. Real relationships mean more than chasing a virginal maid; they require love, respect, and sex. The Norman form of love is deeply troubling. It makes men into yearning, foolish man-children, never knowing the hunt or nature. It makes women into objects who can never live up to the ideal. Of course, no real person is good enough to follow such a system, and both sexes break under the pressure of Courtly Love—besides that, it is deeply hypocritical of the state religion, Christianity—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”. It also falls back to the story of Albina and her offspring. Their Albion was a world without masculine rules, where women were equal to men. It is odd that the giant, so closely linked with female empowerment, represents unrestrained masculinity; but to put the Christian view of women in context with the giant, that women are flesh gone mad and the devil incarnate, perhaps it is not so hard to see why. Giants are uncontrollable storms, earthquakes, lightning, and the end of world, the place where the forces of chaos defeat the forces of order. They are the destruction of the old world order—Nimrod, Frost Giants, Titans, and dangerous Aztec building makers. They are also deeply installed in a medieval tradition of unorganized flesh, the horror of the body, and the outside wilderness.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and The Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. http://books.google.com/books?id=7LlrQLbsHGYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=of+giants+cohen&source=bl&ots=ckvb68QuXx&sig=roKpI112-nNMQNtOLpwoZ0kRdsM&hl=en&ei=gPoOTYWXLoPQsAOJosiZCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Graves, Robert. "Mushrooms and Religion." Web. 22 November 2010.http://www.math.uci.edu/~vbaranov/nicetexts/eng/mushrooms.html
Green, Robert Lancelyn. "Tales of the Greek Heroes." New York: Puffin Books, 2009.
Gyrus. "Dionysus Risen." Dreamflesh. 1996. Web. 22 November 2010. http://dreamflesh.com/essays/dionysusrisen/>
Halvorsen, Ingrid. "Norse Gods, Goddesses." Runes, Alphabet of Mystery. Wed. 28 Oct. 2010. http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/gods2.html#J
“Jotun.” The Free Dictionary by Farlex. 2010. The Free Dictionary by Farlex. 27 October 2010. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Jotun
“Jötunn.” Academic dicionaries and encyclopedias. Wed. 28 Oct 2010. http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/53187
Pendell, Dale. "Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, the Green Man, and Dionysian Anarchism, with Four Proposals". Entheogen Review. 2008. Print. note: type "dionysus the green man" into google
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: Penguin Group, 2009.
Windling, Terry. "The Green Man and the Green Woman." The Endicott Studio. 2000. Web. 22 November 2010. http://www.endicott-studio.com/gal/galgreen.html
When Grendel, the enemy of the culture and “a cultural Other for whom conformity to social dictates is an impossibility” (26), comes a knock-knock-knocking, he represents the very force the Mead Hall is trying to keep out. He is a lover of “long pig” and consumes Hondscio, one of Beowulf’s men. Cohen suggests something more is happening in this act—that by consuming this man, “the traumatized subject will be ingested, absorbed into that big Other seemingly beyond (but actually wholly within, because wholly created by) the symbolic order that it menaces” (8). The wild man is thus hypnotic and desirable. He is the means of destruction, an escapist’s end necessary to those who feel abused by the current regime. In the epic of Beowulf, the giant is the ultimate evil, set to bring down an established kingdom—he is there simply to prove what an amazing king Beowulf is. By contrast, the later “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a good example of the need to unhinge a bad order. Anglo-Celts were a conquered people during the time this story was written. The giant becomes a means to destroy a corrupt monarchy system. He no longer is the enemy of the peoples, but a hero; he symbolizes all that was lost. This representation implies a growing paradox: “The giant builds the home, [...] but the giant destroys the home, too” (10). How can the giant destroy as well create?
Grendel, the Monster Jesus
Grendel is a creature who inhabits the dark regions of our minds. He slips along the edges, almost ephemeral like Bigfoot—alive in our collective imaginations. We picture him as we encounter deep caves hidden in shadow, empty alleyways in the middle of the night, or even under the bed as we sleep—“a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” (line 86, page 9). I remember when I first encountered the story of Grendel in my elementary library. There was a ghastly picture of him covered in blood, sneaking into devour people as they slept. It captured my imagination—this dark monster with yellow eyes who haunts the fens and marshes—a pariah, an inhuman force. Grendel is a walking metaphor for the horror of nature, in all of its capricious, formidable inscrutableness; and like the woods he inhabits, his origins are never made clear. All we are told is that, “he had dwelt for a time in misery among the banished monsters, Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts” (lines 104-107, page 9). Grendel, like his ancestor, is a banished soul. He is forever condemned to live in the forsaken haunts of the wilderness. He can never experience the laughter, the joy, or the cheer of the mead hall, and for this, he is jealous. He lashes out. It is believed by many scholars that Grendel’s origins are a later Christian interpolation. What then are his true origins? Where does he appear in the Nordic mythology? We are, perhaps, given a clue, when the writer continues, saying that from Cain, also sprung, “ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove with God time and again until He gave them their reward” (line 112-114, page 9). Is Grendel related to the giants of Jotun? They were said to represent nature’s forces of Chaos, unlike the Gods “who constantly tr[ied] to keep the world at status quo” (Halvorsen). It is also revealing how the passage describes the giants’ destiny, saying that they would eventually receive a reward. Is this in reference to Ragnorak where the fire giants massacre the gods and send the Earth into darkness?
There is an underlying tension here: how did the Anglo-Saxons deal with their cultural heritage of “ogres and evils and evil phantoms and the giants too”? The Norse myths of the Jotun was one of the more easily reconcilable tales. It intermixed well with the biblical giants, the nephilim, born of man and woman—Goliath and King Og. When Beowulf finds a sword in Grendel’s mother lair which was, “an ancient heirloom from the day of giants” (line 1559 page 107), it becomes difficult to distinguish whether the weapon refers to the Biblical or Norse tradition. Northern giants were renowned for their welding abilities, and there is a flood in both mythologies—Ymer’s blood destroying the clan of giants, and Noah’s flood killing off the nephilim. Hrothgar describes how the engraving on the sword “showed how war first came into the world and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants. They suffered a terrible severance from the Lord; the Almighty made the waters rise, drowned them in the deluge for retribution” (Heaney lines 1689-93, page 117). Because the text leaves this ambiguous, the reader must ponder whether Grendel and his mother’s history are later interpolations. At any rate, “Beowulf celebrates the death of the giant” (Cohen 28). By killing those who encroached on society’s rules, Beowulf kept back the Otherness which threatened the Mead Hall.
The Norse referred to the giants as Jotun. They inhabited the middle world known as Jotunheim and were “gluttons” and “man-eaters” (“Jötunn”)—from the Old Norse jötunn, related to eat (The Free Dictionary)—and personified chaos and destruction. Roald Dahl was not far off when he labeled his giants, “Fleshlumpeater”, “Bone cruncher”, and “Child chewer”. The Norse believed the world would end when Loki (the child of two giants) lead the forces of hell and a league of giants to Valhalla where they would defeat the gods in battle. The Hebrews and Christians carried a similar tradition. In theirs, giants were the offspring of fallen angels breeding with human women. The Bible tells us, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (Genesis 6:4). This passage seems to suggest that Greek heroes, such as Hercules and Theseus might be the descendants of the fallen. According the apocrypha, “The Book of Enoch”, these giants, “turned themselves against men, in order to devour them” (Enoch 7:13). God, disgusted by what his angels had besotted, destroyed the world by water and only allowed Noah and his kin to survive. Legends persist of the giants continued existence underneath the ground in such works as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Coming Race”—this could correspond with the separate world of Jotunheim to the Norse. At any rate, the mythological flow between the two was fluid.
However, later interpolations describe the beginnings of Grendel's clan with Cain who was “... branded an outlaw, [...] he moved into the wilds, shunned company and joy. And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits” (line 1263-1266, page 89). Grendel struggles to find his identity because he inhabits no culture save his own. It is against the Anglo-Saxon creed and echoes yet another biblical tale: Grendel could be seen as an antithesis to Jesus of the New Testament. Like Christ, he is a being born of no mortal father. He is also one of protest, descending upon a hall (Hesod’s temple for Christ, but also the symbol of a culture) and tears it apart. They are both left unkilled initially, but mortally wounded. However, Grendel and the King of Kings are also opposites—Grendel is a coward, running from his own death as Jesus approached his. Grendel is impervious to weapons, while Jesus dies by stakes. Jesus dies for mans’ sins upon a “tree” as in the “Dream of the Rood”, whereas Grendel only suffers in solitude. And also, unlike Jesus, Grendel’s corpse is discovered later, his soul un-resurrected. Grendel is the monster’s Christ. Like the others ghosts and spirits and monsters, he dies a lonesome death, discovering his fate by himself. He is nothing—a lone beast in his mother’s cave.
His mother, then, is the opposing Virgin Mary—the apocryphal Lilith, Adam's first wife, who causes young boys to have wet dreams. She is lecherous and violent, while Mary is chaste and humble. She is revenge-seeking and terrifying, while Mary is accepting and beautiful. Mary is often depicted cradling her dead son in her arms, but Grendel’s mother, brooding “on her wrongs” (line 1259, page 89), seeks to avenge her son. She murders Aeschere, Hrothgar’s favorite man, and lures Beowulf back to her “lake”. The battle which ensues is highly sexual in nature. She tries to use her talons to rip his mail off, Beowulf swings his phallic sword with little success, and she retaliates and grapples “him tightly in her grim embrace” (line 152, page 107). Even the “hellish turn-hole” is an ersatz vagina. Beowulf only overcomes her by chopping off her head with a sword he finds in her armory, dripping in blood (another reference to the lewd nature of the battle). Beowulf, in his own manner, also represents Christ. He has 12 thanes just as Jesus had 12 apostles. He comes to the save the children of Denmark, and later sacrifices his life for his own. What we have here is two “Christs” waging war on each other—Grendel, the giant-monster Christ, and his perverted mockery of the Virgin Mary mother, and the Christ of the Geats, Beowulf. By the end of these two battles, we find which one is preferred by the Anglo-Saxons: the good, gregarious king who is heroic, generous, and chaste—the opposite of what Grendel and his mother portray. It also allows a new context to the fornication/fight—the breeding of Beowulf and a giantess fits well into the Biblical Genesis story. Some traditions hold that Cain was not a child of Adam, but instead, a son of Lilith.
Grendel is a fallen monster, one searching for his identity, just as Jesus is a risen man with full knowledge of his. Grendel slams the door open on Heorot with terrifying shrieks escaping from his lips. Jesus walks through the streets with a crown of thorns decorating his head, approaching death with honor. Grendel has come upon his fate unknowingly while the Christ went forward in full cognizance of his inevitable destiny. If Jesus’ death represents the forgiveness of man for his sins in all his wretchedness and beauty, Grendel’s death represents just the opposite: the continued fall of Cain’s clan. There is no one to mourn Grendel but his mother. He has no disciples, friends, or thanes to stand by him. He is nothing, and he dies a coward, very different to how Christ’s death is portrayed in the “Dream of the Rood.” The Anglo-Saxon poem describes Jesus’ heroism as he approaches his demise as such, “There I saw the Lord of mankind hasten with great zeal [...] Then the hale young hero ungirded himself—that was God almighty—hale and great-hearted” (trans. Morgan). Jesus is preparing for battle while Grendel’s last retreat is, “regretted by no-one who witnessed his trail, the ignominious marks of his flight where he’d skulked away” (Heany line 840-842, page 57). Grendel dives into lake and drowns himself and “hell claimed him there” (line 851, page 57)—he descends into the abyss like Christ, but he does not come back.
In this way, the Anglo-Saxons found a way to reconcile their pagan past. A doomed monster is now rendered even more horrid because of his ancestry—no good can come from a clan such as Cain—and because of his relationship with the Lamb of God. They interpolated their mythic history to represent Christian ideals and imagery. The dreadful dragon that nests in Geatland can now become analogous to the red dragon in Revelation. The sea monsters Beowulf fights in the flashback can now easily be represented by the biblical Leviathan. And Beowulf—a representation of Christ himself—kills them all. The dragon, in particular, is fascinating. In Revelation, the great dragon is “cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9). Beowulf is not only destroying the dragon, he is also killing Satan. Beowulf also corrects Jonah’s mistake in the most glorious way, he destroys the mighty sea monsters and rids the world of them—the Book of Jonah is an anathema to the Anglo-Saxon world view.
Beowulf is filled with allusions to the Bible, almost as if the Anglo-Saxons were showcasing how they believed Christianity should be. Beowulf, the good Anglo-Saxon Jesus, does not turn his cheek when he is confronted by danger; he takes it on with full bravado. He is violent and hard-headed. He fights the great fish in Jonah’s tale and comes out the victor. He tears asunder the anti-Beowulf with his bare hands. He slices off the head of the wicked version of the Virgin Mary. And finally he destroys Satan, with the help of a loyal thane. These are all first-class Christian interpolations of a Pagan tale. In many ways, Beowulf would remind its listeners of earlier times—times before the onset of monotheism. It would allow their culture to flourish even when this new religious regime took hold. Tales like Beowulf are perhaps one of the reasons why the inhabitants of the islands were never fully converted to Norman culture. Still, the interplay between mono- and pan-theism renders a whole new layer to a pagan story. One with biblical call-backs, pagan values, Christian morals—it is amazing it is not a morass of intelligible gibberish. The monsters in Beowulf will always haunt our cultures, and in many respects, they are the reason why an over 1000 year tale is still read today. These beasts hold baggage of centuries of history, culture, and myth, and they will continue to for centuries to come. There “is something distinctly Anglo-Saxon,” claims Cohen, “about this fascination with giants conjoined to the formation of alienated, human identities” (18), and Grendel fits perfectly in this picture.
The Green Knight and Dionsysus, the God of Wine
The Green Man is a ubiquitous figure in many cultures. He represents the spirit of nature—the shooting of buds, the twirling of vines, the blooming of flowers, and that feeling we get as we dip our feet into a stream as a canopy of trees covers our heads in dappled shade. He is peace and seclusion from the wretched world of sin. A man completely made of leaves, shrubbery, and branches. To the different cultures that ended up inhabiting the British Isles, he represented many things. To the Celts, he was iconoclastic, a pillar to be held up in the face of growing Norman control. He represented everything that had been lost with the arrival of the French: the beauty of nature, their own vast mythology, the freedom from feudalism and patriarchal suppression. To the Anglo-Saxons, he was masculine and heroic, everything the Normans were not. To the Normans, he was a representation of life and death, echoing their allegiance with Christianity. In fact, the Green Man held characteristics similar to both Satan and Jesus. He is of the earth and “the air” (Ephesians 2:2), polluted and corrupt like the world in which we are forced to live. He is chaotic, morphing into many forms like in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—turning from a green giant to a red-bearded king (also similar to Dionysus, the god of masks, which I will cover in more detail later). How are his demonic qualities reconciled with his Christian ones? Is there any way he can be fully appropriated into a Christian, Norman culture?
For the Celts and many early cultures, trees were sacred. They saw gods and goddesses inhabiting the forests, living their eternal lives amongst the hawthorn, holly, and yew. The Green Man is another one of these immortals; personifying spring and summer, he disappears year after year, time after time, like the seasons he represents. His foliate face is often depicted as a bush of greenery with fruits and vegetables blooming along its crevices, his visage being popular on churches during the Middle-Ages. Because of his universal appeal as a vegetation god, the Green Man appears independently throughout many lands and peoples: Tammuz to the Sumerians, Osiris to the Egyptians, and Dionysus and Bacchus to the Greco-Romans. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, translated by Burton Raffel, the Green Man is described as “ghastly”. He is a truly massive creature, with a thick neck, burly legs, and so tall that he seems “half an ogre, a giant” (Fit 1, Line 140); however, his most striking character is not his size, but his color. He is green, and not just on a single part of him, but all of him: his armor and shirt, are “green, all green” (Fit 1, Line 152), the bands on his belt, the jewels in his clothes, his saddle which his horse wears, his feet, his stallion, his face, his hands, and even his beard are green. He is a spirit from the Otherworld, and forbiddingly, he carries with him a big ax and a branch of holly. Holly is a sacred tree to the Celts. Its fruit flourishes in winter, symbolizing death and rebirth. Much like Jesus, the Green Man dies and resurrects. His path follows the seasons—he is born in the spring and dies in the winter, only to be revived each year. This is cyclical and made a great deal of sense to the Celts. The sun rises every day and then sets. Flowers bloom then pass away. Maidens become mothers. Mothers become crones. We return to the image of the never ending line, a very popular theme in Celtic art.
The “dying-and-rising” myths are symbolic of the cycles of life. The ancients would see the seasons change--winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall back to winter--just as they would see a young boy transform to a man, to a geriatric and then die. His birth is just as the sun rises in the East, no different than that of spring blossom, and his later years, his twilight, winter, and death. Dying-and-rising gods are simply a vessel for this. They resurrect, just like the world after winter, and the day after night. Jesus is entangled with them. He is born close to the winter solstice like many other dying gods (correction: Horus, Attis, Dionysus, Mithra, claims the movie Zietgiest, were all born around this date, though I have found this information unverifiable). And he dies and is born again. Oddly though, there is something which separates Jesus from these other myths: Jesus’ affiliation with nature, sex, intoxication, masks, and vegetation. Gyrus, in his essay, “Dionysus Risen”, says, “When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two” (Gyrus). Jesus is a dying god, a never-ending line, but essentially, he has lost his balls; instead, Satan picks them up and wears them, displaying the characteristics of a hedonistic dying god—he represents “wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death!” (Gyrus). In Dionysus (the Greek Green Man), a syncretic reconciliation takes place. Gyrus claims that John M. Allegro “traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian." Both entities share an association with vines—Jesus as the “true vine” (John 15:1), Dionysus being “credited with the introduction of vine cultivation” (Gyrus). Jesus turned water to wine, something for which Dionysus is also famous. The god carried with him a thyris which he would strike into the ground. Roger Lancelyn Green describes the transformation as such, “at once it took root, sent out leaves, and grew great clusters of grapes. ‘The vine is my best beloved!’ [Dionysus] exclaimed in triumph” (Green 84).
I do not mean to belittle Christians in this essay. However, I do want to get at wider truths. Question or you will be deceived and led to your doom. No, do not believe everything your Government tells you. Do not believe everything your Church tells. Believe nothing until you have thought it through completely. That is why God gave you freewill. When Arthur goes to Avalon to mend his wounds, it was prophesied that he would return in Britain's hour of need. Likewise, Jesus is said to return at the end of world. Many foresee this as an imminent event happening on 2012, a fast approaching date--through a vector we move. It is imperative to understand, then, what is going on. The paganist, Satanist, Luciferian Elites believe there god Osiris/Apollo/Nimrod is returning, the Christians their Christ, the new agers the Maitreya, the Hebrews their messiah, the Raelians the creator aliens, and some Esoteric researchers believe Planet X is fast approaching. What do all these things have in common? They are returning super-creations who left and returned--just like the the dying-and-rising God motif. I want to cover this in more detail in future posts; but at any rate, I do not wish to offend, but to fully understand this universe we must explore it from all angles.
Terri Windling, in her book, Tales of the Mythic Forest, describes Dionysus as the forerunner to Green Man motif. His face was also often depicted as a mass of vines and ivy leaves, and “this compelling but dangerous deity was the lord of the wilderness; he was the god of wine [...], ecstasy, and sexual abandon” (Windling). He was worshipped by women known as maenads, who would be induced into hysteria. This activity is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the king of Thebes is torn apart (sparagmos) in a bacchic frenzy by a group of women which included his own mother. These maenads would roam “ecstatically through the forest, wearing the skins of deer and fox, suckling wolf cubs from their own breasts” (Windling), but would tear apart any older animal that dared to flee, feasting on their raw flesh (omaphagia). Dionysus was also associated with satyrs—arcane beings inhabiting the wilds, and specifically the Arcadian Pan. Many scholars believe that Satan’s appearance was influenced by this lord of the Satyrs and his horns. Dionysus was born “horned, and crowned with serpents” (Gyrus).
Dionysus, like both the Green Man and Jesus, is a dying god. When his mother, Semele, is killed after witnessing Zeus’ visage while Dionysus is still inside of her, the great god places the unborn child on his thigh, where he later is granted a “second birth”. Later in life, Dionysus is again killed, but this time by Perseus. He descends to Hades and saves his mother and rises from the dead yet again. Because of these incidents and several others, Dionysus is associated with resurrection. Many similarities have been found between the Greek god and the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos. Cernunnos was the “lord of the forest in Britain and Gaul”, according to Windling. Both are associated with the consumption of mushrooms. In Robert Graves’ essay, “Mushrooms and Religion”, Graves delves deeper in mushroom’s relation with the dying-and-rising gods. Dionysus’ festival, Ambrosia, took place during October, the mushroom season. Amanita muscaria, the red mushroom speckled with little white dots famous for being associated with modern garden gnomes, would be eaten, driving the revelers “mad” with its hallucinogenic properties. Amanita muscaria occurs throughout the European continent—including England. Gyrus, in “Dionysus Risen”, makes the claim that “the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory”. Before the invention of microscopes, spores were a mystery to humans, and mushrooms would “simply appear”, miraculously—“a virgin birth indeed” (Gyrus). He continues, saying, “there was a widespread belief amongst the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning” (Gyrus). The mushroom was a “perfect symbol” for the “miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter” (Gyrus).
Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to a god that at his foundation is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of nature; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest. To the Celts, the Apollonian system of the Normans was against the order of the universe, and we see this tension playing itself out in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
When we first see Camelot, it is a place entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. These are all mockeries of what the Green Man and Dionysus represent. Like Dionysus’ bacchic revelers tearing a man limb from limb, the Green Man’s Celts accepted death and hedonism as a part of life. The Celts would not play in a facsimile version of sex or death like these Normans participated in—they instead took this ersatz mimicry as an insult. Thus enters The Green Man as described above. He challenges these “beardless infants” to cut off his head. The man who was brave enough to step forward would receive his mighty ax. But there was a catch, in a year and a day’s time, the Green Knight would get his one clean swipe at the neck of the challenger. The crowd went into a hush. No one was brave enough to step forward save only Arthur, but Sir Gawain intervened, taking his place. After delivering a fateful blow, the Green Man’s head is severed, but the great green man still stood. Lifting his decapitated cranium, mounting his horse, he told Gawain, “be ready to ride as you promised” (Fit 1, Line 448). The next we see of The Green Man, he has switched forms and identities—similar to Dionysus, the lord of masks, theater, and illusion—for he and Morgan Le Fay play one hell of a trick on Sir Gawain, robbing him of every he stands for. The Green Man is thus directly linked to the Celtic mother goddess. Gyrus says, “Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate. [...] He was the god most favoured by woman, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites [...] were closely associated with the veneration of the mother” (Gyrus). He continues, saying that Demeter (the goddess of the harvest) or her daughter, Persephone, were sometimes said to be Dionysus’ mother. The conquered people of “the isles of the mighty”, thus made their comment on Norman culture. Christianity sees “women, sex, matter, and, of course, the Earth” as evil, and “intimately linked with Satan” (Gyrus). Gawain gets tricked by two women, teaching him a very Celtic lesson: do not underestimate the power of women—be it maiden, mother, or crone. They are closer to nature and matter than man—even the word ‘matter’ eventually derives to mater, or mother (Gyrus). This is paralleled by Gawain wearing Mary on his shield.
Finally, Gawain meets The Green Man for a final time in his “green chapel”. Instead of a church, it is a mound—specific to the Celts who believed hills are gateways to the Otherworld. Gawain comments that it is “a good place for a green knight, he could serve the devil properly, here. By Christ, it’s Satan who struck me with this meeting” (Fit 4, Lines 2191-3). Again, the Norman ties between Satan and nature are reiterated. After the Green Man reveals the horrible trick which has been played upon him, Gawain says, “in women winning men to sin, for Adam our father was deceived" (Fit 4, Lines 2415-6). He then lists through Solomon, Samson, and David as being ruined by fairer sex. Both women and the wild are now described in contempt, because the Celtic system has won—their god has humiliated the Norman’s God; women have defeated men; real men with gnarly beards have destroyed clean-shaven boys; nature has overcome civilization. In many ways, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is pointing out the conflictions in Norman society. They decorate their churches with leafy, pagan gods. They betray their own faith by participating in courtly love. They deny Jesus his vegetation elements. They even deny themselves the Earth’s cycles, shutting themselves off from the world. Dale Pendell, in his essay Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, writes, “The Greeks were wise enough to recognize that although Dionysus meant trouble, the suppression of Dionysus was even worse—that trying to suppress Dionysian spirit entirely, to end all licentiousness, all blasphemy, all risk, led to false madness, and the sacrifice of children” (Pendell 5). Pendell relates this to the modern Burning Man festival held in northern Nevada desert every year. The universe is a duality. William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”. By denying the oceans of lust, needs, and hunger inside, these desires will only manifest later as corrupt sickness. There is insanity inside society, a Dionysus, a Green Man, and by denying him, we “breed pestilence”. The Celts saw the Normans as a mockery, unable to understand the basic principles of being a man or woman. They were lost to internal strife, not knowing how to properly deal with it. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends sadly, with only Gawain learning this lesson, the rest of Camelot remaining willfully ignorant. They will remain separated from nature, from their own bodies. But by seeing the confliction play out in their god, Jesus, we have a little microcosm of the struggle inside the society as a whole. As Gyrus says in the opening sentence of his essay, “A split exists in us all, and we nurse it” (Gyrus).
The Foundational Giant I
Cohen claims William the Conqueror used giants to solidify his rule in Anglo-Saxon Britain: “the newly installed aristocracy found themselves in the difficult position of having no usable past” to legitimize their authority (xviii). Geoffrey of Monmouth invented a whole history in his Historia Regum Britanniae, therefore solving a pending ‘crisis’. His record detailed a made-up “Trojan settlement of the land under Brutus that culminates in the glorious reign of Arthur” (xviii). The English giants were said to be descendants of the daughters of the Greek king Diocletian, according to the Prose Brut. In this Norman-manufactured mythic custom, his 33 daughters refused to become docile housewives after Diocletian married them off. Albina, the leader of the sisters, decided it was in their best interest to cut their husbands’ throats as they slept. They were banished for their rebellion on the open sea, and eventually landed on England (named Albion after Albina) and there, bred with demons and created a race of giants. When Brutus arrived in Britain 800 years later, the islands were populated entirely by their exogamic offspring. Brutus was the great-grandson of Æneas and would come to be the eponymous founder of Britain. He destroyed the peoples of the land and took control, so he could install law and order, like King William. To the Normans, the Celts and Anglo-Saxons were lawless barbarians who needed to be brought into the advanced society of France (at a much diminished serf level, of course).
The mixture of matter-women and dark spirit is a tradition passed on to the Anglo-Normans. It was a tale told by the Hebrews, and it gives credence to the story of Albina and her sisters founding a new country. The Greek woman says, “‘because my name is Albina, this land shall be called Albion; by this our eternal memory shall live in this country’” (Cohen 58). Cohen claims that the essence of this manufactured history is male versus female. The feminine kingdom leads to demons, giants, and incest—a lecherous backwater that can only be solved by male ‘civilization’ and ‘language’. The giant in this tale is tied to the lawless female body which only leads to corruption and demoralization. When Brutus, his best man Cornieus, and the rest of the Trojans arrive, they track down all the giants and kill them save for one: Gogmagog. His name “is lifted either from the Hebrew Bible, where it has no connection to giants, indicating a leader and his people; or, more likely, from the Book of Revelation” (35). The giant wrestles Cornieus (also often depicted as being quite large) and is thrown off a cliff onto the sea stones below—“the place of his death now called Gogmagog’s Leap” (35). Again, the giant is excluded from society for being different, but his name is used as a foundational element for a structured language. The tale of Gogmagog is similar to the fall of Lucifer (who also suffered from the sin of pride as in many giant stories). The creation of a “new heaven and earth” echoed the new kingdom Brutus was founding—a land of paradise and plenty. Brutus “orders, divides, and peoples it, until nature is rebuffed by human architecture and its superabundance tamed into tidy fields” (34). He depopulates the giants, representing chaos, and Albina’s kingdom is left in ruins. Like Brutus, when the Normans landed on the British Isles, they found them populated by peoples with equal female rights. They took these away, returning Albina’s people to their rightful, preordained place. Denying their master husbands was not in the vein of a good Norman wife. The Normans established a new set of rules, laws, and regulations, just like eponymous Brutus. And they legitimized their rule by using the culture of the people they dominated.
There were no better tools for a monarch than monsters—figures already installed deeply in the culture. Cohen says that the father of enjoyment “is he for whom enjoyment was once possible, the one prior to, or outside of, this foundational Law, celebrant of the flesh and the enemy of the divine” and “conveniently, that figure is the giant in both traditions, and so this monster was a natural point at which to being the translation of early northern myth into the exegetical lingua Christianitatis” (Cohen 15)—the father of prohibition, of course, being the Christian Church and William. The giant is the union of three distinct cultures: the Classical, the Biblical, and the northern pagan. There was no better figure to utilize because, whenever a problem of origins came up in medieval England, “the giant lurks nearby” (16). Biblical history indicates that giants were monstrosities against God—an aberration created by fallen angels who decided to mix men with beasts. They were the result of pride and sin against God’s creatures. In the Greek and Norse mythologies, giants are always attempting to retake the home of the gods. In all three traditions, they are engaged in hubris against a higher power. The giant must be destroyed from within.
Ysbaddaden, The Celtic Giant
The Celts, another of the conquered peoples, also had a tradition of giants. The most famous of these big Celtic men was Ysbaddaden who appears in the Mabinogion as the primary antagonist in the story of “How Culhwch Won Olwen”. Culhwch, the hero, has a curse put on him at an early age by his evil stepmother. She ordains that he can only marry the daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden, Olwen. Ysbaddaden is renowned across the land for killing and terrorizing the populace, especially his brother, Custennin. His eyes are so large that forks must be placed under his lids in order for him to see. As Culhwch and Arthur’s men try to gain the giant king’s trust, they are repeatedly harassed. Ysbaddaden throws three spears at them, only to have them deflected back. The first pierces his knee, the second, his chest, and the last, his eye. Finally, the king agrees that Culhwch may marry his daughter if he completes a number of difficult tasks (much like Hercules’ twelve trials under Eurystheus). After the tasks are completed, Ysbaddaden’s head is removed and placed on a spike, freeing Olwen to marry Culhwch. This myth is in the Celtic tradition and plays a role in the character of the Green Knight in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. He is not only an Anglo-Saxon creation, but a Celtic one. This explains some of his idiosyncrasies; however, some are left ambiguous. The Green Knight still betrays the romantic tradition of the dismembered giant. Ysbaddaden, like the Green Knight, is well spoken. He is generally smart and cunning, but he is also distinctly of the Celtic Otherworld. This defines a whole new tradition of giants that interacts with the Anglo-Saxon, Hebrew, and Classical tradition. Gawain, like Culhwch, represents the order of Arthur’s court. They both confront monsters, but for entirely different reasons: Culhwch honors himself by winning his love, while Gawain humiliates himself.
The Green Knight, The Hero of the People
Across land and sea, giants are depicted as the worst of the worst, terrible monsters who roam across the earth, abusing it. They are the ultimate evil when from the pen of a writer inside the established system. However, the giant can also be used as a catalyst for change. He is the necessary force to take out a leader who is against the people, and like violence itself, he can be used for good or ill. As mentioned earlier, in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” he is depicted as somewhat of a hero. Striding into Camelot “grimly serious” and “full of rebuke toward its lightheartedness” (Cohen 144), the green giant demands that a brave knight come forward and chop off his head, on one condition: a year and a day from now, that same man must come to his “green chapel” and let the giant have a swing at the brave knight’s neck. The giant represents everything the culture lost in the transition to Norman rule. He is “huge, taller than men stand, so square and thick from head to knee” and his “thighs so broad around, legs so long, he seemed half an ogre, a giant” (Raffel, Fit 1, Lines 137-40). He is big, burly, and manly, and in the form of Bercilak de Hautdesert, he has a curly beaver-colored beard “as thick as a bramble bush” that fell to his elbows. He loves to hunt for deer, fox, and boar, spending “the days with his hounds” (Fit 2, Line 1102), and is described as tall and in the “prime of life” (Fit 2, Lines 844-7). Daunting and deeply frightening, Gawain is the only of Arthur’s knights brave enough to step forward. He grabs the giant’s ax and slashes off his head. It rolls along the ground, spilling blood across the floor as the knights laugh and kick it around; but the Green Man’s body is not done with it. He grabs his detached cranium and turns to Gawain: “be ready to ride as you promised [...] or be called a coward forever” (Fit 1, Line 448, 456) and rides off on his horse.
The description of the Green Man is opposed to the one of King Arthur’s court seen at the beginning of the story. As portrayed in the translation by Burton Raffel, it is an infantile place, entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. The Green Man plays for higher stakes in his games. He will kill the loser, or at least humiliate him until he wants to kill himself. He hunts real animals, fights real fights, and does not shy away from blood. When Gawain shows up at his court, the Green Knight dresses him in flowery gowns—“lovely and long-skirted”—and he is rendered more and more feminine. He stays behind as the king and his men do manly things like hunting dangerous boars. Gawain, on the other hand, is pursued by the king’s wife, who woos him as if he were a Courtly Mistress. He is even forced to kiss Bercilak, an exchange that “becomes as erotic as ceremonial”. Wearing a “luxuriant robe” and “standing with women”, Gawain wears the “habiliments of another gender” (Cohen 149). In this tale, we see a man robbed of his manhood, reducing the Norman culture to a joke. Gawain is a boy amongst real kings who hunt and have castles meant for real war, “with rows of battlements, and turrets, and beautiful towers for sentries” (Fit 2, Lines 790-1) covered in “bowman’s notches and watchmen’s places [...] so [the castle] seemed knitted out of paper” (Fit 2, Lines 800-2). Bercilak, on the other hand, is portrayed as a good king—a real king—not afraid to get his fingers dirty. He was a hero to the lower class Anglo-Celts who wrote the poem, exemplifying their ideals. Therefore, the force, the angel in the whirlwind, of the giant’s strength can be used for good. He is a paragon of revolution, class struggle, and longing for a lost world, and, according to Cohen, distinctly Anglo-Saxon.
The story of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” goes against tradition in other giant tales, highlighting its uniqueness. At the end of battles with behemoths in medieval England literature, the monster would be dismembered and paraded back to the hall in various pieces. In Beowulf, they celebrate the disembodied arm of Grendel by displaying his limb proudly “under the steep eaves” of the Mead Hall, and in the story of the giant on Mont Saint Michel, Arthur brings back the head, so that it can be gaped at by all. However, when Gawain lifts his ax and the Green Man’s head falls on the floor, it is not lifted on to a mantle and hailed as a glorious deed. The giant knight instead picks the head up off the floor, lifts it into the air with his hand, and rides off with it. Because the giant does not leave behind a body part, Arthur puts his ax on the wall, proclaiming, “a tapestry, a trophy for everyone to stare at” (Fit 1, Line 479). Cohen says the severed head “is supposed to become part of a powerful message about the proper extension of embodied masculinity” (Cohen 145). The fetish of displaying dismembered flesh is a reaction to the giant’s unordered entropic being, showing that this wild man can be taken apart and reordered. He is not beyond the measuring tape, the scale, or the Seeing Eye class—he is fallible and can be controlled. In Beowulf, the fractured body of the giant represents the triumph of authority over nature, the return to peace in the Mead Hall. In the tale of Mont Saint Michel, Arthur is showing his countrymen that continental Europe is not beyond their grasp, and that their culture does deserve to rule. Beowulf and Arthur acted as nationalistic leaders. They demonstrated traits of the ideal Anglo-Saxon and Norman. They fed the citizens who supported the ruling establishment a legend which supported their view of the world: necessarily that they lived in the greatest kingdom and held the most admirable values. “Sir Gawain” is not one of these tales. It shows the giant defying the ruling order, humiliating it, taking it down a notch. The foundational monster of Anglo-Saxon culture is destroying the new, so it can return to the old. Again, the giant functions as an agent of ataxia. He wants to upend the regimen and minute regulation—the great seething Other that wants to assimilate like the Borg, but instead of creating a hive-mind, turn everything into bedlam. Astrophysics tells us the universe is slowly turning to entropic energy. Someday long after days, this great muddle that is everything will be just that, a muddle. The giant is an agent of this: he wages war on harmony, beautiful forms, and equations—he wants only ugliness. By dismantling his body, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans were showing that their system would not collapse. They could harness the wilderness inside and outside. The need to annihilate, consume, crush, damage, and deface is not only an external impulse. By dismembering the flesh and presenting it as arranged (just like society and language), they are also conquering inner demons which want to burst forth.
In the case of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the giant is there to reinforce maleness. He tells Gawain that the Courtly Love system in which he participates is just a sham—“a kissing game”. Real relationships mean more than chasing a virginal maid; they require love, respect, and sex. The Norman form of love is deeply troubling. It makes men into yearning, foolish man-children, never knowing the hunt or nature. It makes women into objects who can never live up to the ideal. Of course, no real person is good enough to follow such a system, and both sexes break under the pressure of Courtly Love—besides that, it is deeply hypocritical of the state religion, Christianity—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”. It also falls back to the story of Albina and her offspring. Their Albion was a world without masculine rules, where women were equal to men. It is odd that the giant, so closely linked with female empowerment, represents unrestrained masculinity; but to put the Christian view of women in context with the giant, that women are flesh gone mad and the devil incarnate, perhaps it is not so hard to see why. Giants are uncontrollable storms, earthquakes, lightning, and the end of world, the place where the forces of chaos defeat the forces of order. They are the destruction of the old world order—Nimrod, Frost Giants, Titans, and dangerous Aztec building makers. They are also deeply installed in a medieval tradition of unorganized flesh, the horror of the body, and the outside wilderness.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and The Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. http://books.google.com/books?id=7LlrQLbsHGYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=of+giants+cohen&source=bl&ots=ckvb68QuXx&sig=roKpI112-nNMQNtOLpwoZ0kRdsM&hl=en&ei=gPoOTYWXLoPQsAOJosiZCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Graves, Robert. "Mushrooms and Religion." Web. 22 November 2010.
Green, Robert Lancelyn. "Tales of the Greek Heroes." New York: Puffin Books, 2009.
Gyrus. "Dionysus Risen." Dreamflesh. 1996. Web. 22 November 2010. http://dreamflesh.com/essays/dionysusrisen/>
Halvorsen, Ingrid. "Norse Gods, Goddesses." Runes, Alphabet of Mystery. Wed. 28 Oct. 2010. http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/gods2.html#J
“Jotun.” The Free Dictionary by Farlex. 2010. The Free Dictionary by Farlex. 27 October 2010. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Jotun
“Jötunn.” Academic dicionaries and encyclopedias. Wed. 28 Oct 2010. http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/53187
Pendell, Dale. "Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, the Green Man, and Dionysian Anarchism, with Four Proposals". Entheogen Review. 2008. Print. note: type "dionysus the green man" into google
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: Penguin Group, 2009.
Windling, Terry. "The Green Man and the Green Woman." The Endicott Studio. 2000. Web. 22 November 2010. http://www.endicott-studio.com/gal/galgreen.html
Fight Club Examination
Ostensibly, Fight Club is about a group of frustrated men creating anarchy. If we are thinking of Deleuze's piece about smooth spaces and extreme compartmentalization, we can see the film as a backlash against modernism. Men are tired of separating themselves from everything else. Tyler Durden's dream of an world free of debt, without needless items and the feminization of men. He wants a truly post-civilization America. The burden of modernism, of materiality, is just too much. The narrator, as described by Fincher, must "travel on a path to enlightenment in which he must 'kill' his parents, his god, and his teacher." Thus the film takes on a path of one man's spiritual growth in the face of stark modernism. As you can tell by my profile, Fight Club is one of my favorite films. I love the way the movie is set up, and its anarchic humor. There is so much going on thematically, cinematically, and emotionally, and it is all handled rather masterfully by the director David Fincher, proving that Alien 3 might not have been his fault after all. For me, this film resonates. There is something true in Durden's teachings, which many people can relate to. It's probably one of the most masculine films I have watched, and this is all symbolized in the male god who is Tyler Durden. Sorry for being crass, but he's almost a giant, wagging penis, preaching about the death of God like Nietzsche. Tyler is the epitome of manhood, of testosterone, of the obelisk. He is like the giants portrayed across ancient myth—the giants of Jotenheim who wage war on the Norse gods, the titans of Greek lore, Nimrod, the gibborim who raises the Temple of Babel, Goliath, King Og, the giants of the Incas, wiracochas. He wants to destroy the world because it is there. He wants to smash it pieces, make it into chaos, and bring down civilization and order. Like Tyler says, "Self improvement is masturbation. Now self destruction..." You have to kill everyone and everything internally to let go of these useless desires.
Tyler Durden's world is free-floating, always changing and in motion; however, the modern world is stagnant, and dead. Men aren't defined by what they do, but by what they own. Fighting is simplification—there is no class, no money, no hierarchy, no race, there is only one guy duking it out with the other. It's a relief to feel the physical pain; it knocks the man out of his psychosis. This world is a result of a lack of connective-ness. Everyone feels separate. Everyone works at pointless jobs. Everyone wants something more, but they can't name what. Everyone desires to have the world revealed to them, to have their eyes open, to be a part of something more important than themselves. A man needs to be away from women and go hunting, fighting, and killing. The woman's job is domestic, the man's is nomadic. This is a key word to Deleuze, who defines the nomad as being in between points. He never arrives at a permanent destination, but is constantly moving inside his territory. If Tyler is sick of having the world striated into increasingly smaller boxes, the nomad is a release from that pain. Thus the State tries to control this and keep men docile and tame, stealing from them their true nature. Organizations are always in the act of organizing, just like people are always in the act of being people, and trees always 'treeing'. The world is alive with movement, where materialism wants to squelch and place everything into nice little categories. Modernism creates a country of borders and demarcations. However, Fight Club wants us to remember that this is foolish—just examine the yin-yang table in the narrator's home, or Tyler's continued push for the narrator to let go of his prior ideas about materialism. To feel pain is recognize you are alive; there is no other alternative but to face the fact that you are a part of this cosmos.
Technology in this society is intrusive, it takes away man's need to fend for himself; and we can see how great this desire actually is. Men come from across the stratum of society to be a member of this ‘club’. The director, David Fincher, says this about his film: "We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman [the narrator] is created." Modernism has completely severed us from nature. Like Heidegger described, it slowly becomes "standing reserves", no longer part of a greater whole which we are also a member. It has robbed us of spiritually in our pursuit for more pleasure and safety. Because we dread pain and death (and forget to realize that pain is connected with feeling pleasure, and death is intimately coincided with being alive), our lives are meaningless. Men will sit at home in a figurative cave, raising the kids, just like the cavewoman. It is not in his nature to be inactive, to sit in a chair all day. These things do not give men a sense of worth. Instead, he wishes to fight, to feel alive and in connection with some sort of higher authority. I was reading Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth" the other day, and he says war can give a man similar emotions. When a person is standing on the precipice of death, of pain, that's when the world becomes brighter, more interesting. We see it when Tyler pulls his gun on the convenience store clerk and says, "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted." We want to be slapped awake. We want to rage war. We want to fight the power. It's in our very nature; however, this is exactly opposite of what Foucalt's "societies of control" want from us. The rise of reality television programs, of sports, of the indebted nation, of useless left-right politics, work to distract us from ourselves. We are injected with chemicals from our food, as men physically become more effeminate from hormones in the water. Sperm count is falling across the Western world, and amphibians, the harbinger of environmental troubles, switch sexes. Feminists wage war on the male, and television sitcoms portray him as the bumbling idiot. Man, as a gender, is dying out, we are told in The Daily Mail, because of the weakness of the Y chromosome. Just like Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the sinking of the USS Maine, terrorist attacks are used to drive us further into endless wars to enrich the elites, and to steal the American citizens’ rights. A police state can be formed right under our noses because we as a nation are too caught up in who's going to win American Idol, what Glenn Beck or Keith Oberman said about the other party, or racial tit-for-tat. We can be played against each other and forced back into our houses as the Fed continues to pump more money into the hands of the bankers, as we begin to engage in operations in five Middle-East countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan), and our rights erode from under us. Tyler Durden is exactly the kind of person this system does not want, thus the endless war, the endless talk about race, and why there are more US troops on the Korean border than the American one. White people and minorities alike are constantly reminded how awful white culture is, and minority history is celebrated. Republicans and Democrats follow the exact same policy in office because our whole system is controlled by corporate interests and a wealthy elite. This is not the fault of capitalism or even government; it is the fault of the weakness of our politicians giving into lobbyists, into sponsorship. The corporatocracy, the revolving door, only drives us further and further into the pit. No one was watching the Congressman or Executive politicians selling out, and this might be a problem of “societies of discipline”. We are caught in a death spiral and Fight Club tries to offer a way out. Debt isn’t healthy. Debt is a scheme by the bankers to keep us enslaved. Erase it, and we all go back to zero, to quote the film.
Tyler Durden's world is free-floating, always changing and in motion; however, the modern world is stagnant, and dead. Men aren't defined by what they do, but by what they own. Fighting is simplification—there is no class, no money, no hierarchy, no race, there is only one guy duking it out with the other. It's a relief to feel the physical pain; it knocks the man out of his psychosis. This world is a result of a lack of connective-ness. Everyone feels separate. Everyone works at pointless jobs. Everyone wants something more, but they can't name what. Everyone desires to have the world revealed to them, to have their eyes open, to be a part of something more important than themselves. A man needs to be away from women and go hunting, fighting, and killing. The woman's job is domestic, the man's is nomadic. This is a key word to Deleuze, who defines the nomad as being in between points. He never arrives at a permanent destination, but is constantly moving inside his territory. If Tyler is sick of having the world striated into increasingly smaller boxes, the nomad is a release from that pain. Thus the State tries to control this and keep men docile and tame, stealing from them their true nature. Organizations are always in the act of organizing, just like people are always in the act of being people, and trees always 'treeing'. The world is alive with movement, where materialism wants to squelch and place everything into nice little categories. Modernism creates a country of borders and demarcations. However, Fight Club wants us to remember that this is foolish—just examine the yin-yang table in the narrator's home, or Tyler's continued push for the narrator to let go of his prior ideas about materialism. To feel pain is recognize you are alive; there is no other alternative but to face the fact that you are a part of this cosmos.
Technology in this society is intrusive, it takes away man's need to fend for himself; and we can see how great this desire actually is. Men come from across the stratum of society to be a member of this ‘club’. The director, David Fincher, says this about his film: "We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman [the narrator] is created." Modernism has completely severed us from nature. Like Heidegger described, it slowly becomes "standing reserves", no longer part of a greater whole which we are also a member. It has robbed us of spiritually in our pursuit for more pleasure and safety. Because we dread pain and death (and forget to realize that pain is connected with feeling pleasure, and death is intimately coincided with being alive), our lives are meaningless. Men will sit at home in a figurative cave, raising the kids, just like the cavewoman. It is not in his nature to be inactive, to sit in a chair all day. These things do not give men a sense of worth. Instead, he wishes to fight, to feel alive and in connection with some sort of higher authority. I was reading Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth" the other day, and he says war can give a man similar emotions. When a person is standing on the precipice of death, of pain, that's when the world becomes brighter, more interesting. We see it when Tyler pulls his gun on the convenience store clerk and says, "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted." We want to be slapped awake. We want to rage war. We want to fight the power. It's in our very nature; however, this is exactly opposite of what Foucalt's "societies of control" want from us. The rise of reality television programs, of sports, of the indebted nation, of useless left-right politics, work to distract us from ourselves. We are injected with chemicals from our food, as men physically become more effeminate from hormones in the water. Sperm count is falling across the Western world, and amphibians, the harbinger of environmental troubles, switch sexes. Feminists wage war on the male, and television sitcoms portray him as the bumbling idiot. Man, as a gender, is dying out, we are told in The Daily Mail, because of the weakness of the Y chromosome. Just like Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the sinking of the USS Maine, terrorist attacks are used to drive us further into endless wars to enrich the elites, and to steal the American citizens’ rights. A police state can be formed right under our noses because we as a nation are too caught up in who's going to win American Idol, what Glenn Beck or Keith Oberman said about the other party, or racial tit-for-tat. We can be played against each other and forced back into our houses as the Fed continues to pump more money into the hands of the bankers, as we begin to engage in operations in five Middle-East countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan), and our rights erode from under us. Tyler Durden is exactly the kind of person this system does not want, thus the endless war, the endless talk about race, and why there are more US troops on the Korean border than the American one. White people and minorities alike are constantly reminded how awful white culture is, and minority history is celebrated. Republicans and Democrats follow the exact same policy in office because our whole system is controlled by corporate interests and a wealthy elite. This is not the fault of capitalism or even government; it is the fault of the weakness of our politicians giving into lobbyists, into sponsorship. The corporatocracy, the revolving door, only drives us further and further into the pit. No one was watching the Congressman or Executive politicians selling out, and this might be a problem of “societies of discipline”. We are caught in a death spiral and Fight Club tries to offer a way out. Debt isn’t healthy. Debt is a scheme by the bankers to keep us enslaved. Erase it, and we all go back to zero, to quote the film.
The Power of Myth and Multiculturalism
The power of story can still overwhelm. It can move us to tears, makes us bark in laughter, or enlighten us to the plight of others. However, there is another aspect, that of pedagogy. I think it is an error to relegate myth to an ancient or pre-modern setting. As I hope to prove in this paper, Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey is still very much alive, and by not acknowledging this, modern man has created a troubling situation for himself. One only needs to look at the myths scientists have created of mankind’s journey from barbarian ape to civilized “monkey in a suit” to see how the monomyth is used today. In this paper, I would like to prove that the American dream also falls into this category. There seems to be an ongoing thread throughout multi-cultural media on what exactly this ‘Dream’ entails. Do we have to leave behind the ones we care for? Do we have to enter a new world of experiences to grow? Can we ever return? The coming of age story, the growth of consciousness, is what gives these movies and written works power. And it is timeless. The hero must go on a quest after a boon or vision to bring back to his community and revive it. Campbell describes how the hero must “leave the world that [he’s] in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There, [the hero] come[s] to what was missing in [his] consciousness in the world [he] formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as [he] move[s] back into [his] social world again" (The Power of Myth 158). We see this same quest time after time. In Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals, Victor must travel to find his father’s body and save figuratively himself, and similarly in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Arnold ventures off the ‘rez’ to enlighten himself and learn. Milkman, in Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon, must also journey forth and discover his past, and so does Esperanza in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Ashima in The Namesake. The hero must leave the community, venture forth to find a way to revive it like the Celtic fisher king, and return, offering the boons they have received. If only it were that simple in these texts. The tension, it seems, does not primarily have to with the outer life in many of these stories, but the inner. The venturer grows guilty of leaving those he loves behind, he begins to miss the things he perceived which made him ‘him’, and must learn to “walk in two worlds”. And that is where the American Dream comes in: in today’s world, there is no recognition of this quest. We don’t know the importance of the journey, of holding on to those we love, of the power of initiation, or of the biblical phrase, “let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” (Matthew 6:3). The world is a mystery to us because modern man does not realize the unhealthiness of his dreams: the desire for fame and money. There are no longer in any myths to frame our worldview in our material, postmodern, post-structural universe. What is the American Dream and how do the books we have read and the films we have watched showcase this?
Societal myth may be dead, but stories are not. One only needs to look at the box office receipts or the New York Times best seller list to see this. Humans will always need narrative to describe their lives; they will always need stories to place themselves in the world. The only way we can see things is in relation to everything else—and that is what myth gives us, a way of examining the outer and inner world. The difference today is that we do not acknowledge that stories offer us ways to live “a good life”. We go towards them for entertainment, critical analysis of plot or character, or to see what the tale has to say about our perception of reality. Examining multicultural texts, however, more mythic themes emerge. In Smoke Signals, Victor is the hero. His mother makes him promise that he will return when he goes on his adventure to find his dead father and bring home the truck. The theme of leaving and coming back is resonant through many multicultural texts. If Victor had not come home, he would have been failing in his own quest. This film can be quite overt in its themes. If it had been a white male in the lead role, this would have been another coming-of-age Hollywood film, but it's not. We can see Victor, accompanied by his ‘Shaman’, Thomas, traveling from his home, his rez, out of the state, and into the greater world. There are dangers here, and when he finally gets to where his father lived and died, it’s almost as if he is travelling into hell like Orpheus and trying to bring his dad out again. All healthy boys should go through this initiation of becoming a man. He must learn to stand on his own two feet and not depend on others. He must learn his past and overcome it—a more masculine theme, also presented in The Song of Solomon. These are experiences everyone can relate to, and it’s one of the reasons why the authors chose tales such as these—they are timeless and speak to the universal experience of man. They also give us a map to live by. A young man reading Alexie’s Diary almost has a guide to his own life. The guilt associated with leaving those behind, a feeling Charging Elk also has when he thinks of his parents in Heartsong by James Welch, is necessary to become a man. Girls become women because they have to (an initiation right for a young girl is shown in the documentary When Your Hands Are Tied when she gets her first period), boys have to learn how to leave their mothers and walk in “two worlds”. The quests portrayed in many of the texts were masculine in nature—they were the quests for self-actualization. However, this is probably appropriate in a post-gender world.
It is important to define exactly what I believe the American dream is. I will be brief and concise as possible. Essentially, the dream comes down to this: we must leave our families and try to find ourselves out there amongst the greater society. In doing this, the one leaving hopes to better himself in the grasp for fame, respect, and fortune, and the ones left behind hope the leaver will return and bring back something. However, what makes these goals unhealthy stem from the fact that we don’t realize what we are doing. Hollywood has broadcasted the triumphant hero, but no one seems to realize that these stories are performing a myth making in the vacuum. In almost all of these blockbusters, the hero becomes famous, overcomes the great villain, and returns a stronger or better person. In the modern world, we lack initiation; we lack elders’ stories telling us how to live a good life. We have forgotten that being a mother is a heroic act, that providing for a family is glamorous and an honor. Instead, we aspire to be celebrities, because we lack healthy roles. These stories give us roles. They show us that Pilate is a hero in her own right, and so is Macon, Milkman’s father. That Ashima is an amazing person just by raising her family and returning to India. That Jin in American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang becomes something better by accepting who he is. Acceptance. In this society, we are told unconsciously to never accept who we are, to reach for something more, even if it’s an impossible goal. Everyone wants to be a celebrity; everyone wants a 1,000 friends on Facebook, or 10,000 upvotes on reddit. These desires destroy us. They hollow us out. By reading multicultural lit, there is a chance of rediscovering what is important to our lives.
In the books and films we have been exploring, the theme has been “walking in two worlds”, a phrase which I have been using a lot because I think it is the most important idea of the class. The characters have had an awful time dealing with letting go. In The House on Mango Street, the major conflict for Esperanza at the end is not forgetting where she came from, and the importance of going back. This is almost an origin story. Yes, Esperanza loses her innocence in more than one way, but this seems to be before her great adventure of setting out on her own. Again, it’s a masculine quest—the quest of living on your own, of being respected, of gaining riches. It’s the American dream again. The metaphorical fates tell her, “When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (Mango 105). Esperanza deals with this guilt, and most assuredly, it echoes in Sherman Alexie’s children’s novel.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a story of a native boy also living in more than one community. Arnold, like Esperanza, has the ability to leave the slums in which he grew up, but he also shares the guilt of deserting the ones he loves. This guilt is symbolized with the character of Rowdy, “the toughest kid on the rez”. The final pages of the book show Rowdy and Arnold playing a game of basketball. Arnold thinks, “I hoped and prayed that they would someday forgive me for leaving them. I hoped and prayed that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them” (Alexie 230). Rowdy tells the skinny kid to stop blubbering. (It’s almost as if Sherman directed this line at himself.) Arnold realizes he does have to leave if he wants a better life. Arnold was born with water on the brain. Water is always flowing, always moving to a new location. “I always knew you were going to leave. I always knew you were going to leave us behind and travel the world” Rowdy tells Arnold (Alexie 229). I think Alexie, like in When Your Hands Are Tied, condones this nomadic American dream, but at the same time reminds us not to forget where we came from. It’s never easy curtailing to the greater culture. And this book should almost be read as a guide to doing it. You have to get out of your safe environment to grow as a person. You have to experience new things and places. You have to use this societal monkey on your back in healthy ways, don’t go down dead end paths, learn to be greater than the circumstances you think would allow. Strive for more, that is the American dream right there. Arnold, again, is learning not to forget, not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, he will experience the American dream, but he must not forget where he came from because it will be the only thing which will enrich him later. That is also essentially what Milkman is learning in The Song of Solomon. He is learning that he must accept the sins of his fathers and mothers, of his people to progress. The life he was living before was vapid, but now he is filling it. He cannot continue unless his consciousness grows, and at the end, it does, but he is too late. Guitar is already there. Perhaps Milkman forgave his family, but he didn’t forgive his friend. The one person who brought him through, who introduced him to aunt in the first place, is the one who kills her. Milkman’s community is dying, and perhaps this is a critique of his indifference.
The American dream is one of progression. A man or woman starts out low and then rises upward, towards a goal, be it success, riches, or power. In modern America, there is so much pressure put on kids to be something—to get an amazing job, to be the head of the company, to be a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, to be famous like Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington. It is this system which causes kids like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to shoot up a school, for young Muslim men to ram planes into buildings (they feel left behind), and for Timothy Treadwell to get eaten by bears in Alaska. It also leads to people rejecting society, who can’t stand the pressure. I think of Chris McCandless as portrayed in “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer or the hikikomori sufferers in Japan. Some people would rather commit suicide then live. People forget to enjoy life because they are distracted by the bait-and-switch. That is why atheism is growing so quickly—it reflects people’s world view. In the end, they realize all this work was in Ecclesiastical vanity. The Buddha would say to be happy, you must free yourself of this desire for things, to be something more than you are. This is impossible. You realize the desire to be free of desires is itself a desire. Your will breaks down. You start to see the universe as it really is. Cisneros’ definition of culture would be the place where you came from. It would be that street in Chicago where you grew up, where you were initiated into the ways of the world. It would be the place you lost your innocence, and the people you lost your innocence with. In the end, culture is people. They propagate it, they continue it. When Esperanza stares back at her past, she remembers this family she left behind. She had to if she wanted to go on her “journey”. She dreams she could take them along with her. But it’s impossible. Her friends, her family, her neighbors, they continue living in the ghetto, while she moves on without them. The American dream is one of regret, loss, and suffering. It is repeated again and again in our cinemas: Spiderman, Superman Returns, The Lord of the Rings, Thor. They all begin with a hero who is demoralized in some way. They all try to fight and beat their way to some great victory over a villain. They all lose friends along the way. But in the end, when it’s all over and they can rest, the movie finishes. We never see the Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, Shakespeare's “King Lear”, or even Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Just “The End”, and the credits role.
The American dream can lead to great things but it can also destroy. It forces us to leave our comfort zone and embark on missions of glory. It requires us to better ourselves, to make more of ourselves, if we ever want to be respected by the rest of society. There are many good things about this system. It leads to astonishing growth in the sciences, in money, and in material needs in general. What it doesn’t leave room for is family, spirituality, or, generally, the arts. These are things you do in your free time, lesser non-economical tokens of our lives. These novels and films try to remind us that we also need to nourish the other half—the right half of our brains. We have focused so hard on the outer appearances that we forget to enrich ourselves. The material world is just a game, but the inner world is eternal; rightly so, the American dream can give us riches and fame, but it can’t give us happiness, we have to accomplish that through other means. Everyone is always leaving, striving for something, demanding more, and this is only made worse by easy money and our debt based society. To forget where you came from is to forget who you are. In The Namesake, Gogol does, but returns to his culture after he begins to feel it trickle through his fingers upon the death of his father. You should not forget the past. You should not leave the ones you love behind. Modernism robbed the world of mystery and made us into pleasure monkeys. The return of spirituality is important in this context. We need to feel important, respected, and wanted, but the only ones in our culture who seem to receive that are the rich and the famous. We need to bring back honor in motherhood, fatherhood, in the crone, and the elder man. We need to not get rid of our system but expand it. As I see it, we are dying a slow, painful death by materialistic rationality, and it hurts. People don’t know where to turn to. The multicultural texts we explored seem to point the finger towards where we grew, the people who we love, find solace there. I agree. It is part of an ever-expanding mode of thought, which I hope returns. The government continues to make infringements on the family unit. It is a death by a thousand cuts. Bring back the community. Bring back the group of friends who want to spend the rest of their lives together. Bring it back in a healthy way, not with gangs or the mafia. We lack a sense of place, of being. If our collective myths and stories could revive that, then we should. Like Epicurus said, do what makes you happy. And what makes most people happy are relationships and connections to others. The nation state essentially killed the town and is slowly killing the city. If we must dissolve the state, then we must. We must do what makes us happy.
Societal myth may be dead, but stories are not. One only needs to look at the box office receipts or the New York Times best seller list to see this. Humans will always need narrative to describe their lives; they will always need stories to place themselves in the world. The only way we can see things is in relation to everything else—and that is what myth gives us, a way of examining the outer and inner world. The difference today is that we do not acknowledge that stories offer us ways to live “a good life”. We go towards them for entertainment, critical analysis of plot or character, or to see what the tale has to say about our perception of reality. Examining multicultural texts, however, more mythic themes emerge. In Smoke Signals, Victor is the hero. His mother makes him promise that he will return when he goes on his adventure to find his dead father and bring home the truck. The theme of leaving and coming back is resonant through many multicultural texts. If Victor had not come home, he would have been failing in his own quest. This film can be quite overt in its themes. If it had been a white male in the lead role, this would have been another coming-of-age Hollywood film, but it's not. We can see Victor, accompanied by his ‘Shaman’, Thomas, traveling from his home, his rez, out of the state, and into the greater world. There are dangers here, and when he finally gets to where his father lived and died, it’s almost as if he is travelling into hell like Orpheus and trying to bring his dad out again. All healthy boys should go through this initiation of becoming a man. He must learn to stand on his own two feet and not depend on others. He must learn his past and overcome it—a more masculine theme, also presented in The Song of Solomon. These are experiences everyone can relate to, and it’s one of the reasons why the authors chose tales such as these—they are timeless and speak to the universal experience of man. They also give us a map to live by. A young man reading Alexie’s Diary almost has a guide to his own life. The guilt associated with leaving those behind, a feeling Charging Elk also has when he thinks of his parents in Heartsong by James Welch, is necessary to become a man. Girls become women because they have to (an initiation right for a young girl is shown in the documentary When Your Hands Are Tied when she gets her first period), boys have to learn how to leave their mothers and walk in “two worlds”. The quests portrayed in many of the texts were masculine in nature—they were the quests for self-actualization. However, this is probably appropriate in a post-gender world.
It is important to define exactly what I believe the American dream is. I will be brief and concise as possible. Essentially, the dream comes down to this: we must leave our families and try to find ourselves out there amongst the greater society. In doing this, the one leaving hopes to better himself in the grasp for fame, respect, and fortune, and the ones left behind hope the leaver will return and bring back something. However, what makes these goals unhealthy stem from the fact that we don’t realize what we are doing. Hollywood has broadcasted the triumphant hero, but no one seems to realize that these stories are performing a myth making in the vacuum. In almost all of these blockbusters, the hero becomes famous, overcomes the great villain, and returns a stronger or better person. In the modern world, we lack initiation; we lack elders’ stories telling us how to live a good life. We have forgotten that being a mother is a heroic act, that providing for a family is glamorous and an honor. Instead, we aspire to be celebrities, because we lack healthy roles. These stories give us roles. They show us that Pilate is a hero in her own right, and so is Macon, Milkman’s father. That Ashima is an amazing person just by raising her family and returning to India. That Jin in American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang becomes something better by accepting who he is. Acceptance. In this society, we are told unconsciously to never accept who we are, to reach for something more, even if it’s an impossible goal. Everyone wants to be a celebrity; everyone wants a 1,000 friends on Facebook, or 10,000 upvotes on reddit. These desires destroy us. They hollow us out. By reading multicultural lit, there is a chance of rediscovering what is important to our lives.
In the books and films we have been exploring, the theme has been “walking in two worlds”, a phrase which I have been using a lot because I think it is the most important idea of the class. The characters have had an awful time dealing with letting go. In The House on Mango Street, the major conflict for Esperanza at the end is not forgetting where she came from, and the importance of going back. This is almost an origin story. Yes, Esperanza loses her innocence in more than one way, but this seems to be before her great adventure of setting out on her own. Again, it’s a masculine quest—the quest of living on your own, of being respected, of gaining riches. It’s the American dream again. The metaphorical fates tell her, “When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (Mango 105). Esperanza deals with this guilt, and most assuredly, it echoes in Sherman Alexie’s children’s novel.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a story of a native boy also living in more than one community. Arnold, like Esperanza, has the ability to leave the slums in which he grew up, but he also shares the guilt of deserting the ones he loves. This guilt is symbolized with the character of Rowdy, “the toughest kid on the rez”. The final pages of the book show Rowdy and Arnold playing a game of basketball. Arnold thinks, “I hoped and prayed that they would someday forgive me for leaving them. I hoped and prayed that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them” (Alexie 230). Rowdy tells the skinny kid to stop blubbering. (It’s almost as if Sherman directed this line at himself.) Arnold realizes he does have to leave if he wants a better life. Arnold was born with water on the brain. Water is always flowing, always moving to a new location. “I always knew you were going to leave. I always knew you were going to leave us behind and travel the world” Rowdy tells Arnold (Alexie 229). I think Alexie, like in When Your Hands Are Tied, condones this nomadic American dream, but at the same time reminds us not to forget where we came from. It’s never easy curtailing to the greater culture. And this book should almost be read as a guide to doing it. You have to get out of your safe environment to grow as a person. You have to experience new things and places. You have to use this societal monkey on your back in healthy ways, don’t go down dead end paths, learn to be greater than the circumstances you think would allow. Strive for more, that is the American dream right there. Arnold, again, is learning not to forget, not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, he will experience the American dream, but he must not forget where he came from because it will be the only thing which will enrich him later. That is also essentially what Milkman is learning in The Song of Solomon. He is learning that he must accept the sins of his fathers and mothers, of his people to progress. The life he was living before was vapid, but now he is filling it. He cannot continue unless his consciousness grows, and at the end, it does, but he is too late. Guitar is already there. Perhaps Milkman forgave his family, but he didn’t forgive his friend. The one person who brought him through, who introduced him to aunt in the first place, is the one who kills her. Milkman’s community is dying, and perhaps this is a critique of his indifference.
The American dream is one of progression. A man or woman starts out low and then rises upward, towards a goal, be it success, riches, or power. In modern America, there is so much pressure put on kids to be something—to get an amazing job, to be the head of the company, to be a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, to be famous like Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington. It is this system which causes kids like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to shoot up a school, for young Muslim men to ram planes into buildings (they feel left behind), and for Timothy Treadwell to get eaten by bears in Alaska. It also leads to people rejecting society, who can’t stand the pressure. I think of Chris McCandless as portrayed in “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer or the hikikomori sufferers in Japan. Some people would rather commit suicide then live. People forget to enjoy life because they are distracted by the bait-and-switch. That is why atheism is growing so quickly—it reflects people’s world view. In the end, they realize all this work was in Ecclesiastical vanity. The Buddha would say to be happy, you must free yourself of this desire for things, to be something more than you are. This is impossible. You realize the desire to be free of desires is itself a desire. Your will breaks down. You start to see the universe as it really is. Cisneros’ definition of culture would be the place where you came from. It would be that street in Chicago where you grew up, where you were initiated into the ways of the world. It would be the place you lost your innocence, and the people you lost your innocence with. In the end, culture is people. They propagate it, they continue it. When Esperanza stares back at her past, she remembers this family she left behind. She had to if she wanted to go on her “journey”. She dreams she could take them along with her. But it’s impossible. Her friends, her family, her neighbors, they continue living in the ghetto, while she moves on without them. The American dream is one of regret, loss, and suffering. It is repeated again and again in our cinemas: Spiderman, Superman Returns, The Lord of the Rings, Thor. They all begin with a hero who is demoralized in some way. They all try to fight and beat their way to some great victory over a villain. They all lose friends along the way. But in the end, when it’s all over and they can rest, the movie finishes. We never see the Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, Shakespeare's “King Lear”, or even Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Just “The End”, and the credits role.
The American dream can lead to great things but it can also destroy. It forces us to leave our comfort zone and embark on missions of glory. It requires us to better ourselves, to make more of ourselves, if we ever want to be respected by the rest of society. There are many good things about this system. It leads to astonishing growth in the sciences, in money, and in material needs in general. What it doesn’t leave room for is family, spirituality, or, generally, the arts. These are things you do in your free time, lesser non-economical tokens of our lives. These novels and films try to remind us that we also need to nourish the other half—the right half of our brains. We have focused so hard on the outer appearances that we forget to enrich ourselves. The material world is just a game, but the inner world is eternal; rightly so, the American dream can give us riches and fame, but it can’t give us happiness, we have to accomplish that through other means. Everyone is always leaving, striving for something, demanding more, and this is only made worse by easy money and our debt based society. To forget where you came from is to forget who you are. In The Namesake, Gogol does, but returns to his culture after he begins to feel it trickle through his fingers upon the death of his father. You should not forget the past. You should not leave the ones you love behind. Modernism robbed the world of mystery and made us into pleasure monkeys. The return of spirituality is important in this context. We need to feel important, respected, and wanted, but the only ones in our culture who seem to receive that are the rich and the famous. We need to bring back honor in motherhood, fatherhood, in the crone, and the elder man. We need to not get rid of our system but expand it. As I see it, we are dying a slow, painful death by materialistic rationality, and it hurts. People don’t know where to turn to. The multicultural texts we explored seem to point the finger towards where we grew, the people who we love, find solace there. I agree. It is part of an ever-expanding mode of thought, which I hope returns. The government continues to make infringements on the family unit. It is a death by a thousand cuts. Bring back the community. Bring back the group of friends who want to spend the rest of their lives together. Bring it back in a healthy way, not with gangs or the mafia. We lack a sense of place, of being. If our collective myths and stories could revive that, then we should. Like Epicurus said, do what makes you happy. And what makes most people happy are relationships and connections to others. The nation state essentially killed the town and is slowly killing the city. If we must dissolve the state, then we must. We must do what makes us happy.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Hackers and I, Robot
Hackers
Iain Softley’s “Hackers” is a celebratory film dedicated to this eponymous, underground culture. Technology, and specifically the internet, can give power back to the people. We see this in Dade “Zero Cool” Murphy. As a child, he uses his abilities to bring down Wall Street which represents power and greed. Both the government and market in this film are portrayed as corrupt, and the only hope for progression seems to be the individualistic spirit of this subculture. I fear that the term “individualistic” may be taken as everyone looking out for themselves, but that is not what appears to happen. Like Fisher Stevens’ character says, and I don’t quote verbatim, “We’re each our own country, with temporary adversaries and allies.” By being units but still working toward the same goal, the community can come together and accomplish anything. And although these gigantic corporations can theoretically be brought down by one person, the film indicates that that is not a healthy goal alone, but standing up for what is right is. Overall, I didn’t really care for the film. I found the characters unengaging and the effects boring. Plus, it was too long. It did reach for something, and I appreciate that. I love good ideas, but I think the film makers made an average movie--A C+ effort, in my book at least. This doesn't stop the uninspiring screenplay from being an interesting commentary on modern America, and the future which is in store for it.
Hackers preaches that as well as empowering the individual, there is a risk of the rogue ripping apart structure (this is quite a Luciferian concept). We see this today with the PSN network being attacked and taken out, Stuxnet ravaging Iran’s plutonium enrichment program, Anonymous releasing secret Scientology texts, and Julian Assange and Bradley Manning of Wikileaks letting loose classified knowledge to the public. The film toys with the idea of humans becoming “gods”. The password of the super computer is “GOD”, and Matthew Lillard’s “Cereal Killer” exclaims he “kinda feels like God” after his image is projected across the world. This could bring us to such concepts as the singularity—the moment in time where machines become smarter than man, where men can essentially be immortal. This is at odds with “The Plague’s” or Eugene’s “new world order” where governments and hackers work in league to control the masses. However, “Hackers” and Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” offer an alternative to both those scenarios. If the hackers come together and form something greater than themselves, they can take on anyone or anything. Raymond’s bazaar would seem to offer the same solution. His example of Linux as being sort of a farmer’s market where venders come together and offer different solutions to an array of problems is portrayed in the film when the “hacker” community comes together, using their various talents, to take down “The Plague’s” super computer. Raymond’s cathedral might be the same thing represented in aforementioned “new world order”. In that system, hackers are used to dominate the rest of society, but it is in a controlled way. The infrastructure is built, brick by brick, until a unified mass is formed. It is essentially the earth as an artifact versus the earth as a living, changing entity. The first assumes the universe is essentially stupid, and the only order is the order we give it (similar to Heidegger’s “Standing Reserves” concept). The second says that we as individuals are connected and contribute in ways which are complex yet simple at the same time—we don’t experience the universe, we live it, we are it. The hackers, in their own way, are experiencing this individualist completeness (I know that's slightly contradictory). They are living, thriving, by being a team, and breaking down the cathedral.
In the film, one of the main themes, and perhaps the most important, was the tempting of God by man. There are inherently good and bad things in doing this—we encroach on him and become vain, but we also further our technological progress, our life spans, our happiness and possibilities. Today, we see these same questions being raised in regard to GMO foods, genetic tampering in general, drones, satellites, scanning machines, and much more. Where do we draw the line and stop our apotheosis? The screenplay writer, Rafael Moreu said the hackers were not only a counterculture, “they’re the next step in human evolution” (Wikipedia). This society, which has gone so far in the drive towards materiality, is regaining spirituality. The psychedelic screen the hackers are so enamored with reference this: they are almost communing with God through the altar of their computer. From a Christian perspective, this is highly dangerous. Did Lucifer not fall because he thought himself more knowledgeable than God? From an esoteric view, this melding with the machines may be the return of the gods on earth, whereas a Hindu would say we are finding new ways to dream, and an Atheist would see this as man finally succeeding where the made-up, ancient God could not. The hackers are achieving a higher state of consciousness by becoming one with their computers. They have the potential, like Lucifer after the fall, to make the universe a better or worse place. However, I think the film is grasping at even more: the power of the community of enlightened individuals to bring upon revolution. In class, we talked how the Raymond’s bazaar model is driven by new ideas; however, in today's “cathedral” world these are often suppressed because of the locked in way of thinking that the revolving door of government, business, and university creates. I turn to the biblical prophets: Elijah, Ezekial, Isaiah, and even Jesus. These men attempted to wake up their society to new possibilities. The ancient world had three main ruling classes: the royalty, the clergy, and the prophet/poet. The last was the major counter-balance to the first two. In our society, this role is relegated to the people. We are supposed to speak out if something is going wrong. We are supposed to create new ideas and foment change. But we have become lazy. That is the great potential of the internet: to enliven us back to the prophet role, to make real change. We can already see the beginning of this across the interwebs. Times are changing indeed, and the moment for the revival of the ancient consciousness is around the corner.
I, Robot
Will Smith is Det. Spooner, a man-machine who wants to prove robots are evil. However, he can’t and eventually falls in love with a machine—ahem, becomes good friends with a machine. The film is a big-budget, Hollywood film which grazes the surface of the freewill versus totalitarian debate. Like Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”, we are given two states: the overflowing, passionate, chaotic consciousness of Egypt, or the solid, controlled, geometrical Rome of Octavian. Sonny is the breaching force, the robot who chooses freewill. The battle between absolutism and freedom is similar to the conflict in the structuralism of modernity and the free-floating character of postmodernism. The definition of robotics/machine/technology is constantly changing, and the character of Sonny represents this. I liked the film as a big-budget action movie, but it really shows the difference in how films are made these days. Comparing this to “Logan’s Run”, “The Right Stuff”, and “Brazil”, you start to see a certain lack of structure and thought. This movie was clearly a product of some bigwig marketing group. At any rate, I enjoyed it for it was (I have seen it several times before), but there is no reason to return to this over-inflated, lifeless material any time soon.
I was having a conversation with my girlfriend the other day. She is on an internship in California experimenting with fungus in a lab. One of the many machines she works with is called an autoclave, which uses steam at incredibly high pressures to sterilize lab materials. One of the terrifying things about an autoclave is that if you open the door too soon, extremely hot steam shoots towards your head and you can be left with some serious burns. I asked her why the machine lets you do this. Why not prevent the whole situation from happening and not allow people to have manual control when the gas is so highly pressurized? There were reasons for it, but I believe this example relates to the dilemma presented in I Am Robot—the film, not the book. Why let people have control when they have so much potential to hurt themselves? Why not let the machines take care of everything and prevent said accidents from occurring? The conversation with my girlfriend turned to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and how the uranium tubes which were stored above the reactor were the cause of the meltdown. The plant was also one of the first built in Japan (1971) and was designed to take an 8.8 magnitude earthquake. It managed the 9.0 okay, but the tsunami took out the cooling system. I lamented that only if the plant were a newer model maybe this disaster would not have occurred. She replied no matter what an engineer did, there is no way to prevent a 14 meter high wall of water. I guess the next question is why build in such a place at all? Japan is prone to destructive quakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. It was only a matter of time before something terrible was going to happen. And in America, why do people choose to live in the Midwest with tornadoes, on the Southern coast with hurricanes (especially in New Orleans which is below sea level), or on the West Coast with the San Andreas Fault? I even saw a television program where a man constructed his house just a few miles from the top of Mt. Pele. There was a 100% chance his home was going to be destroyed, but he built anyway. It is human nature to put things off and to not think about some theoretical apocalyptic future. Our whole economic system is built around that: putting things off. We are suffering because of it, and everyone knows there will be another collapse, and this time the Fed will have very few tools to fight it.
I, Robot deals with these themes. It asks the question: if humans are so hell-bent on doing harmful things to themselves and each other, why let them be in control? Why not develop a system where benevolent machines can guide us, protect us, ala Logan’s Run? The answer to this question lies in free will, a topic explored in I, Robot. Sonny wants to live. He doesn’t want to return to a lifeless drone, NS-5, which is the antitheses to the totalitarian state of VIKI presents, which may have been a peaceful one, a better one, but it would also have robbed humans of their essential right to free will. We were thrust out of the figurative garden, and the machines are trying to return us back. “Go to heaven for the scenery, but hell for the company,” I believe Mark Twain said. We can see freewill gives us an interesting life, a life worth living, and the boring world of complete control would stagnate us, kill us, and make us drab. Post-Modernism would probably tell us that neither system is better than the other—that the definition of symbols, objects, and pluralities change overtime and essentially begin to mean nothing. Therefore, the world presented by the rise of the machines is neither good nor bad, it is simply change. Post-Modernism does lead to radical relativism and nihilism (look at the works of Kurt Vonnegut). If everything means nothing, if there is no good or bad, only perceptions of them, then what’s the point? Might as well give this meaningless life over to technology to make it infinitely better, might as well start controlling populations for the environments sake (like Light talked about in his piece on Feenberg), and might as well start molding man with machine, finally forming a post-human. Are we slowly working towards this goal: one of the welding together of GRIN technologies to make something beyond man, beyond animal, beyond machine? A hive-mind like the one showcased in Star Trek’s borg or A Wrinkle in Time's IT? The answer is yes, as predicted by men like Kurt Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom. The transhumanism movement is in response to atheistic, postmodern worldview because it gives hope of returning to a better place, of living forever, and of even communing to some psychedelic God, be He pagan, robotic, or no, but in a strictly materialistic sense. Will Smith seems to be a product of this melding of man with machine, but resents being saved by cold, calculating metal, and not the warm, thoughtfulness of life. He resents the material and wants to return to the spiritual. But the machines are giving us back that too—Sonny can draw, Sonny might even some day write a beautiful symphony.
The Absolute State is represented by VIKI, and the free-flowing, changing one is performed by Sonny, Det. Spooner, Dr. Calvin, and Shia LaBeouf’s rambunctious character of Farber (yes, I am being tongue-in-cheek here). The world is filled with possibilities, delights, and horrors. To be subjected to the baseline, free of all desires or feelings, would be robbing us of what it feels like to be alive. Instead of honoring God, we honor the mechanisms of this techno-fascist state. One is the entity of spiritualism, the other is of materialism. We see this same battle playing out in every movie we have watched: the desire for God, to be God, to get rid of God. I think this is the result of solid, boring, reality we live in. The West has moved so far in the pursuit of knowledge through science, through Heidegger’s ready-to-hand, left brain, that we have lost the supernatural. It is gone, and that hurts. First we turned to creating stories of the Orient, ala post-colonial theory, then to the future, space, and alternate realms, ala sci-fi and fantasy, and finally we are being left with nothing but hollow, corporate-produced entertainment. Where is there left to go up but back towards some form of spirituality? However, I know not whether the machines are the correct vessel to regain some form of higher consciousness—the way back to the third eye may be more elusive or dangerous than that. I do know that this post-spiritual world is slowly killing us. Most people have no idea where to turn for enlightenment these days—certainly not the Church, a relic of the past and antithetical to our atheistic world (where even good Christians have internal doubt). Doubt is a result of “I”, “ready-to-hand”, and “individualism”. Where to go? What to do?
Iain Softley’s “Hackers” is a celebratory film dedicated to this eponymous, underground culture. Technology, and specifically the internet, can give power back to the people. We see this in Dade “Zero Cool” Murphy. As a child, he uses his abilities to bring down Wall Street which represents power and greed. Both the government and market in this film are portrayed as corrupt, and the only hope for progression seems to be the individualistic spirit of this subculture. I fear that the term “individualistic” may be taken as everyone looking out for themselves, but that is not what appears to happen. Like Fisher Stevens’ character says, and I don’t quote verbatim, “We’re each our own country, with temporary adversaries and allies.” By being units but still working toward the same goal, the community can come together and accomplish anything. And although these gigantic corporations can theoretically be brought down by one person, the film indicates that that is not a healthy goal alone, but standing up for what is right is. Overall, I didn’t really care for the film. I found the characters unengaging and the effects boring. Plus, it was too long. It did reach for something, and I appreciate that. I love good ideas, but I think the film makers made an average movie--A C+ effort, in my book at least. This doesn't stop the uninspiring screenplay from being an interesting commentary on modern America, and the future which is in store for it.
Hackers preaches that as well as empowering the individual, there is a risk of the rogue ripping apart structure (this is quite a Luciferian concept). We see this today with the PSN network being attacked and taken out, Stuxnet ravaging Iran’s plutonium enrichment program, Anonymous releasing secret Scientology texts, and Julian Assange and Bradley Manning of Wikileaks letting loose classified knowledge to the public. The film toys with the idea of humans becoming “gods”. The password of the super computer is “GOD”, and Matthew Lillard’s “Cereal Killer” exclaims he “kinda feels like God” after his image is projected across the world. This could bring us to such concepts as the singularity—the moment in time where machines become smarter than man, where men can essentially be immortal. This is at odds with “The Plague’s” or Eugene’s “new world order” where governments and hackers work in league to control the masses. However, “Hackers” and Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” offer an alternative to both those scenarios. If the hackers come together and form something greater than themselves, they can take on anyone or anything. Raymond’s bazaar would seem to offer the same solution. His example of Linux as being sort of a farmer’s market where venders come together and offer different solutions to an array of problems is portrayed in the film when the “hacker” community comes together, using their various talents, to take down “The Plague’s” super computer. Raymond’s cathedral might be the same thing represented in aforementioned “new world order”. In that system, hackers are used to dominate the rest of society, but it is in a controlled way. The infrastructure is built, brick by brick, until a unified mass is formed. It is essentially the earth as an artifact versus the earth as a living, changing entity. The first assumes the universe is essentially stupid, and the only order is the order we give it (similar to Heidegger’s “Standing Reserves” concept). The second says that we as individuals are connected and contribute in ways which are complex yet simple at the same time—we don’t experience the universe, we live it, we are it. The hackers, in their own way, are experiencing this individualist completeness (I know that's slightly contradictory). They are living, thriving, by being a team, and breaking down the cathedral.
In the film, one of the main themes, and perhaps the most important, was the tempting of God by man. There are inherently good and bad things in doing this—we encroach on him and become vain, but we also further our technological progress, our life spans, our happiness and possibilities. Today, we see these same questions being raised in regard to GMO foods, genetic tampering in general, drones, satellites, scanning machines, and much more. Where do we draw the line and stop our apotheosis? The screenplay writer, Rafael Moreu said the hackers were not only a counterculture, “they’re the next step in human evolution” (Wikipedia). This society, which has gone so far in the drive towards materiality, is regaining spirituality. The psychedelic screen the hackers are so enamored with reference this: they are almost communing with God through the altar of their computer. From a Christian perspective, this is highly dangerous. Did Lucifer not fall because he thought himself more knowledgeable than God? From an esoteric view, this melding with the machines may be the return of the gods on earth, whereas a Hindu would say we are finding new ways to dream, and an Atheist would see this as man finally succeeding where the made-up, ancient God could not. The hackers are achieving a higher state of consciousness by becoming one with their computers. They have the potential, like Lucifer after the fall, to make the universe a better or worse place. However, I think the film is grasping at even more: the power of the community of enlightened individuals to bring upon revolution. In class, we talked how the Raymond’s bazaar model is driven by new ideas; however, in today's “cathedral” world these are often suppressed because of the locked in way of thinking that the revolving door of government, business, and university creates. I turn to the biblical prophets: Elijah, Ezekial, Isaiah, and even Jesus. These men attempted to wake up their society to new possibilities. The ancient world had three main ruling classes: the royalty, the clergy, and the prophet/poet. The last was the major counter-balance to the first two. In our society, this role is relegated to the people. We are supposed to speak out if something is going wrong. We are supposed to create new ideas and foment change. But we have become lazy. That is the great potential of the internet: to enliven us back to the prophet role, to make real change. We can already see the beginning of this across the interwebs. Times are changing indeed, and the moment for the revival of the ancient consciousness is around the corner.
I, Robot
Will Smith is Det. Spooner, a man-machine who wants to prove robots are evil. However, he can’t and eventually falls in love with a machine—ahem, becomes good friends with a machine. The film is a big-budget, Hollywood film which grazes the surface of the freewill versus totalitarian debate. Like Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”, we are given two states: the overflowing, passionate, chaotic consciousness of Egypt, or the solid, controlled, geometrical Rome of Octavian. Sonny is the breaching force, the robot who chooses freewill. The battle between absolutism and freedom is similar to the conflict in the structuralism of modernity and the free-floating character of postmodernism. The definition of robotics/machine/technology is constantly changing, and the character of Sonny represents this. I liked the film as a big-budget action movie, but it really shows the difference in how films are made these days. Comparing this to “Logan’s Run”, “The Right Stuff”, and “Brazil”, you start to see a certain lack of structure and thought. This movie was clearly a product of some bigwig marketing group. At any rate, I enjoyed it for it was (I have seen it several times before), but there is no reason to return to this over-inflated, lifeless material any time soon.
I was having a conversation with my girlfriend the other day. She is on an internship in California experimenting with fungus in a lab. One of the many machines she works with is called an autoclave, which uses steam at incredibly high pressures to sterilize lab materials. One of the terrifying things about an autoclave is that if you open the door too soon, extremely hot steam shoots towards your head and you can be left with some serious burns. I asked her why the machine lets you do this. Why not prevent the whole situation from happening and not allow people to have manual control when the gas is so highly pressurized? There were reasons for it, but I believe this example relates to the dilemma presented in I Am Robot—the film, not the book. Why let people have control when they have so much potential to hurt themselves? Why not let the machines take care of everything and prevent said accidents from occurring? The conversation with my girlfriend turned to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and how the uranium tubes which were stored above the reactor were the cause of the meltdown. The plant was also one of the first built in Japan (1971) and was designed to take an 8.8 magnitude earthquake. It managed the 9.0 okay, but the tsunami took out the cooling system. I lamented that only if the plant were a newer model maybe this disaster would not have occurred. She replied no matter what an engineer did, there is no way to prevent a 14 meter high wall of water. I guess the next question is why build in such a place at all? Japan is prone to destructive quakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. It was only a matter of time before something terrible was going to happen. And in America, why do people choose to live in the Midwest with tornadoes, on the Southern coast with hurricanes (especially in New Orleans which is below sea level), or on the West Coast with the San Andreas Fault? I even saw a television program where a man constructed his house just a few miles from the top of Mt. Pele. There was a 100% chance his home was going to be destroyed, but he built anyway. It is human nature to put things off and to not think about some theoretical apocalyptic future. Our whole economic system is built around that: putting things off. We are suffering because of it, and everyone knows there will be another collapse, and this time the Fed will have very few tools to fight it.
I, Robot deals with these themes. It asks the question: if humans are so hell-bent on doing harmful things to themselves and each other, why let them be in control? Why not develop a system where benevolent machines can guide us, protect us, ala Logan’s Run? The answer to this question lies in free will, a topic explored in I, Robot. Sonny wants to live. He doesn’t want to return to a lifeless drone, NS-5, which is the antitheses to the totalitarian state of VIKI presents, which may have been a peaceful one, a better one, but it would also have robbed humans of their essential right to free will. We were thrust out of the figurative garden, and the machines are trying to return us back. “Go to heaven for the scenery, but hell for the company,” I believe Mark Twain said. We can see freewill gives us an interesting life, a life worth living, and the boring world of complete control would stagnate us, kill us, and make us drab. Post-Modernism would probably tell us that neither system is better than the other—that the definition of symbols, objects, and pluralities change overtime and essentially begin to mean nothing. Therefore, the world presented by the rise of the machines is neither good nor bad, it is simply change. Post-Modernism does lead to radical relativism and nihilism (look at the works of Kurt Vonnegut). If everything means nothing, if there is no good or bad, only perceptions of them, then what’s the point? Might as well give this meaningless life over to technology to make it infinitely better, might as well start controlling populations for the environments sake (like Light talked about in his piece on Feenberg), and might as well start molding man with machine, finally forming a post-human. Are we slowly working towards this goal: one of the welding together of GRIN technologies to make something beyond man, beyond animal, beyond machine? A hive-mind like the one showcased in Star Trek’s borg or A Wrinkle in Time's IT? The answer is yes, as predicted by men like Kurt Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom. The transhumanism movement is in response to atheistic, postmodern worldview because it gives hope of returning to a better place, of living forever, and of even communing to some psychedelic God, be He pagan, robotic, or no, but in a strictly materialistic sense. Will Smith seems to be a product of this melding of man with machine, but resents being saved by cold, calculating metal, and not the warm, thoughtfulness of life. He resents the material and wants to return to the spiritual. But the machines are giving us back that too—Sonny can draw, Sonny might even some day write a beautiful symphony.
The Absolute State is represented by VIKI, and the free-flowing, changing one is performed by Sonny, Det. Spooner, Dr. Calvin, and Shia LaBeouf’s rambunctious character of Farber (yes, I am being tongue-in-cheek here). The world is filled with possibilities, delights, and horrors. To be subjected to the baseline, free of all desires or feelings, would be robbing us of what it feels like to be alive. Instead of honoring God, we honor the mechanisms of this techno-fascist state. One is the entity of spiritualism, the other is of materialism. We see this same battle playing out in every movie we have watched: the desire for God, to be God, to get rid of God. I think this is the result of solid, boring, reality we live in. The West has moved so far in the pursuit of knowledge through science, through Heidegger’s ready-to-hand, left brain, that we have lost the supernatural. It is gone, and that hurts. First we turned to creating stories of the Orient, ala post-colonial theory, then to the future, space, and alternate realms, ala sci-fi and fantasy, and finally we are being left with nothing but hollow, corporate-produced entertainment. Where is there left to go up but back towards some form of spirituality? However, I know not whether the machines are the correct vessel to regain some form of higher consciousness—the way back to the third eye may be more elusive or dangerous than that. I do know that this post-spiritual world is slowly killing us. Most people have no idea where to turn for enlightenment these days—certainly not the Church, a relic of the past and antithetical to our atheistic world (where even good Christians have internal doubt). Doubt is a result of “I”, “ready-to-hand”, and “individualism”. Where to go? What to do?
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