No Need To Suffer (part 5)

The Need of Attachment

Just as we do not need food to meet the need of hunger if we can identify or invent some other means to meet that need, then also we do not need suffering if we can identify or invent some other means to meet the need of attachment. Moreover, inasmuch as needless attachment leads to suffering, we may read in a different light what Thầy Nhất Hạnh says:

Understanding [needless attachment] always brings compassion. If we don’t understand [needless attachment], we don’t understand happiness. If we know how to take good care of [needless attachment], we will know how to take good care of happiness. We need [needless attachment] to grow happiness.

The fact is that [needless attachment] and happiness always go together. When we understand [needless attachment], we will understand happiness. If we know how to handle [needless attachment], we will know how to handle happiness and produce happiness (31).

Perhaps the appeal to “suffering” in Thầy Nhất Hạnh’s book—rather than an appeal to “needless attachment”—as the source of unpleasantness in human experiences arises from an attempt to reach a certain kind of ear in our Occidental culture. For a very long time now, Thầy Nhất Hạnh has sought to speak to Occidental ears, from his earliest appeals to people in the United States to stop destroying the people of and the world of his homeland to all of his subsequent work for peace worldwide.

Moreover, he stresses over and over that one may neither communicate nor achieve communication where listening cannot or has not occurred. Out of the howling suffering that we live in within our Occidental culture—a howling plastered over by thick layers of materialism, anaesthesia, and a partial knowledge of human experience—perhaps it must seem too abstract to approach the root of “attachment” all at once.

If “understanding suffering always brings compassion,” then a part of what such compassion entails would involve a person’s realisation of the attachment underlying that suffering. Otherwise, such compassion has an only a limited, therapeutic benefit, albeit still a desirable one. No wonder that non-attachment in Buddhism so often reads in Occidental ears as, “Oh, so I’m just not supposed to care about anything?” A focus on feeling or affect (on the sensual experience of suffering) that does not track back to the source of that affect (one born of desire arising from attachment) shifts us only from a disagreeable state of attachment to a seemingly more agreeable one.

The use to which the phrase “we need suffering” gets put acknowledges that suffering serves as a means to an end, and in this way discloses the misleading use of the word “need.” In fact, do not need suffering, although it suffices as a prevalent or prevailing means for meeting the need of attachment. To realise this clearly cuts off at the knees any apathetic or sadistic attempt to justify cruel behaviour or the suffering of others under the banner of “we need suffering”. It debunks every claim both of doing harm for the good of another of doing nothing for another’s harm because we all must deal with our own problems.

We do not need suffering. One would instead have to argue that we have no alternative to suffering as a means for meeting the need of attachment, except that we do have other means both to work against attachment and to work for non-attachment that make such a claim hollow, self-serving, or maliciously intended.

No Need To Suffer (part 4)

The Need to Suffer

Since a need refers to that condition that must be met so that the present state of affairs might continue, we must ask then whether suffering names an actual need or if it embodies rather a present or prevailing means for meeting an as yet, still unnamed need. In the same way, just as the necessity of food as the most prevalent means for satisfying the need of hunger implies further that we might meet that need of hunger through means other than food, then the necessity of suffering as the most prevalent means for satisfying whatever as-yet unnamed need it meets implies as well that we might meet that unnamed need through means other than suffering as well.

Here, we may return to the Bhāgavad-Gītā for a clue what might constitute this unnamed need. There, we see:

while contemplating the objects of the senses, attachment develops; from attachment desires are born; from desire arises anger; from anger delusion occurs, from delusion bewilderment of memory; from bewilderment of memory the loss of spiritual intelligence; and from the loss spiritual intelligence one perishes

The root of this cascade that ends in one’s disintegration begins from developed attachment while contemplating the objects of the senses, attachment develops. Contemplation of the objects of the senses itself does not inevitably play out in the cascade, but the attachment to those sense objects contemplated. From that, desires arise; desires that circumstances then either frustrate (leading to anger that the desire failed to be gratified) or gratify (leading to anger that the desire proved non-permanent and transitory).

How we understand the downstream consequences of the desires arising from attachment, not only does attachment itself begin this cascade, we may note that attachment precedes desire. Hence in Buddhism one hears again and again of the necessity of non-attachment as a solution to the problems both of frustrate desire and the perils of karmic rebirth, rather than an initial emphasis on desires themselves. Attachments to desires not desires themselves prove the trap; not affect or feeling itself, but the ground of them, attachment to them.

This already suggests that suffering, understood as an affect or a feeling, does not get to the root; we might simply say that attachment to suffering identifies a prior condition or problem that requires our address. Thus, if we “need” suffering, this hols only because “attachment to suffering” occurs so pervasively, so automatically, so unconsciously, that it already provides the framework or the ground by which we might move towards happiness or peace and away from or out of suffering.

And yet, the understanding disclosed by the Bhāgavad-Gītā shows that by awareness of the issue—by seeing that attachment to desires, not desires themselves—exhibits the root of the problem, we may proceed from that point, and not from the condition of being already trapped within our attachments. This alone shows suffering not as a need but as the prevailing means by which we address the now-no-longer-unnamed need of attachment.

The Bhāgavad-Gītā, Buddhism, and many similar traditions, in fact, insist that suffering results from needless attachment, from attachments that we assuredly resorted to but that it did not have to go that way.

The strangeness or weirdness, the difficulty of trying to come to terms with the notion of non-attachment, so prevalent in Buddhism, arises out of this critique. Even to say, “One might not be attached” seems attached to the notion of non-attachment. But nothing paradoxical hides in this. Just as our best approximation of “objective reality” can only arise from a collectively intersubjective collation of subjective impressions—the Jains would remind us, “No, not even then”—so also must every engagement with the notion of “non-attachment” find expression through our embodied and attached human beingness. We can never talk it, but can only talk about it, but even that talking about it serves, or can serve, to orient one’s attention in the right direction.

But however helpful or unhelpful the elaborations, we see that suffering supplies merely the most prevalent means for meeting the need of attachment.

We may speak of a need of attachment even in Buddhist terms, in that everything manifest being necessarily both transient and limited, then we see attachment to that limitation and transiency as the condition that must be met if the state of affairs of our individual embodiment will continue. Since much Eastern philosophy and religion sees this sort of persistence over lifetimes as a problem needing a solution, its solutions then properly go to the very root of the need that generates the ground of that persistence: attachment.

Just as I cease to exist as a self-aware living individual if the need of separation (apartness, isolation, &c) no longer gets met by some necessity (whether friendship, community, togetherness, &c), so also do we cease to exist as a self-aware living individual if the need for attachment gets no longer met by some necessity as well. That suffering embodies simply the prevalent or prevailing means by which the need of attachment gets met, this means we might meet that need by other means as well.

As such, we do not need suffering.

 

No Need To Suffer (part 3)

Let Us Not Promote Suffering

Against the notion of this defence of Thầy Nhất Hạnh’s insistence that “we need suffering,” to say we need suffering also resonates terribly in English. If we would say that we need suffering, then this means we should also do all that we can to ensure that we and others suffer, so that they may grow, or at least move finally toward that end of happiness or peace that suffering lays the groundwork for.

A very great deal of political quietism and apathy may hide under this notion, even if someone does not have enough strength of character to inflict deliberate suffering in others that they might grow toward happiness. They can at least stand aside and declare the suffering of others none of their affair but certain something good and necessary.

However, as we also know the Vedic injunction—mā hiṁsyāt sarvā bhūtāni : never commit violence to anyone—one might think that this alone should stop any such understanding of suffering—deliberately or perversely inflicted or not—in its tracks. The injunction should already rule out any apathy by people toward suffering, much less any insistence on inflicting or promoting suffering in others through violence due to the necessity and benefit of suffering. However, it does not always work out that way. In his study of the Śrī Vedānta-Sūtra, Adhyāyas III & IV, for instance, David Bruce Hughes summarises the argument around Sūtra 3.1.26:

The Vedas order:

agnisomīyaṁ paśum ālabheta

“One should sacrifice an animal in an agnisomiya-yajña.”

Because piety and impiety is known only from the Vedas’ statements, the Vedas’ orders to commit violence must be understood to be actually kind and pious. Therefore the orders of the Vedas are never impure. The prohibitions “Never commit violence to anyone,” and “Violence is a sin,” are the general rules decreed by the Vedas; and the statement, “one should sacrifice an animal in an agnisomiya-yajña,” is an exception to that general rule. A general rule and a specific exception to that rule need not contradict each other. There is scope for each (29, underlining added).

One may readily anticipate a reading of “the Vedas’ orders to commit violence must be understood to be actually kind and pious” as simply the Orwellian doublespeak of Power.

I will not engage the manifold apologetics, both disingenuous and sincere, that exist for this exception to the general rule of mā hiṁsyāt sarvā bhūtāni : never commit violence to anyone. I raise the point only to make clear the destructive use that some may and have put the phrase “we need suffering” to use, whether to do harm to others for their own good or to do nothing about harm to others for their own good. I do not read that Thầy Nhất Hạnh intends the phrase to stand on its own, and he provides much more text by which to contextualise his intended meaning, as I hear it. Yet I still hear him saying, “we need suffering” out of a sense of his own experience of suffering as it contributed to his growth toward peace and happiness.

If we seek out the “lesson” in the suffering that befalls us, this occurs only retrospectively. Experiences befall us, and those we experience and name as suffering we may then engage in whatever way we do, even to learn something from that experience. We will see, then: one may only recognise suffering, we re-cognise it; one cannot inflict it, not even the sadist, who may know another human being well enough in advance to know that certain kinds of physical, psychological, or social violence done will instantiate in that person as suffering, that they will experience and name those actions as inflicting suffering. Nonetheless, such a cruel person inflicts only violence, and we may see then in every claim to do harm to another “for their own good” only violence and a violation of the injunction mā hiṁsyāt sarvā bhūtāni : never commit violence to anyone.

In life, if we will less often meet sadists—those sufferers who spread the agony of their experience deliberately to others—and more often those sufferers whose own suffering makes reaching out compassionately to others too onerous or difficult, still the burdensome of this experience does not mean we must overlook the self-serving character of our attempts to solace ourselves by blunting or deflecting or ennobling the evident suffering of others—especially suffering that arises from social injustice and privilege—under the banner of “we need suffering”. Perhaps I decide I need a suffering, that does not license me to decide that you need suffering in general, and even less so any one or more specific suffering: that cancer, sexual assault, the death of your child, a war, your failure to get into college.

Whatever need of suffering we might recognise individually in retrospect, to prevail over the violence that wrought it argues not for the necessity of such violence but rather to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of an inhuman fate.

 

No Need To Suffer (part 2)

The Suffering of Need

In English, we have an unfortunate relationship with the word need. We may often hear something referred to as needed, when the thing described rather embodies only the present or prevailing means by which we meet an actual, often unnamed, need.

A need, rather, names only that condition that must be met so that the present state of affairs might continue. The notion of biological needs, the biology of living beings, gives us our most familiar examples. We call food a need, for instance, but food embodies only the most prevailing means by which we meet the need of hunger. In other words, we may understand hunger as a need, i.e., that condition that must be met so that a given living being may continue to persist as a living being. That food embodies simply the most prevalent means for satisfying the need of hunger means further that we might meet that need of hunger with other means than food. Biologically—for mammals at least, including ourselves—we may name also the needs of thirst, environmental exposure, and fatigue also, which we generally meet with the prevailing means of water, clothing and shelter, and sleep. By referring to these biological needs of hunger, thirst, exposure, and exhaustion, I do not intend to offer an exhaustive list.

Since we experience these biological needs of hunger, thirst, exposure, and exhaustion as unpleasant, as something we wish to avoid, but must continue to experience them in order to persist as living beings, then we may say that we need the suffering they entail. Without them, we would cease to exist as living beings. In this light, we may understand how Thầy Nhất Hạnh insists, “We need suffering” (30). We may see how our embodiment in this life, which seems to require this kind of biological suffering in order to persist, makes suffering a prerequisite for the condition opposite of suffering, which we might call happiness or peace.

Being > Biology

For human beings, as one species amongst the many within the counsels of species, what constitutes our human lifedoes not arise from our biology. Experiencing everything through our perceptions, our perceptions define what we deem reality. A living being without self-awareness will have no body, no brain, not even any world or environment in the sense that we experience it. For us to speak specifically of biological needs, then, already emanates not from any physical reality of the world but from our way of conceptualising our experience of it.

Since a need denotes that condition that must be met so that the present state of affairs might continue, inour human experience we not only name under a category of biology such needs as hunger, thirst, exposure, and exhaustion, but also many other needs; Thầy Nhất Hạnh specifically combines the biological and the non-biological when he writes, “Love, respect, and friendship all need food to survive” (9).

One will find few who would object to the notion that human beings—if not all sovereign, living beings—need love, respect, and friendship. But again, we see love, respect, and friendship not as needs but rather the present or prevailing means by which we meet some actual, as yet still unnamed, need. I notice that it does not clarify thinking to imagine food as the opposite of hunger; rather, food embodies a prevailing means by which the need of hunger gets met. So just as the necessity of food meets the need of hunger, then we might ask as well what the necessities of love, respect, and friendship meet the needs of.

To address only one example, we may see that friendship meets a need of separation. Since we cannot have the experience of existing as individuals if we do not experience some reality of apartness or distinction that sets us apart from all other people and living beings, then separation or apartness describes a condition that be met so that the present state of affairs might continue. If we ceased to exist in our separateness, then we as a living being would no longer exist. However, as also with hunger, the unpleasantness of this experience of separation or apartness—this absolute isolation from all others—along with our desire to avoid the on-going state of the experience of that, makes friendship (or togetherness or community) a present or prevailing means by which that need of separation, isolation, apartness gets met.

One might elaborate a long list of non-biological human things—for example, love, respect, friendship, fairness, cooperation, compassion, recognition, &c—that we would incorrectly call needs, since these things embody rather the present or prevailing means for meeting some as yet still unnamed need. But in all cases, however one builds such a list, the experience of the unpleasantness of those needs and our desires to avoid experiencing the state of them points again to the sense of Thầy Nhất Hạnh’s insistence, “We need suffering” (30) if we would attain its opposite: happiness or peace.

However, I would further emphasise that any so-called “biological” needs do not differ in kind at all from these otherwise “non-biological” needs.

A living system self-aware or not that fails to meet the need of hunger disintegrates; the organisation of its life as an organism falls apart and it ceases to have being. Conventionally, we say it dies. In the same way, for self-aware living beings, if one fails to meet the need of separation, the organisation of its life as a living being also falls apart and it ceases to have existence. We sometimes metaphorically say people die of loneliness, but sometimes this happens literally as well.

Moreover, whatever importance I accord my conceptualisation of my biology, that conceptualisation itself already represents a “non-biological” value. Thus, when someone gives me food to eat—when someone meets my need of hunger with the necessity of food—I say we might more clearly understand this not in terms of biology but, rather non-biologically, as meeting the need of separation with friendship.

Someone might object, “Why only the need of separation? Why not also the need of hunger?”

I intend to erase here the false distinction of the biological as somehow prior to human existence or simply more important. Instead of “one does not live by bread alone,” I would say, “one does not live by bread at all; one only persists.”

But further, that I should cease to have being “biologically” does not end my life—it ends only my experience of that life. Whatever role our human imagining of biology plays in the shaping of our lives—and it plays a considerable role, one assumes—it describes neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for understanding the character or experience of self-aware life. When I die, my life continues in the lives of other living beings; the framework of “biology” cannot explain this aspect of human experience, an experience shared by other living beings who express grief over the death of another, for instance.

For the experience of a self-aware life, then, the qualities of difference one may identify between different needs (like hunger or separation) have felt consequences, but do not finally rise to a difference in kind. In other words, one perhaps may not ultimately find a satisfying distinction of difference between the so-called “biological” and “non-biological” needs of self-aware living beings.

To make this more starkly dramatic, rather than speaking of a need for hunger, one might describe the need for starvation in human experience. It seems no accident or coincidence that one of the riders of the Apocalypse has the name Famine, not Hunger. Or again, people in prison and in poverty and in alienating workplaces may receive food and yet feel (correctly) that they have ceased to live. Or yet again, like those on hunger strikes who specifically refuse to meet the need of hunger with food, they may yet feel (correctly) that their life, perhaps for the first time, has at last attained significance and meaning. At the end of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Sydney Carton reflects on his impending (and voluntary) execution as giving for the first time a weight and significance to his otherwise wasted life.

In all of this, we may understand all human needs as the needs of self-aware living beings, and refuse to misleadingly distinguish between biological and non-biological needs and the means that meet those needs. Such a view remains resonant with Thầy Nhất Hạnh’s insistence, “We need suffering” (30)—we need the human experience of hunger and separation, thirst and loneliness, &c. In the case of all such human needs, the unpleasantness of the experience of those needs as well as our desire to avoid those experiences, points to the (human) need of suffering Thầy Nhất Hạnh identifies; an experience we then either meet with the present and prevailing means that meet that need or fail too and experience the disintegration of the organisation of our lives, i.e., we die or cease to exist.

In the same way that if we cease to experience hunger this in all likelihood means that we have died, then more generally if we cease to suffer, then this in all likelihood means we have stopped humanly living.

 

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XIV (Temperance)

Abstract

Aesthetically, temperance (art) involves the mindful combination of disparate elements into a meaning, a surreal whole, not currently available to the status quo; psychologically, it signifies the mindful integration of ego-consciousness and archetypal material from the unconscious; interpersonally, it represents the mindful care of the “us” formed by you and me; socially, its points to individuation (as the individual expression of a culturally collective norm), &c.

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The fifteenth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 14: Temperance (or Art).

Over the past two or so years, I’ve been reading a lot of Jung’s writings,[3] and will continue to do so,[4] in part not only because his approach to psychology resonates with my own experience but also because when I read his works I experience a dislodging of psychic imagery that seems interesting and/or fruitful and/or inspiring. In addition, I have been doing Tarot card readings since 1986,[5] when my friend in college introduced them to me, and have even worked “professionally” as one.

So it proved very on-point and kind of my friend to think of me when she saw a copy of Nichols’ (1980) Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey. This series, then, embodies my reactions to and commentaries on Nichols’ commentaries, &c, and will work through the major arcana (the trumps) of the Tarot deck chapter by chapter as Nichol’s book does in order from 0 to 21.

Temperance: Heavenly Alchemist[6]

As a first note, whatever I now think about Crowley’s Thoth deck, I certainly appreciate that it named card 14 “Art” rather than “Temperance”. As an artist, but also by not using a word I would otherwise associate with prudery and not drinking—as Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in moderation, including moderation”—Crowley’s term put a sense on this card that kept me thinking about what I have at stake in the creation of art, namely: the regulated combination of disparate elements to create a whole.

By regulated, I mean that the choice of elements  I combine occurs cybernetically, deliberately, and essentially non-randomly. By a whole, I mean a meaning not otherwise available in culture (i.e., a place where culture currently has a hole). All of this lives, of course, in the conceit that this whole offers a more desirable alternative to those currently available in our culture.

With this idea still dim in my mind in college, I found the surrealist’s project compelling, building as they did from that quintessential example of (linguistic) surrealism given in Lautréamont’s (1869) Maldoror and cited often by Andre Breton: he was as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Or, “in a direct reference to Lautréamont’s ‘chance meeting on a dissection table’, Ernst defined the structure of the surrealist[7] painting: ‘A linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them’ (quotation here, example here).[8] Not just blending, then, but blending somethings together to rete an as yet unknown unity;[9] or (and) as Jung puts it in Nichols’ summary, “the necessity arises daily to reconcile the world of our dreams with that of our daily lives” (254).

Specifically, Nichols notes that the angelic figure on the card presides over the ceremonial involved in the mixing of disparate parts, in this case opposites. This requires care, because the combination of (in this example) fire and water threatens to evaporate all of the water if too much fire or quench the flame in the presence of too much water. Even in the correct proportions, it seems steam would result—a desirable result if we aspire to drive a locomotive or steam-punk airship—but also perhaps still a “waste” into a cloudy nothing. The admixture of fire and water itself also suggests fire-water, or alcohol, though how one chemically arrives at such a point from these inputs remains obscure, even if we could apply some kind of distillation.

The emphatic point involves the care involve in the preparatory ceremonial, whether we understand this in literal alchemical terms, metaphorically in psychological terms, or somewhere between literal and metaphorical as far as artistic combination goes. But even to flag these three categories understates things. Every second of every day involves some tricky integration of self and society, mind and body, analytic and synthetic categories, here and there, past/future and present, &c, or (if we invoke some Buddhism) the process of engagement in the world without becoming attached. To mediate these—a pun on “to put into media”—involves quite literally the “art” of living.

Generally, Nichols seems to resort mostly to larger-than-usual statements that seem only partially attached to the card. Helpfully, she names three virtues, symbolized (in what she groups as the middle of three rows of seven Major Arcana) in Fortitude, Temperance, and Prudence (the last of which sometimes appears in place of the Hanged Man). She does not say so, but the link between the Hanged man and Prudence seems obvious to me; becoming an example of the Hanged Man happens if you do not practice Prudence.

In general, she identifies this entire row as devoted to (moral) equilibrium, so that if all of the cards have deployed balance in one way or another (Justice’s scales, the ups and downs of the Wheel of Fortune), then it makes sense that balance per se, as temperance, should make an appearance as a capstone. How we mediate this balance in ego-consciousness becomes crucial, because:

when the unconscious steps into our outer world to borrow as its dream symbols the events, persons, and objects of our daily experience, it threatens the accustomed order of everyday life. In a similar confusing way, the rational ego mind can intrude into the image world of the unconscious, disturbing and disrupting its healing work.

When these two worlds get mixed up unconsciously, with no guardian angel to preside, our lives become muddled and confused, often with disastrous results. If we try to live on the outer side a drama that more properly belongs to the inner, the plot could end in tragedy … It is equally impractical, of course, to attempt to squeeze into our inner world events which properly belong in outer reality. If, for example, we have a problem with our spouse or neighbor, it is futile to take this drama wholly on the symbolic level, spending long hours concocting imaginary dialogues with this person or theorizing in solitary confinement about possible reasons for the other’s behavior. Although some introspection is valuable, there comes a time when one must step into reality and initiate a real-life dialogue with the person in question (254–5).

I call this making actual of archetypally material presented to one’s imagination as an impulse literalization. In Thomas Moore’s (1992)[10] Care of the Soul, he presents an excellent example of this. A business man who has been happily married for decades suddenly finds himself wanting to have an affair with his secretary. Rather than following this impulse, which he finds disturbing but threateningly hard to resist, and a lose-lose situation whatever he does, since if he betrays his wife, he will (1) either have to start lying to her or ruin everything by telling her, and (2) treat his secretary unfairly by either giving her false hopes that he would leave his wife or, in fact, actually leave his wife. So, he seeks out Moore, who invites him to play out this fantasy in his imagination rather than further repress it, and in the process of working through this fantasy, he comes to realize that his actual desire resides in wanting again the sort of youthfulness an freshness with his wife that he’d once had with her. From that (new) starting point, he approached his wife to re-kindle the fire, as it were.

This story aptly illustrates what Nichols means by letting the unconscious (literally) into the outer world such that “our lives become muddled and confused, often with disastrous results.” I have frequently seen, both for myself and in others, how such literalization does, very often, portend disaster, whereas by allowing such impulses a free rein in the imagination (if they do not simply dissipate from their own inertia), their “true interest’ becomes apparent. I have also found that almost never—in fact, I can think of no occasion—when the actual thing desired could get readily or easily inferred from the apparent impulse. An experienced therapist or psychopomp might have inferred that the businessman’s desire for his secretary really had something to do with his wife, but in what sense? *c. In any case, the point doesn’t require some clever human insight or wisdom in advance, but only a willingness to ask questions, to listen, and to give the impulse free rein to expose what it “really wants”.

How often do people eat because they have grown bored? The impulse to eat, which only adds extra calories, runs exactly contrary to (perhaps) the desire to get up and go outside and run around, to feel active. People recovering from addiction know intimately how their beast will devise manifold pretexts for using again, but event eh desire to use may already over some more deep-felt desire—and not just to “mask the pain” and so forth. At such times, odd as it may seem, it can help, it can provide insight, to ask the beast, the importuning complex: “what do you (really) want,” to let the impulse, whatever it consists of, to have free rein in one’s imagination.

Practicality makes doing this for every impulse unfeasible but also only infrequently always necessary; the problematic impulses—as people recovering from addiction can attest—involve the ones that specifically thwart our wills and have or threaten detrimental impacts in our lives. Trimpey (1996)[11] spends far too much of his time critiquing the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous, but his recognition of the distinction between chemical dependency and addiction remains pertinent, where the label addict applies only if she or he has a chemical dependency they cannot control or manage. Once a person reaches this point,[12] then Trimpey’s approach kicks in. But he characterizes the addiction as a beast, recognizably a complex in the Jungian sense, as a presence in consciousness that threatens to thwart or usurp our ego-consciousness. Attempting to reason with this thing may prove fruitless, but letting the beast have free play in one’s active imagination at least (1) does not perilously attempt to repress it, and (2) allows it to spend whatever energy it has on its “fantasy” rather than our (problematic) use of rugs, food, sex, or whatever else we feel addicted to (or chemically dependent upon).

Precisely in the way that this represents something of a negotiation, it points to the needfulness of temperance in the combinatory sense rather than in its virtuous sense as moderation. Ultimately, it become moderating to find a (socially harmless) expression for (beastly or compensatory) impulses, but moderation rather gets understood in such a way. The fact of negotiation presupposes equality of speaking power even if the parties themselves differ vastly in power, as may often prove the case between a small band of protesters and a multinational corporation, or one’s ego-consciousness and the unconscious. It also, for that reason, does not propose turning the other cheek.

Notwithstanding that Christian discourse selectively ignores its own discourse, we should not confuse turning the other cheek and nonviolent resistance. One might say the former more resembles pacifism while nonviolent resistance embodies a counterforce more powerful than violence itself, but the more salient distinction involves the (necessary) publicity or visibility of the latter. Turning the other cheek when the world cannot see it justifies critiques of this as pacifisms though, of course, one cannot always assure or control the environment so that one’s pacifism remains or becomes publically visible.

I will disagree with myself some, since the degree of visibility plays a role here. James Lawson, who helped to discipline and organize the students of the Nashville Lunch Counter Sit-Ins in 1960, reports in (2000)[13] A Force More Powerful about an African-American tied to a tree by white would-be lynchers intending to beat him with chains, and as they did, the man said something like forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do, and this had the effect of confusing his attackers; an argument broke out amongst them. Thus, although here the only witnesses to the man’s nonviolent resistance comprised his attackers, nonetheless even that limited degree of visibility had an effect (in this case) an thus transformed (invisible, i.e., non-public) pacifism into nonviolent resistance. Thus, even in a solitary torture cell or in a case of rape, there still remains one other human being as a witness to your torture—although to what extent one may launch an appeal in a society of two where one acts as a perpetrator may not prove “visible” enough.

A situation of actual negotiation does not carry such literal threats of violence, even as it threatens whatever change (as a tempering) must result between the two parties that face-off over the negotiating table—whether this occurs between our ego-consciousness and some archetypally grounded complex, between another human being we find ourselves in conflict with (especially in romantic relationships), or with some more diffuse “corporate” entity. The presence of the supposed angel on the Temperance card suggests something like an arbiter—in fact, Nichols makes very much of the necessity of this presence, even though most of our negotiations in life do not have the luxury of such an overseeing force.

In the analytical setting, a therapist may stand as this mediating force; in some legal negotiations, an arbiter gets formally involved. But when it comes to interpersonal disputes, we tend to eschew a neutral party and instead try to amass a force of supporters (if only in the form of their arguments)—though one might say, again, that in any circumstance where “winning” or achieving “power-over” someone else becomes a criterion then one has ceased to negotiate.[14] In this light, one might precisely appoint a neutral party to oversee one’s interpersonal conflicts,[15] or we might precisely recognize that between you and me stands our “us,” which me may address ourselves to in seeking to find a resolution to our conflict. Married couples often know this egregiously, since the alternative to working out the negotiation involves divorce, separation, or worse.

In one of the more radical components of Jung’s thinking, he affects something like a Keplerian revolution on the notion of consciousness. I mean, at times in his attempt to describe the relative “positioning” of elements within consciousness relative to the total Self (which includes conscious and unconscious elements), he more or less “de-centers” ego-consciousness. To describe this geometrically, he suggests something more like an elliptical than circular “orbit” for consciousness, that we do not have one center (to the Self) like a circle, but something more like an ellipse, with its two central foci. Like planetary orbits, these centers of gravity do not have equal size—the Sun has vastly more mass than any given planet, but the ellipse traced out by each planet depends upon those relatives masses.

If synchronicity comprises Jung’s best-known ‘weird” idea, and his contention (I cannot quite remember where) that our consciousness actually (and literally, it seems) extends outside of our bodies into the space around us represents his “weirdest” (but not at all so well-known) idea, I suspect that this realization that the Self (the totality of the consciousness and unconscious taken together) has a literal double-focus may prove of greatest importance for humankind as we move forward (hopefully). I can’t begin to tease out the ramifications of this, but s far as the Temperance card goes, this two-part function of consciousness fundamentally involves then the sort of blending, moderation, or negotiating described above.

I principally mention this because we often hear platitudes about the center, including frequently enough from Jung, but also at the same time about “balance”. In Jung’s elliptical description as also in the vast distances that some of the planets must remain from the Sun in order to “preserve their orbits,” it becomes clear that the “center” at the very least does not occur spatially or positionally. When we fancifully employ some instruction software that gives us a teeter-totter with a heavy weight on one end and a light one on the other, and the assignment to locate the fulcrum so the two sides balance, we notice that the balance-point does not stand in the center unless we start with equal weights in the first place.

In the case of consciousness, however, we have the capacity (Jung observes) to focus on either foci (literally); we can occupy the position of ego-consciousness (the planet, if you will) or we can (sometimes involuntarily) occupy the position of the archetypal material presented to consciousness (the Sun), often with the effect of ego-inflation or what Jung calls godlikeness.[16] Whatever the case, the conventional or platitudinous sense of “balance” does not appear here. We do not receive in equal measure some offsetting bit for each part of experience and, importantly, the promise of karma does not consist in just desserts either, but only in the assertion of consequences for action. Jung frequently speaks of the action of the unconscious in a compensating sense; we become too one-sided and the psyche attempts an offsetting compensation, but this does not involve adding, say, a -3 to our 3 so that we arrive again at 0. If, on the heavy end of the teeter-totter we add some more weight, and we keep the balance-point in the same place, then we do not simply add the same addition of weight to the other side to maintain the balance.

Example: if a 56 pound grandson sits 8.5 feet from the pivot point of a teeter-totter, then his 240 pound grandfather must sit approximately 1.9 feet from the center on the opposite side to balance the teeter-totter. If the grandfather then holds his 13-pound granddaughter as well (and if we do not move the balance point of the teeter totter), then the grandson would have to hold not an additional thirteen pounds but only a fraction more than 3 pounds to keep the teeter-totter level.

Just to continue this metaphor, if we keep the balance point in one place, then as we increase grandfather’s mass he would have to sit closer and closer to the pivot point or, alternatively, the grandson could sit further and further away (if we could extend his end of the teeter-totter). These changes remain proportion; thus, if we double the weight on the grandfather’s side, this requires a double of the weight on the grandson’s side.

Consequently, the amount of “increase’ on the (much larger) side of the Unconsciousness requires  proportional (but smaller) reaction in consciousness, depending upon the “distance” one stands from the Unconscious material. Conversely, when we find ourselves “close” to the increase of Unconsciousness, this requires more (weight) from us to compensate for it.

We don’t have to make this literal, but by acknowledging two foci and relative center of mass, this provides  way to understand why some psychological phenomenon may have little charge for us while other, sometimes even seeming slight changes, can have devastating effects. But it also points to what the term “balance” means—not as some equal-sized, equal-weighted counter-gesture to whatever gets thrown at us. And this informs, in turn, how Temperance functions; more precisely, Temperance needn’t remain concerned only with blending polar or equal opposites—we might mix equal parts red and yellow to get a neutral orange, or we might mix a great deal of yellow into red to get an extremely pale orange. Temperance involves the art of intermingling or mixing, keyed of course to the specifics of what we mix but not (as a process or means) determined by the component parts.

In a relationship, whether opposites attract or not, the two palettes as a set of attributes in the pair involved intermingle into whatever they do—she, with her volatile, dominating charisma, he with his self-effacing easy-goingness, or the two of them with their equally ambitious, at-the-gym, perpetually “on” motivation, or whatnot. Or the (mathematically much more complicate) multidimensional orbiting of a group around some common point of interest, which has become utterly conventionalize in orchestral music (to achieve certain effects). Or in the psychological reality where multiple complex make their demands and announce their (sometimes murky) intentions within the court of the ego-consciousness—that sovereign who (after the manner of card 3 or card 4) has to try to integrate a whole kingdom of subjects (under an often too-apparent bluff).

One final note about balance then. On a cybernetic view of living systems (too sketchily presented), the general run of things involves the absorption of changes of state in a living organism, often through (mostly negative) feedback loops.  This regulatory function has the aim (so to speak) of maintaining what an observer might describe as key variables necessary for the continued functioning of the living system.  In  most general way, we can say that all living systems share this structure of perturbation and compensation, but what matters more involves that what each living organisms’ system “aims” to preserve stands as organism-specific so that (similarly) each compensation for a given perturbation remains organism-specific as well.

Analogously, imagine two sets of grandfathers and grandsons in the example described previously. In both cases, the amount of additional weight each grandson will have to hold in order to balance the teeter-totter differs and depends entirely on the whole system (grandfather, grandson, teeter-totter, distances, weight added). Even though both examples share the (mechanism of a) teeter-totter in common, what “balance” means for the two situations differs.

All the more so with living systems, where more than merely “changes in weight” introduce themselves, evening as something like a “balancing” function (a verb, rather than the noun of “balance”) plays a role for all living systems. This additional level of complexity, however, seems still at least an order of magnitude less than any sort of “living system analogy” we might offer for how “balancing” works in our psychological make-up.

In living systems—and Maturana and Varela (1987)[17] aver in any case the extension of their descriptive biology to things other than biological systems—this description of (homeostatic) “balancing” remains helpful because it describes primarily a mechanistic-like process, as understood from the standpoint of an observer. Like so-called inert matter, where differences in sample generally do not obtrude destructively into whatever sought-for outcome scientists or engineers might desire in an experiment or process, on the “merely physical” side of biology, one may similarly disregard difference in sample—hence, on the strictly physiological side of things,  host of different kind of medical treatments achieve their desired outcomes. But as we begin to shade over from strictly biological or physiological properties of matter—where disregarding differences does not affect outcomes—one we get far enough into the psychological realm, we can no longer ignore differences—and so many (if not most) psychotropic medications only in a gross sense of the term ‘work” and often seem to make patients lament the cure more than the ailment.

In the absence of a better term, we can just as well say “tempering” to describe the actual process that occurs, and in which we can sometimes find ourselves complicit, when perturbations cause changes of state to our psychology and then through amplifying or inhibiting cognitive feedbacks attempt to regulate or absorb or compensate for those perturbations. How this differs in practice,[18] from the sort of permanently reified “balancing” of living systems involves how what constitutes “balancing” itself (in human experience) may, can, or does change.

Part of what distinguishes living systems from non-living systems involves a greater range of compensations for a greater range of perturbations; the limits of this “adaptability” then generally denote the limits of the organism’s survival capacity, i.e., the capacity of this “balancing” to absorb a given variety of perturbations. “Tempering,” by contrast, proposes something like an adaptability of adaptations, though to unequivocally or absolutely distinguish between the “mere adaptability” of a cell or bodily organ as opposed to some putative “adaptability of adaptabilities” that we (credit ourselves with or) claim needn’t get insisted upon.

With this, we push (somewhat unnecessarily) against the limits of the metaphor of formal biology as far as this blog goes. But it points still to the notion that Temperance (cad 14) differs mechanically and in substance from Justice (card 8) with its perfectly reciprocal arm-balances. The high-wire act of temperance, often accompanied in its practitioners with just the balance-arm but no balance pans, doesn’t necessarily ever aim for perfectly level, but must constantly adjust to keep the performer from plunging headlong. And were a bird to land on the bar, a lover of strict justice might complain on principal that this throws everything off, but the exigencies of the situation don’t allow for too long such precious argumentation—unless we want the performer to go over the edge. Moreover, this image of a bird on the bar shows how Justice’s pans occupy fixed positions on the end, whereas the bird might land anywhere, demanding then a different response an offset.

In the Temperance card itself, we see this depicted as a solid stream of water passing (as in the hands of a deft bartender) from jug to jug. The fluidity points (precisely one would think) to something unlike the fixed bar on the Justice card. As one throws water from jug to jug, this calls (as also for  juggler) constant adjustments; a mechanistically fixed set of responses will likely quickly end with water everywhere but in the jugs any longer.

And, in fact, we do this continuously, as we may see at the fundamental level of our physiological selves, but all of this activity remains unconscious. With this card, in the second “half” of the major Arcana, we have instead the possibility of doing this tempering conscious, deliberately. If not in every instance (thought why not), then certainly at least in the sort of crucial moments we encounter in our encounters with ourselves, with others, with the world, &c.

In the scheme of life-goals or puruṣartha, card 14 stands as the second in the domain of mokṣa or liberation. In addition to all I’ve already said, this points specifically to what often seems to come up in Occidental encounters with Buddhism (or Eastern philosophy generally): the confusing relationship of acting in the world while seeking non-attachment.[19] Frankly, from my reading of the Bhagavad-Gītā, the means for non-attachment seem overly simplified—just do all I do for the sake of the deity of my choice and non-attachment occurs automatically. (I say this also without ignoring that this approach, differing as it does between karma yoga and bakhti yoga, constitutionally does not appeal to me either, which Kṛṣṇa assures me poses no problem, as jñana yoga more floats my boat).

I have to, in fact, avoid some temptation here to align cards 13–16 (Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower) as explicitly corresponding in some defensible way with bakhti yoga, karma yoga, raja yoga, and jñana yoga specifically;[20] I will stick for now with the idea that the sequence itself reprises the steps of liberation, where each of those steps has its analogous moment in the four principal types of yoga.

The issue of engaged Buddhism seems more problematic in Occidental culture, and not merely because it arrived after centuries of engaging the idea in India and elsewhere. The message in the Bhagavad-Gītā iterates in several places that one should act; one should follow one’s dharma, and that premature withdrawal from the social world, even for the noble aspiration of renunciation, portends a social wound. Certainly in the now world-wide interpretation of the Bhagavad-Gītā by the founder of the Kṛṣṇa Consciousness movement A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupāda—himself coming “to” the text principally by way of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, a later commentary on the Bhagavad-Gītā—he unambiguously advises a change of mind or intention in how one acts more than a change of action, this “line of advice” seemingly used to avoid running afoul of the existing social order (of castes) or the imputation of promoting overt civil disobedience or revolution . Kṛṣṇa himself in the Bhagavad-Gītā states one does better to do one’s own dharma badly than someone else’s dharma well.

Whatever the details of this, it becomes clear both in the Bhagavad-Gītā itself as well as in the Kṛṣṇa Consciousness movement that non-engagement stands as a non-option, however one can remain non-attached in all of that. It seems to me that Temperance particularly points to this, not simply in whatever groundwork gets laid for reintegrating the personal soul (atman) and world-soul (brahman) but also for continuing to live in the world while not accruing karma.

From brooding on sense objects, attachment to them arises. Out of that attachment, personal desire is born. And from desire, anger appears. Anger confuses the thinking process, which, in turn, disturbs memory. When memory fails, reasoning is ruined. And when reason is gone, one is lost (Bhagavad-Gītā II.62–3).

We see that out of the problem of attachment, addressed by card 14 (Temperance), personal desire is born, addressed in card 15 (the Devil), from which anger appears. From confused thinking, disturbed memory, and ruined reason, one then becomes lost, addressed in card 16 (the Tower). But this impressively succinct diagnosis of the problem also signals the steps towards its resolution; by not brooding on sense objects (Death), we may become or remain non-attached (Temperance), may thus not experience destructive desire (the Devil) so that we experience the Tower not at the terrible end of the world as we know it but rather as “escape from prison and all that entails”.

Endnotes

[1] As a general context, I do not believe Tarot cards are in any way inherently magical; I’m not someone who becomes psychically disturbed if you touch my deck or someone who claims you’ve ruined the vibe if you do. Personally, doing Tarot readings for people is one place in my life where my intuitive and intellectual sides work in tandem, rather than being at odds with one another—and that sense of co-operation is a pleasure to experience. For others—for the “us” that exists during the duration of the Tarot reading—it is a chance to have a conversation; as an example, I’ve had a radio show where I did Tarot card readings on the air with formerly incarcerated individuals in order to let the world listening hear the reality of incarceration, &c, but the conversation is also for the other person, to examine the forces, the patterns, the trends in her or his life, and to have the opportunity to change them. I continually ask questions when doing Tarot card readings; I don’t pretend to be or act psychic. And having said all that, to the extent that the imagery in the Tarot operates archetypally (as Nichols claims), to the extent that it can inspire images and dislodge psychic impressions in those using and viewing the cards, then I agree that the Jungian approach Nichols brings to the Tarot stands to be helpful, insightful, and useful—hence this commentary on her commentary.

[2] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser.

[3] Psychological Types (Collected Works 6, [1921], 1971), Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9, Part 1, 2^nd ed. 1968), Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works 7, 2^nd ed 1966), Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works 12, [1944], 2^nd ed. 1968), Alchemical Studies (Collected Works 13, 1968), Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works 14, [1955-6], 2^nd ed. 1970).

[4] I have Symbols of Transformation (Collected Works 5, [1911-12], 2^nd ed. 1967), Aion (Collected Works 9, Part 2, [1951], 2^nd ed. 1968), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), Experimental Researches (Collected Works 2, 1973) lined up next, and need still to find affordable copy of The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works 8, 1970).

[5] I began with the Crowley-Harris (1972) Thoth Tarot, which I used for many years, acquired but didn’t find myself inspired by Dali’s (1955) Universal Tarot, owned, found myself inspired by, but did not use Tavaglione’s (1979) Stairs of Gold Tarot, used Brian William’s (1988) Renaissance Tarot during my professional phase, in part because the trumps readily leant themselves to that kind of setting, Gerhardt & Zeeuwen’s (1996) Terrestrial Tarot, which one reviewer describes as very unsettling yet still possessing a “strange magnetism,” and finally, Sergio Toppi’s (2000) Tarot of the Origins—Toppi being, as it turns out, one of my favorite illustrators of all time (see here and here, for my reviews of two of his books). I recently acquired the Mary-El deck as well.

[6] The title used for this header comes from the title of the chapter in Nichol’s book.

[7] Often, I find the surrealists too addicted to Freud in their effort to get at the unconscious—the desire being more relevant finally than their (poor) choice of theoretical understanding of means. But this provocation by the unconscious, which leads to the kind of desire Breton expresses when he says he wishes to “effervesce’ language, cannot and will not and does not rest on mere dialectics. What emerges, by the combination of disparate elements on an alien ground, only appears after the fact, so to speak. The synthesis does not come with foreknowledge. In Jung’s terms, borrowed and bastardized slightly, such a combination would provide a symbol, not a sign, of something, though we would not s yet know what it symbolized. In Jung’s usage, one encounters numinous material and then attempts to embody it, in a symbol; by definition, one cannot construct symbols then. But surrealism demonstrates we may, in fact, construct that something like  symbol, so long as we admit in advance that we do not know (yet) what we symbolize. Or, again, on another note; this approach remains explicitly non-dialectical for reasons Bakhtin (1986)* describes:

Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness—and that’s how you get dialectics (147)

* Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (trans. and ed., M. Holquist & C. Emerson). Austin: University of Texas Press.

[8] One wonders, in our so-called postmodern age, why we seem never to hear of synergy’s opposite (e.g., contrergy, hetergy, antergy), where the whole stands less than the sum of its parts. While anergy indicates “a lack of reaction by the body’s defense mechanisms to foreign substances,” which seems useful in dealing with the many hetergic cultural objects we daily encounter, synergy’s specific antonym still seems necessary; the Urban Dictionary proposes (obviously) antergy:

Where synergy is defined as “combining of forces for greater productivity and mutual understanding” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” antergy has the opposite effect: each additional team member that is added means that the project will take longer to complete.

I object to this only because it more offers a description of muddled cooperation. If I split a hair, imagine that two work toward an end and then a third comes along and (tries to) “help” and slows the process. What gets created involves less the sum of its parts and in fact still represents some sum greater than the parts, but a sum that the original two synergists did not desire. The process of utilizing synergy, conceptually and descriptively, results in the greater productivity and mutual understanding (ideally) that the Urban lexicographer notes, but such implementations of synergy does not limit its sense or its implementations only to that. Technically, I wonder if for instance a combination of colors or a combination of musical instruments to create hues and timbres otherwise not possible without those inputs denotes cases of synergy as well—I don’t think I want to allow “mere blending” an exact synonymy with synergy. Meanwhile, I imagine a case where a great movie gets subjected to a tried and true method of parody, but the result turns out a stinking heap of shit. Or a case where the weaknesses of two people, when they work together, results in a more disastrous outcome than either could have achieved individually. There I find true antergy.

[9] Related ideas include cooperation, synergy, that the whole stands greater than the sum of its parts, the psychological processes of alchemy (which Nichols will doubtless raise and discuss), the (not-dialectical, see Bakhtin above) re-merging of dichotomies, the many topics discussed in Oyama’s (2000)* Ontogeny of Information, and Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory, at least as Frederick Copleston (1946) described it. Nichols summarily emphasizes the intermingling “as symbolizing spirit and flesh, masculine and feminine, yang and yin, conscious and unconscious … ‘the marriage of Christ and Sophia’ or ‘the union of fire and water’ (249–50), &c.

* Oyama, S. (2000). The ontogeny of information: developmental systems and evolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

**Copleston, FC (1946). A history of philosophy: Greece and Rome. New York: Doubleday.

[10] Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul: a guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins.

[11] Trimpey, J., & Rational Recovery Systems (Organization). (1996). Rational recovery: the new cure for substance addiction. New York : Pocket Books.

[12] An objectionable part of Trimpey’s description suggests that chemical dependency (or addiction) remains strictly an individual problem. If I drink, but not to a degree that I find problematic despite its effects on my mate, family, children, friends, or other relatives, then my chemical dependency remains just that, but not yet an addiction. Again and again, Trimpey iterates that users presumably know the consequences in the main and have a right (in a free country) to continue to use—to destroy their lives, as someone else might say. In Trimpey’s calculus, destroying my life might necessarily include affecting the lives of those around me as part of my freely willed determination to keep using. And so long as I remain willing to affect the lives of those around me, then I remain in the zone of chemical dependency and not addiction. This all seems on the dicey side, but the distinction between chemically dependent and addicted remains helpful.

[13] Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: a century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

[14] The statement ‘we do not negotiate with hostage takers” belies (accidentally) and precisely that such “negotiations” do not deserve the name negotiation at all.

[15] How the two involve select such a neutral party already reprises, writ-small, the problem of cooperating to find a solution in the first place.

[16] If I stick strictly to the metaphor of planetary orbits, then the unconscious per se becomes space itself (or space-time),a s the ground on which the Self (as conscious and unconsciousness together) stands. By definition and empirically, we never encounter the unconscious directly, but only through psychically embodied archetypal material; such emanations “from the Sun” constitute one of the psychological focal points in consciousness generally. It appears as “toward the center” (i.e., on the interior of our orbit) but the physicists assure us that the center of gravity in the system exists somewhere other than either focus. That “true center” (o gravity) marks the actual “location” of negotiation, but it offers nothing material or substantial in terms of the “bodies involved”. Locating that shared point, as an intersection of values (for instance) may help in any negotiation; were I to negotiate with President Obama for some social good, I’d find it hard not to get blinded by the mere radiance of his position as president, &c.

[17] Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding. Boston: New Science Library.

[18] Besides the sheer fact of us having a practice at all.

[19] In a Christian context, what one does after the attainment of grace proposes a similar kind of question, though one generally far more glibly answered.

[20] The way I list these yogas suggests a correspondence with the cards, but I can’t really seriously defend these choices. The sense of “transformative sacrifice” implied in Death might align with bakhti yoga just as well as the fundamental emphasis on Desire in the Devil card, but the sheer “doing” of the death card points to the sheer doing and transformation in Karma yoga. And so on, unsatisfactorily.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card XI (Strength)

Abstract

Card 11 (Strength) denotes the moment when all that has gone before becomes self-aware or self-conscious, hence the strength of strength, hence the compassion in cooperating to recognize the fairness of fairness, cooperation, compassion, and recognition as “universal” human values.

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The twelfth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 11: Strength.

Over the past two or so years, I’ve been reading a lot of Jung’s writings,[3] and will continue to do so,[4] in part not only because his approach to psychology resonates with my own experience but also because when I read his works I experience a dislodging of psychic imagery that seems interesting and/or fruitful and/or inspiring. In addition, I have been doing Tarot card readings since 1986,[5] when my friend in college introduced them to me, and have even worked “professionally” as one.

So it proved very on-point and kind of my friend to think of me when she saw a copy of Nichols’ (1980) Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey. This series, then, embodies my reactions to and commentaries on Nichols’ commentaries, &c, and will work through the major arcana (the trumps) of the Tarot deck chapter by chapter as Nichol’s book does in order from 0 to 21.

Strength: Whose?[6]

If we consider the Major Arcana (excluding the Fool, the 0) in two series of ten (from 1–10, and 11–20), then this card, which sometimes gets swapped with card 8 Justice, represents the first card in the second sequence. In Toppi’s deck, he refers to this as “Creative Force” in marked contrast to the Magician, who (as previously noted) denotes a charming but limited kind of charlatan figure. Here, by contrast, we have the real deal, albeit at the very first step of the “conscious” version of our journey. If the first sequence from 1–10 suggests the naïve or innocent or unconscious articulation of the soul (or Atman), here we have the more knowing, experience, and conscious version of the same cycle in cards 11–20, analogous to the first time around.[7]

Taken in groups of four (1–4, 5–8, 9–12, &c), this card falls in the third position of the “dharma” or service row; it corresponds with the (earlier) Empress and Chariot, and the later Devil and Sun.  In this context, I tend to understand “strength” in the sense Kṛṣṇa invokes when he says, “I am the strength of the strong” (Bhagavad-Gītā, 7.11), i.e., the archetypal (universal) pattern out of which or from which all concrete particularizations arise. This does not involve a claim of superlative strength; rather, it makes a claim for the basis of all strength itself, whether great or little, the very thing that makes strength possible. This statement by Kṛṣṇa occurs in a whole series of such illustrations, again not to stake a claim as the “strongest” but to underline the logically prior (and necessary) universal condition for all expression of concrete particulars. Like Jung’s sense of the unconscious, this points to something we may only designate or point to, because as soon as we imagine it or encounter it, we find ourselves confronting a concrete particular, never the archetype itself.[8] On this view, this simply points to the suprapersonal or transpersonal self, the logically necessary and prior “human universal,” as the ground for strength, intelligence, or every other concretely particular human attribute.[9]

If, in the first sequence from 1–4, we enjoyed the ego-gratification of pleasure—entertained by the spectacle of magician, High Priestess, Empress, and Emperor—and in the second, we enjoyed the power involved in authentic empathy, cooperation, outstandingness, and fairness, though still fundamentally as an egoistic practice, now we encounter the powers of these pleasures in their social (transpersonal) guise, and with the Strength card itself, the “root” of this comes into view unambiguously for the first time.

In commenting on the female figure on the card and the lion she tames, Nichols invokes narratives such as Beauty and the Beast, The Frog Prince, Cupid and Psyche” and so forth; hence, “it is through a woman’s compassion for [a figure’s] bestial nature that a hideous monster ultimately casts off its disguise, revealing itself to be a handsome lover or god” (203). In Alan Moore’s (2012) Swamp Thing (volume 3), this sort of story trope has the usual problematic valences—especially when Swamp Thing’s actions toward a monster do not read as compassion, it seems, and the monster (a werewolf) commits suicide instead—but in addition to this, we may also note the parallel sorts of stories where loathly ladies turn out as beautiful princesses or goddesses, if only a male sees past appearances as well. The stories about the Arthurian Sir Gawain and Dame Ragland (or her narrative equivalents) give lovely evidence of this.[10]

We might tease out important differences between the Beauty and the Beast type of trope and the Sir Gawain and dame Ragland type; I simply want to emphasize that Nichols focus on only one type leaves out of the picture the other type. Nichols specifically claims,

These tales dramatize the poetic truth that when human consciousness recognizes and accepts its untamed, primitive nature, it not only frees itself from the instinct’s autonomous power but liberates and transforms the instinctual side as well (203).

We might wonder who comprises the ideal listener of such a story. Does the beast get liberated from its beastly condition by female compassion, or does a female “hero” catalyze a change so her love that sees beyond appearances gets rewarded? Am I not horrific on the outside, yet lovely on the inside, the beast argues, certainly a common enough plaint of homely lads everywhere. &c. Most such stories (of the male or female variety) presuppose a previous deforming transformation, which the princess’ kiss on the frog’s lips undoes, &c. Nichols’ description proposes something else—that what started in a state of incoherent if inchoate non-refinement transforms under the or within the compassionate embrace of the anima. In the case of Sir Gawain, the happy resolution of the story hinges on his living up to a chivalrous code, precisely to not acting on the basis of some previous beastliness and acknowledging the rights of an Other; this seems to me to get closer to a recognition of unconstrained human behavior that frees itself from that unconstrained behavior and transforms instincts into something else.

Nichols offers a deft summary of what Jung intended by the word possession:

Doubtless, everyone has had the experience of being “swallowed up” by an affect. We know how sudden emotions can literally seize us—how the animal side of our nature can spring upon us from behind to claim its own. At these times, ego consciousness is thrust aside and our bodies fall prey to a force which is beyond control. We quiver with fear, tremble with rage, blush with shame, or laugh hysterically, at the same time feeling sudden tears wet our cheeks. When these things happen, our ego self, helpless and humiliated, tries to run away, symbolically if not literally. We want to put the incident behind us (204).

This relates perhaps more generally not only to getting swallowed up by our beastliness but also by any archetypal material, as ego-inflation or godlikeness. Perhaps in part for that reason Nichols spends such a great deal of time talking about the lion, which (as Leo) conventionally represents the most egoistic of the Zodiacal signs as well. Specifically, Nichols contrasts the (related card of the) Emperor as “external authority, the thou shalt of civilization, whereas the lion personifies instinctual authority, the I will of the self” (207, emphasis in original). Since Jung seems to have identified the will especially with ego-consciousness, this linking with instinctual authority needs some amplification.

The question Nichols proposes in the title of this change (“Strength: Whose?”) points to the tension between the will of ego-consciousness—as that part of myself that I identify readily with myself as directing events as best I can—relative to this instinctual sense of “I will,” which points to the will of a complex that possesses me an runs contrary to the things my ego “I” says it wants. If the lion represents consciousness per se, then indeed we find much “in it” that the ego-consciousness’ “I” finds bewildering, confounding, even demoralizing, as people at Alcoholics Anonymous can testify.

The Emperor’s realm, civilization, stresses the welfare of the community. Strength’s province, culture, nourishes the needs of the individual. A veneer of civilization can be superimposed from without, but true culture cannot be achieved by externals. It is an inner happening, cultivated anew in the heart of each human being. It involves accepting and integrating the lion as he appears within oneself. As Jung reiterates, a change in human consciousness cannot be mass produced; the individual human psyche is the sole host and carrier of consciousness (208).

Or as Jung (1921)[11] makes this point elsewhere:

As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must led to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation …(Psychological Types, ¶758)

A norm serves no purpose when it possesses absolute validity. A real conflict with the collective norm arises only when the individual way is raised to a norm, which is the aim of extreme individualism … The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality (ibid, ¶761).

If I correct Jaffé’s (1964)[12] reification of “civilized” and “primitive” individuals, then:

Suppressed and wounded instincts are the dangers threatening [the civilized [part of Occidental consciousness]; uninhibited drives are the dangers threatening [the primitive part of Occidental consciousness]. In both cases the “animal” is alienated from its true nature, and for both, the acceptance of the animal soul is the condition for wholeness and a fully lived life. [We] must tame the animal in [ourselves] and make it [our] helpful companion [and also] must heal the animal [within ourselves] and make it [our] friend (quoted in Nichols, 213).

In this context, the card’s guiding female figure, read as Jung’s sense of the anima by Nichols, provides a key image. Happily, Nichols usefully contrasts the image of the “anima’s” handling of the lion (approaching it from behind) with an image of Samson (or presumably also Heracles) battling a lion, with his feet planted an coming at it from the front. She emphasizes more of a “duet” or dialogue between the lion and anima as opposed to the opposed monologue in the image of Samson and his lion. In several of the late romances within European literary tradition (the kind with knights and such), we begin to see the hero in his confrontation with the monster merge together with it in a kind of mutual recognition, rather than simply the older pattern whereby the hero murders the monster outright with all due haste (as, for example, Beowulf does twice). Such an alternative outcome does not represent the norm, however, then or now; these days, sometimes even when the hero attempts a reconciliation, the villain rejects the offer, as Stevenson’s (2008)[13] Kung Fu Panda exemplifies.[14]

So we might see in the kind of dialogue Nichols reads out of the card as a more morally sophisticated relationship between the willful (conative) instinct of the lion, as the will to power, and the mediating or moderating moral (axiological) instinct of the lion. Nichols does not emphasize the point, but by invoking the Emperor (civilization) and the lion (culture), we might remember that we see rather a female figure on the card, not a male one; while card 11 (Strength) stands “below” in relation to card 4 (the Emperor) when Nichols arranges them in groups of seven, we might ask if the Empress rather has something to do with this, whether in terms of radiant inspiration or through the reflection of active imagination. Moreover, from previous posts, if the Empress and Emperor signify the radiant (extraverted) and reflective (introverted) modes of consciousness—without trying to assign one or the other to a gendered card—then whichever way we assign these two modes, the figure of the two looked, perhaps in something of a stale-mated dialogue at the moment, points to another sense of this card.

I think an important emphasis, then, with this card hinges on its tension: the true it depicts shows a single, frozen moment of time, like sumo wrestlers one instant after they begin. The card offers no moment of relaxation, as it were, even as no especially momentous struggle seems to show in the pair. Like the time preparatory to an earthquake, the vast pressures to work remain invisible—or, more simply, the card points to a wealth of events that simply do not readily express themselves outwardly or on the surface.

I hesitate to endorse the interpretation that woman has the gentle strength necessary to tame the man-beast, because this makes it woman’s task to do so, and essentially excuses any male culpability, since boys will be boys just as lions will be lions, &c. This points, however obliquely, at the non-recognition of women’s work in culture generally, most of all in motherhood—and as a specific service (in the public or social sense), this attaches—in this case, with unfortunate sexist overtones—to dharma in general. Almost everywhere,  central part of Woman’s dharma involves producing children and playing an essential role in producing (at the same time) adults as well, or at least something like the raw material that civilization will shape into adults, &c.

This highly lopsided sexism notwithstanding, this “row” of major Arcana, organized into groups of four, tracks various manifestations of service, as opposed to the pleasure or power of the previous two series. As noted previously, this sense relates to Kṛṣṇa invocation, “I am the strength of the strong” (Bhagavad-Gītā, 7.11) as simply the archetypal (universal) pattern out of which or from which all concrete particularizations arise; the hermit (card 9) has sought the real foundations of power and pleasure, the overwhelming presence of the world (card 10) has made itself felt in a sense of fate; and if fate denotes what happens to you, then destiny denotes what you make of those circumstances, and card 11 (Strength) seems to be the first point noted in that next step of the progression. But in all cases, one’s “developmental” efforts around these cards implicate offers to the social world. In the most co-opted or noble sense, this amounts simply to literal service, just as Mother Theresa tended to people, just as hundreds of millions of mothers have since humanity first got started. As an act of sacrifice, card 12 (the Hanged Man) literalizes this, at least in its most outward sense—and we know from any number of Jungian passages that literalizing archetypal material usually results in disastrous outcomes.[15]

In one (misleading) sense, Strength masquerades as a synonym for Truth—so just as the Hermit runs the risk of becoming a false prophet, and our view of Fate (or the world) can take on a false sense of inevitability, here the sort of moral error we recognize in the false claim “might makes right” shows how “strength” (as Truth) can go awry, and so on the same basis one’s act of self-sacrifice proves ultimately for the wrong cause or needless or simply wrong. With cards 1 through 8, we had largely to do with amoral factors—the mere appearances of the Magician, High Priestess, Empress, and Emperor (however much they protested the validity of their claims) and the actual power of ritual, cooperation, magic/technology, or justice (however much anyone justified each one as essential or necessary), but now for the first time, in an ‘authentic” way, if you will, the basis of morality—not simply as a matter of pleasure or convenience or as a principle of whatever one can get away with enforcing—comes to the fore.

Technically, if we remember that roots of Justice in the Egyptian figure of the Goddess Ma’at, then that card (card 8) signals a transition to this level. Whatever else may have happened over the course of Egyptian history, from its earliest days Ma’at specified less the content of any Law and more the spirit with which one wielded the Law, the way one practiced it—and I will summarize that way in terms of fairness, compassion, cooperation, and recognition (of the people involved). The values, as criteria for addressing other human beings (if not also the world generally) comprise the ethical foundation of the “dharma row” of cards. We might torture the four values into some correspondence with the four cards here, but the more salient point revolves simply in the recognition that these values trump power or pleasure.

Importantly, these do not comprise the ultimate themselves; at least one more row of cards remains, but this informs how to understand the word “dharma” or “service” in this context. Service carries such overwhelmingly sacrificial overtones that it seems hard to think of it otherwise, or has gotten so infected with passive-aggressive “generosity,” or has been profoundly and completely monetized so that we can hardly do a service without expecting some reward. But insofar as the Strength card itself points to the strength of strength, this itself points to the notion of Truth (with  capital T): the ultimate basis for human action.

Doubtless in many circles, such Truth becomes coterminal with spiritual revelation of some sort—and if that revelation happens not to misrecognize the fundamental human values of fairness, compassion, cooperation, and recognition, then it might indeed warrant the designation “scripture”. No intolerant monotheism does, of course, though millions of people ignore their scripture in order to live morally better lives, thank goodness.

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[1] As a general context, I do not believe Tarot cards are in any way inherently magical; I’m not someone who becomes psychically disturbed if you touch my deck or someone who claims you’ve ruined the vibe if you do. Personally, doing Tarot readings for people is one place in my life where my intuitive and intellectual sides work in tandem, rather than being at odds with one another—and that sense of co-operation is a pleasure to experience. For others—for the “us” that exists during the duration of the Tarot reading—it is a chance to have a conversation; as an example, I’ve had a radio show where I did Tarot card readings on the air with formerly incarcerated individuals in order to let the world listening hear the reality of incarceration, &c, but the conversation is also for the other person, to examine the forces, the patterns, the trends in her or his life, and to have the opportunity to change them. I continually ask questions when doing Tarot card readings; I don’t pretend to be or act psychic. And having said all that, to the extent that the imagery in the Tarot operates archetypally (as Nichols claims), to the extent that it can inspire images and dislodge psychic impressions in those using and viewing the cards, then I agree that the Jungian approach Nichols brings to the Tarot stands to be helpful, insightful, and useful—hence this commentary on her commentary.

[2] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser.

[3] Psychological Types (Collected Works 6, [1921], 1971), Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9, Part 1, 2^nd ed. 1968), Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works 7, 2^nd ed 1966), Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works 12, [1944], 2^nd ed. 1968), Alchemical Studies (Collected Works 13, 1968), Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works 14, [1955-6], 2^nd ed. 1970).

[4] I have Symbols of Transformation (Collected Works 5, [1911-12], 2^nd ed. 1967), Aion (Collected Works 9, Part 2, [1951], 2^nd ed. 1968), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), Experimental Researches (Collected Works 2, 1973) lined up next, and need still to find affordable copy of The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works 8, 1970).

[5] I began with the Crowley-Harris (1972) Thoth Tarot, which I used for many years, acquired but didn’t find myself inspired by Dali’s (1955) Universal Tarot, owned, found myself inspired by, but did not use Tavaglione’s (1979) Stairs of Gold Tarot, used Brian William’s (1988) Renaissance Tarot during my professional phase, in part because the trumps readily leant themselves to that kind of setting, Gerhardt & Zeeuwen’s (1996) Terrestrial Tarot, which one reviewer describes as very unsettling yet still possessing a “strange magnetism,” and finally, Sergio Toppi’s (2000) Tarot of the Origins—Toppi being, as it turns out, one of my favorite illustrators of all time (see here and here, for my reviews of two of his books). I recently acquired the Mary-El deck as well.

[6] The title used for this header comes from the title of the chapter in Nichol’s book.

[7] We can locate this kind of movement all throughout the Tarot cards. In the court cards (using a hybrid designation of the cards as child, animal, queen, king), then the child innocence mirrors the animal’s intuitive knowledge, and the child/animal “innocence” contrasts with the queen/king’s experience. Similarly, the relation of adjacent minor arcana mirror this s well; the 2 represents a “knowing” version of the “naïve” ace; the 3 and 4 together represent an “experienced” version of the “innocent” 1 and 2; and the 5–8 reprise in a “conscious” way the sequence previously “unconscious” in the 1–4. &c. (Of this last, one might rearrange things to say that the 1 and 10 operate like bookends, like the Major Arcana’s Fool and Universe, so that the two “inner” cycles reprise the “innocent” and “experienced” version in the 2–5 and 6–9, respectively.

[8] As also remains true of (the Hindu conception of) deities generally. We can only encounter avatars of the Inconceivable, logically enough.

[9] We needn’t turn this into a literal metaphysical claim.

[10] One may read an antique example of this here.

[11] Jung, CG ([1921], 1971). Psychological Types (Vol. 6, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[12] Jaffé, A (1964). Symbolism in the visual arts. In CG Jung (ed). Man and his symbols, Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, p. 239.

[13] DreamWorks Animation., Stevenson, J., Osborne, M., Cobb, M., Reiff, E., Voris, C., Aibel, J., Berger, G., Black, J., Hoffman, D., Jolie, A., McShane, I., Cheng, L., Rogen, S., Liu, L., Cross, D., Kim, R. D., Hong, J., Fogler, D., & Duncan, M. C. (2008). Kung fu panda. Glendale, CA: DreamWorks Animation.

[14] The villainous snow leopard gets offered a chance to give up his vengeful ambition but opts out and blows up as a result.

[15] Fundamentalism, in all types of religious settings, illustrates this nicely and horribly.

INTUITING TAROT AND JUNG: Card IX (the Hermit)

Abstract

Overbearing prophet of self-aggrandizement or a genuine seeker after an understanding for the betterment of our social world.

Introduction & Disclaimer[1]

The tenth post in a series that adds commentary to Nichols’ (1980)[2] Jungian commentary on the major arcana of the Tarot, here I engage with card 9: the Hermit.

Over the past two or so years, I’ve been reading a lot of Jung’s writings,[3] and will continue to do so,[4] in part not only because his approach to psychology resonates with my own experience but also because when I read his works I experience a dislodging of psychic imagery that seems interesting and/or fruitful and/or inspiring. In addition, I have been doing Tarot card readings since 1986,[5] when my friend in college introduced them to me, and have even worked “professionally” as one.

So it proved very on-point and kind of my friend to think of me when she saw a copy of Nichols’ (1980) Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey. This series, then, embodies my reactions to and commentaries on Nichols’ commentaries, &c, and will work through the major arcana (the trumps) of the Tarot deck chapter by chapter as Nichol’s book does in order from 0 to 21.

The Hermit: Is There Anybody There?[6]

Some days have elapsed since I read Nichols’ text, so I write primarily from  memory of the dominant points she raised.

To address the probably less significant one first, she discusses some the numerological element of 9, and especially its self-recurrence, i.e., for a number divisible by 9, if you add the digits of that number together they too will divide by 9. Since we typically deal in base 10, 9 represents the last digit before a “new cycle” begins as well. Consequently, 9 can have a sense of bloated everythingness (and not necessarily something so tidy as a whole “completion”), and it still retains a sense of the number of planets in the solar system, despite the demotion of Pluto as a planet, but we might take this quite precisely as pointing to the kind of contingent messiness that 9 carries.

That said, it only represents the last digit because we use base 10. We have little reason to treat it as “inevitably” carrying that value. In German, one counts with uniquely distinguished terms up to twelve before one starts saying things like “three and ten, four and ten” and so forth.[7] On those grounds one might insist that 12 represents the “fully loaded” number, &c. The point seems rather that, wherever one marks the return to the beginning of a cycle, some digit, whether “nine” or “twelve” will occupy that position by default.

This needn’t comprise a non-issue. Nichols arranges the Major Arcana (excluding the Fool) in three groups of seven cards, which puts the “9” as the second card in the second sequence; not exactly an “end” position. If we take the Fool (card 0) and the Universe (card 21) as “bookends,” then we may further understand the remaining twenty cards in two groups of ten (cards 1–10 and cards 11–20), in which case the Hermit occupies a position much closer to the end of the first sequence. One way to read the relationship of the Hermit (card 9) to the Wheel of Fortune (card 10) recapitulates the relationship between card 9 as the atman (the personal soul) and card 10 as Brahman (world-soul).[8] Or again, if we arrange the cards in five groups of four, then the Hermit represents the first card in the third series; if arranged in four groups of five, then the Hermit again occupies a next-to-last position in that series. Nothing demands necessarily that we pick one configuration to the exclusion of any other; this simply illustrates that what denotes a “final card” or a “hinge card” depends on how one parses the Major Arcana in the first place.

The larger point from Nichols’ text concerns her association of the archetypal Wise Old Man with the Hermit.

In traditional reading, the Hermit represents the quintessential “seeker within”—the seer whose iconic lantern shines a light in the darkness. Nichols alludes to this some—if memory serves—but this emphasis plays second fiddle to construing the Hermit as the archetypal wise Old Man. If, at other points in her book so far, it seems as if she sometimes reaches to incorporate Jungian material but still manages to make it seem relevant to the card at hand,[9] the match here seems strikingly unmotivated. Having read Jung’s Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, maybe I simply failed to grasp the vast significance that I should have ascribed to the figure of the Wise Old Man, or perhaps my hostility to old bearded males who claim to know the truth makes me push such material away.

Nichols for her own part makes the Hermit far less of any kind of thundering prophet type.[10] For her, the Wise Old Man shines a little light from his lantern and you can take it or leave it. At one of the climaxes of Satchidananda’s (1988)[11] Bhagavad-Gītā, Kṛṣṇa, who definitely offers no image of an Old Man, declares, “Now I have given you the most precious and profound knowledge, he secret of secrets. Reflect on it fully; then do so you wish” (XVIII.63). Satchidananda’s commentary expands this,

Either by one or two, or all of [the methods mentioned, Kṛṣṇa] says, “You will come to me. I’m not simply saying this lightly. It is a promise. There is no doubt about it. You shall come to me. I am making this promise because you are my beloved” (295).

Here we see an image of wisdom imparted but not demanded adherence to, which resembles the sort of image Nichols provides for the Wise Old Man. Archetypal or not, she largely strips this figure of the super-human characteristics of previous cards; she reads a lot of humility into the figure, insofar as he comprises a “merely” human figure. Perhaps he shrugs a lot, smiles, and says, “Maybe, maybe not.”

This chapter (like the previous one on card 8, Justice), has a pointed question as its subtitle, which seems to link the two. If the previous chapter asked if one may even say such a  thing as Justice exists, along with the rather stern calls Nichols makes for personal responsibility, here the question involves whether anybody, i.e., a real human personality, exists in each person. Insofar as our souls—eons ago in the primordial soup—arose out of the ocean of unconsciousness, we will have always held all along the way that we possessed self-awareness—if only because we have an “I” that refers to itself—but does that self-awareness yet rise to the level of self-consciousness? If, from the murk of the previous eight cards, we may readily locates forces and something we would call our personality, this does not mean we will yet have begun to individuate—we have differentiated (from other human beings that resemble us) but we will not yet have “taking the reins” (not included on the Chariot card, we might remember) to begin deliberately crafting our lives and actively individuating.

Hence the germaneness of the question “is there anybody there?” Hence also, I suppose, the appearance of the Old Man who, like our mother or father or guardian has grown up but who unlike those people has no obligation to care for us regardless, may more blithely or glibly make observations about the world and how it intersects with our life. Or a figure may, like Kṛṣṇa, insist, “I know it may seem impossible, but I promise you: you will return to me. There is no doubt of this.” Which shows, I think, that we should not for a moment imagine that the “Wise Old Man” must be old or a man. To the extent that witches, in their old form, might readily get mistaken for men—or, more precisely, given how the very old veer toward the same kind of androgyny as the very young—once again, the desire to put a gendered meaning on these figures seems to lead us astray.

The wisdom part matters, not the “old” or the “man” though by saying this I do not deny at all the differences in effectiveness of an image depending on how we construct it. For instance, if “only” Satchidananda had said, ““You will come to me. I’m not simply saying this lightly. It is a promise. There is no doubt about it” (295), this has nothing of the sort of deep resonance that the same words have for me if I imagine them coming from (the entirely fictional figure of) Kṛṣṇa. Precisely and only by occupying an impossible point of view—the non-actual universe where Kṛṣṇa actually exists—does the sentiment, “Look, don’t worry; your salvation, your eternal enlightenment, is inevitable” actually take on the characteristic of dispelling worry or so-called “convincing” me. I don’t plan on reincarnating, ever; we rot in the ground, but this does not change having the experience of reassurance that the sentence imparts.

Nor does the sentence promise a lie, because the point does not hinge on whether I ever actually achieve enlightenment or not but that right now, in this moment right here, I do not experience any sense of dispiritedness that makes continuing seem pointless. Satchidananda cannot say that sentence to me and have it work (in all likelihood); it needs embodying in the voice of Kṛṣṇa.[12]

Because the wisdom part matters, the “old” and “man” part may give some the oomph that adds persuasiveness to the statement, but with that admirable capaciousness of imagination, it seems Indian philosophy understands that “old” does not provide the only adequate metaphor for “knowledgeable”—even seemingly young, Kṛṣṇa has already lived innumerable lifetimes, as has some eleven-year-old saint, who might equally utter wisdom. A grandfather or grandmother may very well embody such knowledge, especially in a wholly mortal human domain, but we also see (as children) that our elders have woefully fucked up the world, so we might also need someone other than “an old man” (or even an old woman) to persuasively espouse “wisdom”.

By saying this, I do not only implicate elders in the First World. Spencer and Gillen (1904)[13] note that all but one of the various social norms enforced amongst the aboriginal people they studied; “In general, prohibitions function to give the best foods to old men; younger men are under food restrictions that gradually lift as they age, women are under yet stricter prohibitions (which presumably do not lift as they age)” (615). Errington an Gewertz (1987),[14] writing about the Chambri people of Papua New Guinea, insist that:

Chambri men and women experience the world through a set of non-Western cultural premises concerning the nature of indebtedness and the nature of power. The primary debt is for physical and social existence itself: individuals are indebted to those who have engendered them and to those who have lost ancestral power to give them viability and social position” (17).

This primary ontological debt of children toward adults, the same debt that informs the famous fifth biblical commandment, [15] points to a preemptive strike against any criticism directed toward elders for 91) fucking up the world or (2) ringing the one making the complaint into the world. This preemptive strikes marks a fundamental branding, like the branding of slaves or cattle; it frames the whole discourse; it even creates the very subjectivity (of the one making the complaint) who will one day lodge the complaint.

In Smith’s (2013) The Problem with ‘Privilege’ (from here) and her analysis of the politics of (white) confessional, it becomes clearer (as also from other readings I’ve done lately[16]) that perhaps the preeminent aspect of power involves controlling—better still, initially framing—a discourse, the terms of discussion, and nowhere does this power get deployed with absolute non-contradiction (until very far too late in the game) than in the adult-child domain. And since this operates at a level that seems even deeper than invisibility or unconsciousness, and for which the entire premise of becoming adult entails not rejecting but adopting the very arrogation of context-framing in the first place, then it seems fairly hopeless to expect that the figure of the wise old anything will seem anything but wise except for those who have already assented to the prevailing social order.

Many do, of course, even if grumblingly—the Devil’s bargain being, “when you have adult status, then you can enforce whatever however you like” (subject to mediation from one’s own peers, of course). This doesn’t mean no one responds favorably to the “Wise Old Man”; his popularity, in fact, makes for a point of despair amongst those who do not, will not, cannot acculturate—all the more so, the more a culture construes itself (1) monoculturally, and (2) provides no non-conformist alternatives—usually this means moving away, which often constitutes a non-options realistically speaking.

Meanwhile, in the same way that the Hierophant (card 5) might on the one hand get taken as the culmination of the first four cards (Magician, High Priestess, Empress, Emperor) as another kind of “charlatan” who we impart all the magic to or (on the other hand) as a legitimate social force that has real power in the public domain, the Hermit functions in a similar kind of way. As the “quintessence” of the second set of four cards (Scientist/Priest, Synergy/Cooperation, Technology/Magic, Justice/Culture) that all center on power, then the Hermit occupies the preeminent position of Power because he points to Information (or, more precisely, the flow of it). For cards 5–8, each offers a specific application of information: either in science/ritual, through cooperative social action with others, via technology or magic, an through the disposition of force (Justice). But only the Hermit, as information per se, actually frames or defines the terms of those projects, and so represents the superordinate or underlying principle at work in each.[17]

In all of these cases, a power-over prevails, whether that stands “for the good” or not. We find this, necessarily, least pronounced in card 6 (Synergy), but one has only to think of the phrase “cooperative venture” to know that hierarchy an domination get easily and/or quickly into the mix.[18] Thus the Hermit signifies the Knower over and above the Know-nots. But in its capacity as the first card of the next sequence (dedicated to dharma), this points essentially an fundamentally to know Power serves rather than dominates, how it gets put to use for the social good.

In a strictly human sense, the Hermit as Knower-Over-All appears in public as the haranguing prophet, or simply the Wise Old Man who ensures that all prohibitions meet his needs first and foremost. The Hermit as Seeker, by contrast, serves the human project generally by his or her karma yoga. Meditation may prompt a retreat for a time, but then, like a Buddhist nun, she appears in public so that the metaphysical, ontological “truths” of perennial philosophy (or Buddhism itself) get applied in the social world.

Because this generally take the form of individual activity, this appears to have the smallest social footprint. At times, it encourages martyrdom and generates saints; Power per se loves to make calls for (noble) self-sacrifice, always exempting itself when it goes. &c. The main distinction overall concerns the socio-moral good that the Hermit’s meditations have yielded. In the form of the Wise Old man, this does not mean the hierophantic nepotism and self-interest of Power itself—like Moses’ declaration that his brother gets 10% of all sacrifices—but an actual wisdom (or something in the direction of it) that has more than ritual, habit, or the word of someone else when it comes to articulating patterns of behavior in the social world. Whereas the Hierophant never innovates, except accidentally and through error, the Hermit may actually add to the repertoire of culture by beginning to understand why the Hierophant’ “magic” (or science) works.

As an investigator of frameworks, rather than someone only familiar with a discourse, this begins to suggest the power to reframe discourses and thus change minds in a way that the Hierophant cannot. This may underscore the primary distinction between the Seeker (who follows Dharma, who serves the good of the world) versus the Prophet (who seeks or attains Power by his various pronouncements).

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[1] As a general context, I do not believe Tarot cards are in any way inherently magical; I’m not someone who becomes psychically disturbed if you touch my deck or someone who claims you’ve ruined the vibe if you do. Personally, doing Tarot readings for people is one place in my life where my intuitive and intellectual sides work in tandem, rather than being at odds with one another—and that sense of co-operation is a pleasure to experience. For others—for the “us” that exists during the duration of the Tarot reading—it is a chance to have a conversation; as an example, I’ve had a radio show where I did Tarot card readings on the air with formerly incarcerated individuals in order to let the world listening hear the reality of incarceration, &c, but the conversation is also for the other person, to examine the forces, the patterns, the trends in her or his life, and to have the opportunity to change them. I continually ask questions when doing Tarot card readings; I don’t pretend to be or act psychic. And having said all that, to the extent that the imagery in the Tarot operates archetypally (as Nichols claims), to the extent that it can inspire images and dislodge psychic impressions in those using and viewing the cards, then I agree that the Jungian approach Nichols brings to the Tarot stands to be helpful, insightful, and useful—hence this commentary on her commentary.

[2] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser.

[3] Psychological Types (Collected Works 6, [1921], 1971), Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9, Part 1, 2^nd ed. 1968), Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works 7, 2^nd ed 1966), Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works 12, [1944], 2^nd ed. 1968), Alchemical Studies (Collected Works 13, 1968), Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works 14, [1955-6], 2^nd ed. 1970).

[4] I have Symbols of Transformation (Collected Works 5, [1911-12], 2^nd ed. 1967), Aion (Collected Works 9, Part 2, [1951], 2^nd ed. 1968), Psychiatric Studies (Collected Works 1, 2^nd ed. 1970), Experimental Researches (Collected Works 2, 1973) lined up next, and need still to find affordable copy of The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works 8, 1970).

[5] I began with the Crowley-Harris (1972) Thoth Tarot, which I used for many years, acquired but didn’t find myself inspired by Dali’s (1955) Universal Tarot, owned, found myself inspired by, but did not use Tavaglione’s (1979) Stairs of Gold Tarot, used Brian William’s (1988) Renaissance Tarot during my professional phase, in part because the trumps readily leant themselves to that kind of setting, Gerhardt & Zeeuwen’s (1996) Terrestrial Tarot, which one reviewer describes as very unsettling yet still possessing a “strange magnetism,” and finally, Sergio Toppi’s (2000) Tarot of the Origins—Toppi being, as it turns out, one of my favorite illustrators of all time (see here and here, for my reviews of two of his books). I recently acquired the Mary-El deck as well.

[6] The title used for this header comes from the title of the chapter in Nichol’s book.

[7] As  Germanic language, English of course does this as well. By contrast (and one might name many) Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese immediately say “ten one” for “eleven” an so on.

[8] More precisely, here the relationship remains sunk in maya, the illusion of distinction; precisely the non-identity of the atman and Brahman in this context shows the effects of maya.

[9] Especially in the way she introduces Jung’s psychological typology.

[10] Which seems somewhat disingenuous, but let it stand.

[11] Satchidananda (1988). The living Gita: the complete Bhagavad Gita, Buckingham, VA: Integral Yoga Publications.

[12] Or some other super-human, divine figure.

[13] Spencer, G, and Gillen, FJ (1904). Northern tribes of Central Australia, London: Macmillan, available from here

[14] Errington, F, and Gewertz, D. (1987). Cultural alternatives and a feminist anthropology : an analysis of culturally constructed gender interests in Papua New Guinea. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire], New York: Cambridge University Press

[15] Not the one about murder, as construed by the Augustinian division of the commandments according to Lutherans and Roman Catholics.

[16] Parts of Canetti’s Crowds and Power an discussions about discourse occurring at Transracialeyes (e.g., here).

[17] In the actual operations of culture, of course the domains of scientist, synergy, magic, and Justice all variously have mechanisms for controlling, protecting, and articulating their discourses, of course.

[18] Or one could simply think about relationships in general.

BOOK REVIEWS (2013): Gaiman and McKean’s (1995) The Tragical Comedy Or Comical Tragedy Of Mr. Punch: A Romance

Summary

Against the advice “choose love” I propose, “Choose love when it’s appropriate to choose love. I refuse to live a life of one choice; there’s no life in that.”

Pre-Disclaimer

Last year in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day, and now I’m not sure if I kept up. I have the same task this year, and I’ve added that I will write a book reaction (or reply) for each one that I finish (or give up on, if I stop). These will not be Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, unless that strikes me as necessary or if the book inspired me to provide one when I read it. In general, these amount to assessments of in what ways I found the book helpful somehow.

Consequently, I may provide spoilers, may misunderstand books or get stuff wrong, or get off on a gratuitous tear about the thing in some way, &c. I may say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff. There are some in the world who expect everyone to be omniscient and can’t be bothered to engage in a human dialogue toward figuring out how to make the world a better place. To the extent that each reply I offer provides a here’s what I found helpful about this, then it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, this or whatever we see as potentially helpful toward making the world a better place. If you bother to take up your end of that bargain, that signals part of the problem that needs a solution.

A Reply To: Gaiman and McKean’s (1995)[1] The Tragical Comedy Or Comical Tragedy Of Mr. Punch: A Romance

I want to begin immediately by saying that Gaiman as a writer tends to annoy me, and it has to do ultimately, I think, that he seems too calculating to me; someone I know has described some of his work as, ultimately, too precious, which may be saying the same thing. By this, I do not mean that he cannot write; his ability, in fact, only makes the calculation that much worse.

Why would I read this book, then? Because Dave McKean illustrated it. I would say that he has every bit the kind of flexible adaptability that allows Gaiman to succeed too easily, except that he (McKean) also has a degree of inspiration that Gaiman tends to lack.

Let me say again: Gaiman can write; my criticism could actually, in some respects, get taken as much more damning: Gaiman only can write.

But this doesn’t matter much. I only say this at the outset in the interest of full disclosure.  If you fancy yourself a fan who won’t hear your beloved artist impugned, this provides you with a plausible exit excuse now.

Second, as a piece of upfront disclosure, my basic take on this book hinges on seeing it as a kind of “shitting on the experience of childhood” type of book. I intend to say more, of course, but something like Stephen King’s (1981)[2] It, which wreaks havoc on clowns (if John Wayne Gacy hadn’t’ve already), seems like a similar type. Here, the target of course features English seaside Punch and Judy shows.

About this genre, I want to say: I did not enjoy a great deal of my childhood; much traumatized me, and more for worse than better, the fact of my trauma doesn’t make me unique at all. Long with the ridiculous trope of the happy childhood (as represented in literature), the trope of the unhappy childhood frequently and rather obviously takes its pot-shots at some of the most obvious ‘beloved aspects” from the happy childhood stories—thus we have nightmarish clowns, teddy bears, terror-riddled amusement parks and summer camps, &c.

Sometimes, it seems some jealousy gets into these unhappy childhood stories; other people enjoyed Punch and Judy, for instance, so I will set out with malice aforethought an shit all over it, in part to affront those who still claim a glowing warm nostalgia for the thing but also (sometimes in addition to, sometimes simply for the sake of it itself) is a kind of vengeance taking. Now that I have grown up, I can redress the grievance done to me by childhood, in the specific form of the clown, the summer camp, the amusement park, &c.

I don’t claim by saying this that the desire for vengeance taking makes no sense or even the desire to shit on a culture that you experienced as shitting on you growing up (or later); I do claim, however, that generalizing one’s experience to all people (whether you write from the standpoint of a happy childhood not) as fucked up and illegitimate. I feel especially sensitive about this because I’ve been reading Elias Canetti’s (1960) utterly fucked up Crowds and Power for a while now (addressing it section by section in my blog), and the take-away from him so far summarizes as: if you want to avoid getting victimized, become a victimizer. Culture wounds n traumatizes (whole groups of) people; we will not remedy that (historical) problem by allowing a desire to victimize other people in return lead the way in social policy.

This may overstep the mark—I don’t think one can fairly say that Gaiman’s story advocates retributive violence for historical violence done, but the story (as I intend to show) concerns responding to violence with violence and especially to a sense of justified homicide, which in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict makes for a very troubling, and timely, read indeed.

Normally, I do not provide a synopsis, and I won’t here as well, but Gaiman seems to assume a familiarity with the Punch and Judy story in his readers, probably justly. Gaiman disappoints any of his readers expecting a Punch on the rampage in the real-world story—or, rather, he delivers it with an allegorical twist. By this I mean he has more or less thoroughly distributed people who symbolize or represent figures from the traditional Punch and Judy shows into the real-world of the book’s narrative.

Specifically, Uncle Morton gets bitten on the nose by a Toby dog (whatever that means exactly) early on after his introduction. Familiars of Punch and Judy will recognize this event from the punch and Judy shows; a Toby dog, in fact, marks the first “character’ to interact with Punch. The initial exchange begins well enough, but quickly begins to sour, as the dog becomes inexplicably angry, until finally it snaps at Punch and bites his nose.

But let me pause a moment. Any notion of a definitive script for a Punch and Judy show remains dubious. A published one, with exactly the same title as Gaiman and McKean’s book, remains controversial and notorious but also still a go-to source for material and inspiration. Without belaboring the point, suffice it to say that any attempt to claim some necessary narrative or story in Punch and Judy involves a piece of ideology; it involves a desire to misread the historical record in order to make a certain kind of point. I count it an open question, especially in “popular” genres where the usual sort of “fixed texts’ and the like seem less often the norm, if at all; Blackwell (1997),[3] a feminist film critic, refers specifically to “the male model of fixed (and gendered) subjectivity” (133). Whether actually male-oriented or not, certainly the model of fixed subjectivity describes writing and thus a particular mode of consciousness about cultural productions that abets class stratification. That current works get authored by named individuals and works of yore by “anonymous” does not occur only as a matter of historical amnesia or an absence of available documentation.

This said, because we live in a world of writing, and because Gaiman (and McKean) provide us a (written) narrative, it not only functions as a fixed form but also begins on an assumption of fixed forms. We see this most of all in the allusiveness characteristic of Gaiman generally and of this book specifically, which (again) takes its title exactly from the one (spurious or otherwise) published script of a Punch and Judy show. By this, I do not mean that Gaiman necessarily or only draws upon this script; he likely witnessed Punch and Judy shows in England growing up and he grants that he pilfered things from his family history as part of this book. The reference to the Jim Crow character, for instance, seems more prevalent in US productions of Punch and Judy, something more like the occasionally recurring “servant” figure being more common in England.

A very important aspect of Gaiman’s book involves its refusal (justified or not; that provides the central question for this blog-post) to take the Punch and Judy story in a humorous sense. A strident but illustrative example makes this clear: hear a racist joke, denounce it as not funny, you might get labeled a kill-joy. Punch and Judy, especially as a children’s entertainment, generally gets taken as humorous, &c., and Gaiman’s approach to it says, “On the contrary.” And I find some good reasons for this an some not. Again, I make that the central question of this blog post.

A brief historical sketch. Punch and Judy does not originate in England, but emigrated from Italy at some time. For  long while, it eked out an existence by busking. I mention this, because Punch and Judy has long had something of the status of an Other, even after being assimilated to English culture. This may explain partly the “tolerance” for the violence within it; namely the fact that Punch beats to death (or in one case, hangs) all (or at least always most) of the other characters. Before waxing moralistic about the effect of violence on children, &c, which concern has been raised before about many things, including Punch and Judy over the centuries, Gaiman inserts an important point in the mouth of the young protagonist in his book: that the characters have to die in order to free up the puppeteers left hand for the appearance of the next character.[4]

But side from this not-at-all negligible technical aspect, a predominant part of the wit of Mr. Punch involves his verbal adroitness in the face of hostilities. Gaiman gives a nice example when the beadle says that Mr. Punch will be hanged until “you are dead, dead, dead!” and Mr. Punch sys, “What, I’m to die three times.” Punch’s most famous episode concerns tricking the beadle (or, more traditionally, Jack Ketch) into hanging himself rather than Punch, but throughout a Punch and Judy show, these sorts of evasions remain standard. After Punch has a run-in with a crocodile, one of the few things to best him to some degree, a doctor appears in response to his cries for help, and offers to give him “physic” in the form of beating with a slapstick.[5]

Punch: What do you have there?

Doctor (wielding a slapstick): Physic, for your hurt. [Hits him]

Punch: I don’t like it. It gives me a headache.

Doctor:  That’s because you’ve not taken enough of it. [Hits him] The more you take, the more good it’ll do you. [Hits him]

Punch: So you doctors always say. Try how you like it yourself.

Doctor: Oh, we never take our own physic. [Hits him]. Just a bit more now. [Hits him]

Punch: Oh, doctor! Doctor! No more, no more. I’m quite well now.

Doctor: Only one more dose. [Hits him]

Punch gets ahold of the stick and delivers physic to the doctor multiple times, repeating the doctor’s justifications for several lines. Until finally:

Doctor: Oh pray, Mr. Punch. No more. One pill of that physic is a dose.

Punch: Doctors always die when they take their own physic. [Hits him] Another small dose, and you never want physic again. [Hits him] There: don’t you feel the physic on your inside? [Hits him dead, and throws the body off the stage with the slapstick, laughing] Now doctor you may cure yourself, if you can.

This short scene represents nearly the entire topos of Punch and Judy episodes. Punch winds up in a circumstance where, despite his protests, violence or threatened violence escalates to the point that he turns the tables on his attacker to a fatal degree. This excess of violence usually represents the issue pointed to as disturbing or unsettling in Punch and Judy shows,[6] but before continuing any further along this line of thought, some words need saying about puppet theater.

In conversation with a friend, who has worked in puppet theater, he described how certain otherwise troubling topics (like race) could find expression in puppet theater in a way that people seemed more inclined to listen to or hear. In trying to get at why, an essential feature of puppet shows came out: that realism remains utterly alien to and impossible to achieve in a (live) puppet show. If painting can manage photorealism, if film (even at its most unrealistic) still seems to film “reality,” and if live theater inescapably gets enacted by real human beings, try as one might, realism represents an impossible criteria in puppet theater, so that if one were to achieve it, one would move immediately instead into theater per se.

A famous Japanese playwright famously gave up writing for theater to write puppet theater instead. When asked why, he replied that he could do more in puppet theater. In many cases, the conceit of realism joyfully goes out the window like Punch’s baby in puppet theater—people compose and perform puppet theater exactly for that reason—but I suspect that puppet theater, perhaps uniquely, abolishes the expectation of realism in the audience as well. I would contextualize Brecht’s epic theater as a type of gesture like this for stage; by throwing everything into “the past,” the non-realism of theater for both the audience and playwright becomes critically enabled, and thus avoids getting bogged down in “realism,” which remains a terrible fate for many cultural productions. Nonetheless, in epic theater one still remains confronted by (real) human actors in real (historical or mythic) settings. Not so with puppet theater, no matter how hard it tries.

In that respect, to take puppet theater as realistic represents a deliberate or innocent but also profound misreading of it. I say this, primarily to explain how one might find the scene above entertaining, even funny, despite the excess of violence that Punch resorts to kill the doctor. Certainly, someone standing in the presence of such a performance, seeing and hearing the people around him laughing at such violence, might easily wonder, “Would they kill me too,” especially if you come from a lass or sector of society historically subjected to violence. It may readily seem that that laughter might readily turn to mob violence against oneself.

Scores of lawsuits have alleged the culpability of movies, books, records, &c., in the suicides an even homicides of various folks, and without exception—so far as I know—courts have consistently thrown out such lawsuits. The conclusion rests on the fact that thousands or millions have wallowed in the degenerate filth of the Satanic music or violent video games without resorting to suicidal or homicidal violence, so the problem and its tragic consequences originate in the suicide or homicide, not the work of literature, &c.

So, one needn’t invoke some ground authoritarian personality to explain the phenomenology of laughter at Punch and Judy shows, much less any malign intent to indoctrinate in making the show into a children’s entertainment, even if those come into social play. It remains a useful thing, when discussing this kind of issue, whether something affords social harm by design or not. Guns, for instance, by design afford massive bodily injury or death; one might also turn a chair or a car into a lethal weapon but neither afford death-dealing as a matter of design.[7] Similarly, whatever a Punch and Judy show does afford, indoctrination of children or an opportunity to wallow in злорадство (aka Schadenfreude, or “joy in the suffering of others”) do not seem its designed affordance.[8]

To put this another way: since puppeteer theater proposes (and can only propose) a completely non-realistic world, to speak of it as depicting violence, as providing representations of violence, misstates this; puppet theater, rather, provides non-representations of violence. This doesn’t merely offer a pretty change of phrase. In (live, human) theater, the representation of violence onstage remains a challenging technical issue typically solved by a number of often rather lame conventions—the silly little cap gun for the discharge of a gun being the most garish and frequent. One might look, instead, to what another friend flagged down as a brilliant piece of staging in Peter Brook’s (1967) film adaption of Peter Weiss’s (1964) The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, where Glenda Jackson’s character Charlotte Corday drapes her long hair back and forth across de Sade’s back to the sound of whips—all of this to represent de Sade actually getting whipped.

This points to a non-representational gesture, even as inevitably and unavoidably we see real human beings involved nonetheless. Another non-representational resort—one of the oldest—occurs when action occurs offstage—a very literal form of non-representation. &c. But with puppet theater, non-representation does not constitute a resort but its essence. It can do no other but non-represent. And precisely for that reason, as the Japanese playwright observed, puppet theater can do more.[9]

Again, then, to take puppet theater in a representational sense—i.e., to read out the implied “allegory” it proposes in the real-world as a commentary; or, more simply put, to treat it as if real—proposes a serious misreading of the topos of puppet theater. And this misreading Gaiman accomplishes by “fixing” punch and Judy within the larger project of his book.

For one—and one sees this in Vess’s (2004) Book of Ballads as well (which I wrote about here)—the “fixing” of the Punch and Judy narrative in a single form runs contrary to the “popular” habit of simultaneously maintaining multiple, not necessarily mutually coherent narratives. This amounts to the crime of writing itself, committed most profoundly (if not initially) with regard to all of the scripture of the world; the word scripture itself pointing to the culpability of writing in that process. As soon as someone fixed the fluid, multiple, mythologically numinous experience of the “beyond” in a single embodiment for a given culture, they thereby invented religious tyranny s well—and perhaps exactly that purpose inspired writing it down in the first place.

I do not suggest by this that Gaiman intends once and all for forever to fix the Punch and Judy show “script”. Like many middle- or upper-class culture workers before him, he expropriates a popular cultural form and modifies it in ways that make it acceptable to the dominant classes while also becoming alien and other to its original meaning as part of his larger project. It does not help my claim, however, that he titles his book exactly like the one controversial but published script of Punch and Judy. Those who say he does intend to ‘fix” the Punch and Judy narrative and point to that fact have an easier time making their point than the opposite. But regardless of Gaiman’s intentions—and “intentions” at this point gets muddled up by the collaborative element of working with McKean—the gesture of expropriation and distortion persist in the novel.

Beyond the gesture of fixing that goes along with representation in language, which in this case occurs by representing the Punch and Judy show itself in a novel, two other essential elements of the public puppet show get lost (along with the fact of it being live and experienced with other people). The voicing of Punch has forever used a device (a swazzle or a swatchell) that makes his speaking very non-normal. Insofar as some people will insist that without the use of a swizzle then a Punch and Judy constitutes no authentic Punch and Judy show, this sonic absence in a text (Gaiman’s text) has to count as a non-insignificant omission. One has to count this as virtually identical to a collection of ballads that includes only the words and not the music.

What this means in practice, for the novel (or any novel that would represent Punch and Judy), entails throwing the emphasis on the reaction of the protagonist or other characters. Saying this would amount to no new news whatsoever, except that the experience of experimental composers shows over and over again the problem when people substitute their response to a reaction to a composition in place of  response to the composition itself; they say things (and sometimes I say things) like “I don’t understand it” or “It didn’t move me” rather than examining the actual experience that they most assuredly just had in the presence of the composition.

To put this one way, since people tend to gross egocentrism when it comes to judging (musical) compositions (as good or bad), very few people will readily admit that this substitution of the response to a reaction to a composition in place of a response to the composition even amounts to a problem, and I don’t feel at this moment like swimming all the way upstream against the largely unreflective or mindless doxa of egotism that supposedly “justifies” such an opinion, when anyone even bothers to think on it. I will simply say for now that so long as people refuse to accept the premise of (certain kinds of) experimental compositions that alternatives to the current undesirable world order are possible, then that sort of persistent substitution of their responses to a reaction to a composition in place of  responses to the composition itself condemns all of us to the reproduction of the current undesirable world order.

And so, whatever value the protagonist’s response to (his) reaction to a Punch and Judy show has for the novel itself, this (1) reproduces the undesirable status quo by that very substitution and also (2) arguably reifies his reaction as the reaction. No doubt, Gaiman would deny any intention toward point (2), just as Stephen King doubtless would deny any accusation that he means all clowns to always and only have the value of creepy—even if all clowns do creep him out. Nonetheless, people do now in part thanks to King claim all clowns “are” creepy; not to “blame” King or Gaiman, this only points to the implicitly social nature of a cultural object.

And this implicitly social nature of the cultural object, then, runs fundamentally contrary to the substitution of my experience (or any individual experience) as a unilateral or monosemic judgment about a thing socially in the first place. This matters here, because Punch and Judy shows occur publicly, in the presence of many other people, while Gaiman and McKean’s book occurs privately and not as a shared experience (except after the fact in discussions, if at all). So this, again, crucially shifts and thus distorts the presence of Punch and Judy in this book. For example, a recurrent aspect of most Punch and Judy shows, especially now as entertainments for children, involves audience participation and the dramatic irony of various puppets that threaten Punch (from behind). Audience members get encouraged to warn Punch of impending violence—a point Gaiman (necessarily) includes in his book.

If, again, we misread puppet theater as representational, then we might wonder at the psychology of people who warn a character onstage so that he can bludgeon to death someone, but Punch and Judy (besides being non-representational) does not have as its object the depiction of bludgeoning to death. Imagine to yourself what such a show would look like—it would not require Punch’s verbal audacity or daftness, &c. Even within Gaiman’s text, the acknowledgment occurs that the “deaths” of the characters point first and foremost to a technical necessity of the one-performer puppet show; the puppeteer needs to get the puppet off one hand in order to introduce the next character.[10]

These three elements then—the expropriating fixture of the Punch and Judy text (by intention or not), the unavoidable omission of the sonic element,[11] and the missing public element inherent in the shift from public theater to private reading—all make especially problematic the use of Punch and Judy as a vehicle for exploring the themes Gaiman seems to want to in his book. No doubt, the protagonist responds as he does to the show (and the whole world he finds himself in), but the fact that he sees Punch as a pedagogic figure who tells a truth about the world that adults lie to him about cannot substitute for either the meaning of the world or the social meaning of Punch and Judy. Again, Gaiman might readily deny any such claim, but this again points to the implicitly social nature of a cultural object. Do I suggest that culture workers should get held accountable for the “nihilism” of people who see the world in terms of bludgeoning other people to death or who exhibit pathological clownphobia? In one sense, of course not, but in another sense if the cultural object offered offers a sufficiently distorted or narrow view of something, then the very distortion and narrowing models that narrowing and distorting for others in the world and in fact and get tagged as at least problematic, if not culpable. If, in my artistic productions, I make a good faith effort to avoid artificially and willfully leaving out of my culture objects elements that patently offset some major element of the intention in my work, then I suspect I put myself more “in the clear” against charges of “dogmatism”. If I wrote a piece with a suicide in it, and someone committed suicide after reading it, if a jury could identify within that piece the counter-narrative to the necessity of suicide, then this clearly displays that I did not “encourage” suicide, even if I “advocated” it. On the other hand, if no evidence for any counter-narrative to “commit suicide” can get reasonably defended in my piece—my defense attorney would provide the “literary analysis” laying out my defense that we can locate such a narrative in the book; I don’t leave this only up to the jury—then I do say that makes me vulnerable at least to censure in the person’s death.

This all describes, of course, a ridiculous and almost nonsensical circumstance. In any real such event, the defense would always argue and torture out of the text whatever necessary counter-narrative required for exculpation while simultaneously blaming the victim for failing to detect the counter-narrative. Meanwhile, the image of lawyers, defendants, and judges all deeply engaged in abstruse literary analysis seems rather marvelous to me. But the larger point here remains that (1) we should not settle such things in a court of law but rather in the social domain,[12] and (2) that we should not allow culture workers, especially those who receive money for their work, to try to hold themselves wholly innocent of the consequences of their work.

One may, again, distinguish between what a culture object affords by design as opposed to otherwise. Someone might go on a murderous rampage after reading Winnie the Pooh; we may safely hold A. A. Milne harmless for this in all likelihood; the suicides that followed upon reading Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther perhaps not so much. &c.[13] And because Gaiman’s book centers explicitly on the single constructing consciousness of one person, one may reasonably say it affords by design a reading that collapses the entirety of the general into the particular, and thus affords a false generalization. The protagonist’s gloomy conclusion “adults lie” means, then, that all adults lie and can do nothing but lie, which of course means, if one wishes adulthood, then one must lie. For Gaiman, this may means “write fiction”—more precisely, someone who gives up the overgeneralized (childish) notion that all adults lie may come to realize how all adults, as all human beings generally perhaps, constantly fictionalize reality. Just as realism rests on a series of conventions, so reality itself rests on a series of fictionalizations, or myths as Oyama (2000)[14] discusses it: she cites Toulmin (1982),[15] who observes that to call a theory a scientific myth is not to dismiss the theory, but rather to say that it is persistently used to answer nonscientific questions, i.e., it serves an explanatory role in human experience, while Shklar (1971)[16] writes that such mythmaking is “neither pseudo-history nor pseudo-etiology nor primitive science … neither the rival nor the precursor of more rigorous forms of thought. It is psychological evocation.” Oyama herself points out how “the need to blame, to attribute responsibility for suffering and injustice, is one of the things that motivates myth” (189). While

White (1972)[17] suggests that the historical past is “plastic,” as we choose our ancestors to justify our changing definitions of ourselves. “Social fatherhood,” he claims, is “bestowed by the sons.” … To choose a past is thus to choose a present, and vice versa. “By constructing our present, we assert our freedom; by seeking retroactive justification for it in our past, we silently strip ourselves of the freedom that has allowed us to become what we are” (in Oyama, 191).

All of this contextualizes the fundamental theme that seems at work in Gaiman and McKean’s novel, which involves violence or retributive violence—a notion very much in the public eye at the moment given the Zimmerman verdict. Unambiguously in the Punch narrative, all of his violence arises in reaction to his perception of (or the actuality) of a threat. In all cases, the scenario holds him initially innocent; the offense originates with the Other.

Of course, eventually (after he has murdered a few people), the constable who shows up and the beadle who would have him hanged argue that Punch no longer can claim innocence; he has crossed the line, but continues to cleverly or bluntly avoid that accusation and deal out more of his characteristic excess. One can hardly ignore how this attaches to George Zimmerman, who doubtless felt he had ever right to stalk and confront someone he (by his own claim) did not assume had criminal intent, and then responded with excessive deadly force when that Other (Trayvon Martin) did something that moved him (Martin) from the category of okay in Zimmerman’s mind to not okay.

In the case of Punch—sticking with the published script only because it provides one concrete example—he begins at the very outset of the play by saying nice things to the Toby dog, extending his hand even. The Toby dog begins to growl, at which point Punch changes his mind and calls the dog bad, &c. Instead of leaving and leaving the dog alone, Punch remains and wounds up getting bitten on the nose as a result; the scene ends (unusually compared to all others) when the dog runs away.

We can call it 50/50 whether Punch “started” this one or not, but parallels in the narrative go against him. For instance, in his dealing with the baby—given to him by his wife Judy to babysit—he begins as he did with the dog, complimenting it and the like. But then, when the baby begins to cry, Punch changes his tune, berating and criticizing the baby until finally he throws it off-stage. If, in the first scene, we might believe the dog’s personality makes him aggressive or nasty, even if the baby seems similarly colicky, most won’t accept Punch’s claims about the child’s malice, much less that that justifies him killing it.

However clearly this makes Punch in the wrong in these two early cases, the other scenes explicitly involves others beating or threatening to beat him with the slapstick, which he eventually gets ahold of and bludgeons his “attacker” to death. Nonetheless, this non-ambiguity doesn’t change the underlying premise, that Punch responds to (a threat of) violence with overwhelming, even lethal violence. Again and again, the show presents—with the exception of the baby—that Punch’s attackers ‘brought it upon themselves”—and if we adopt a sociopathic enough sensibility, we can say the same for the baby as well, if we like.

This perception of danger lies at the heart of Florida’s stand-your-ground law, self-defense homicides in general, and George Zimmerman’s mindset when he created a situation (like Punch) where ultimately he used lethal force to get out of a situation. He decided at some point, just as Punch did with the dog and the baby, that any initial presumption on his part that here he’d found someone “good” quickly changed in whatever way—because the dog growled, because the child cried, because Trayvon did something—that set of a cascade of consequent events where he resorted to lethal force.

Clearly, to shoot a dog for growling, a child for crying, or a young black male for saying, “Stop following me, fucker,” stands well over the line of reasonable. What becomes clear here involves a tension between two things: (1) a claim of fear on the part of Punch or Zimmerman in the face of growling or crying or people threatening him with sticks, which as something irrational tends not to lend itself to considered reflection and all of that, and (2) our duty as social beings not to act like stupid motherfuckers who let the mere possibility of fear jerk us around.

Punch confronts two kinds of fear with the god. Whatever friendliness he exhibits initially, it apparently has at the back of it a willingness to believe that dogs will turn inexplicably violent, so that when the dog growls he assumes, as not all of us would, that the dog will inevitably attack. If someone says to me, “Stop following me, motherfucker,” I likely would not assume that an attack will follow. Because Punch stupidly continues to bother the dog once it starts growling, he creates the situation whereby he gets bitten. As the “advanced species” in the scenario, he has the responsibility to take the steps necessary to avoid escalation. That might mean leaving the scene; it certainly doesn’t involve blaming the dog. For all that the media and Zimmerman’s defense tried otherwise, Trayvon Martin remained a child, not an adult; Zimmerman, as the adult, had an obligation to remove himself from the scene, to not exacerbate the situation.

The point, as any number of commentators attempt to make clear to white America, the excuse of irrationality for the fear of young black males is prejudicial not irrational. Punch’s willingness to immediately believe, when the dog growls, that the dog has a hostile character and intention, that that can only indicate an intention to attack, comes out of prejudice, not irrationality. Arguably, that prejudice, which leads Punch to speak aggressively to the dog (i.e., to exacerbate the situation), eventuates the dog’s attack. Whatever the dog’s character, most folks would agree: if a dog growls, better to back away or do something else to mollify it; yelling at it would s we say “be asking for trouble.” Punch, of course, doesn’t think so, or doesn’t even have a clue so.

Probably neither does Zimmerman. And once the cascade of events, set in motion by prejudice, led him to remain in the situation and escalate it to the point of an actual fear—if in fact he ever got into a physical altercation with Martin—then that actual fear led him to pull the trigger. So when the jury found him not guilty, they were indeed saying, as commentators have insisted, that they signaled their approval for the prejudice that made Zimmerman already emotionally predisposed to see Trayvon Martin as a dangerous animal in the first place. And saying that they “had to” because legislators wrote the law that way or the jury instructions required them to look at it that way dodges the question of why the law got written that way and the jury instructions crafted in that way in the first place.[18]

For the record, just as one and the same action by people differently positioned in a hierarchy has a different social meaning,[19] even within the Punch and Judy world itself, Punch occupies different hierarchical positions. If he comes across as patently villainous in his infanticidal and uxoricidal early scenes, at least in the original popular setting of the play, getting over on the constable and hangman make him heroic. It matters, by the way, that Punch and Judy constitutes a foreign arrival; one can track xenophobic elements throughout the narrative (signaled first and foremost in Punch’s voice)—notice the difference it makes, for instance, that an English Mr. Punch beats to death Mr. Scaramouch (retained from the Italian original). At least some portion of what makes Punch and Judy “acceptable” on English shores involves that, to some extent or at some dim level, Mr. Punch does not hail originally from England. I’ll simply go so far and say that an English audience (at least originally) “excused” his child-killing an wife-killing on the grounds that they expect as much from uncivilized foreigners, but then enthusiastically embrace the popular sentiment, found all over the place in culture and myth, of the poor person who outwits the authorities (constable, hangman, devil). Of course, once Punch and Judy itself got taken up by middle- and upper-class culture workers—as, for example, when the hangman sequence got excised from performances generally during the Victorian period, when Punch and Judy got framed as primarily for children—then in place of “foreigner” one could substitute “poor”, and something similar to what Foucault identifies round the gallows of yore could take place in a Punch and Judy booth. I mean that the performance could become a space where “the poor” could actually mock Power; they themselves could “excuse” Punch’s early violence as twitting Authority in the first place.

However the case or not, the element of race remains a complicated on in Punch and Judy and thus continues to inform the Zimmerman situation. Mr. Scaramouch enters with malice aforethought it seems and simply begins beating Punch with no apparent provocation. If ever Punch seems justified in his turn about, then that happens here, although, of course, completely knocking Scaramouch’s head from his shoulders rightfully seems overkill.[20] This particular murder often occasions the reason the constable gives for his arrival, but surely we shouldn’t attempt color-blindness here and pretend that an Englishman decapitating an Italian plays no part in this moment. Just as we should not pretend colorblindness about white/Hispanic man who murdered a black child.

In the case of Scaramouch, the narrative gives unambiguous weight to the unjustness of his attack on Punch. I won’t torture the story to say that Scaramouch himself arrives, interested to find out what evil Punch got up to with his Toby dog. I think it remains quite consonant with the milieu present when Zimmerman decided to confront Trayvon martin where he did that mutual misapprehension probably existed on both sides, as Scaramouch and Punch might. So that if we wonder why Scaramouch decides he and just start beating Punch, then prejudice (rather than fear) provides a more plausible explanation even than claiming he has come to avenge his offended dog.

Notice here how also, in the Italian original, we would see no “inter-racial” element in a confrontation between Punchinello and Scaramouch (perhaps a class distinction, but not a race distinction), so that some might try to apply the racist and colorblind thesis “I don’t see bad Italian (black) people, I just see bad people” to the Zimmerman case. Hence the violence Punch visits on everyone (or Scaramouch on him, or Zimmerman on Martin) gets deflected from a structural or institutional basis and seems to becomes merely a personal matter or even simply an unfortunate exception amidst an otherwise perfectly functioning society. We can rejoice how the transplantation of Punchinello and Joan from Italy to England exposes this otherwise duplicitous argumentative move.

To consider Punch and Judy in literal terms, as a representational depiction of violence, misreads the essential character of puppet shows. And just as Jung warns that when symbolic psychic content gets acted out literally in the world that this tends to lead to negative—and usually contrary to desired—outcomes. SO in that case it seems “of course” that literalizing the Punch and Judy narrative would affect horror (or anxiety and angst) rather than genuine laughter—by which I mean Gaiman’s extension of the Punch and Judy narrative into the world of his novel.

However, he adds a very problematic element, perhaps accidentally. It remains an open question what exactly we might conclude about Punch’s “retributive violence”. By this, I don’t mean that he might make  case for himself; I mean, rather, that the problem of and how we deal with the “paranoid” in our midst who substitutes (unconsciously, so to speak) his illegitimate prejudice as a criteria for action as if it were a legitimate fear still requires a social solution. To recognize that Zimmerman’s prejudice (prejudgment), his willingness to believe even non-evidence of criminality in Trayvon Martin constituted evidence of criminality, provides the real impetus to a situation where a (likely very real) fear for his life (during a struggle with Martin, if one occurred) led to him using deadly force. But whether the murder amounts to self-defense or not, whether the “real fear” ever played a real role doesn’t matter—to my mind, the prejudicial willingness to see evidence of criminality where non deserved finding means that Zimmerman “started it”. This pattern describes Punch as well, while (of course, if still significantly) all of his targets comprise various sorts of “deserving” types (growling dogs, crying babies, nagging wives, Italians, constables, hangmen, the devil).[21] Just as D-FENS asks at the end of Schumacher’s (1993) Falling Down, “when did I become the bad guy?” Punch (and Zimmerman) might not have the capacity to recognize that his actions make him the bad guy.

This, however, does not broach the problematic element in Gaiman’s book. In it, the character of Uncle Morton has at least two major links to the Punch mythos. For one, he gets identified with Punch himself, because he gets bitten on the nose by the Toby dog; second, although the family narrative remains deliberately vague, rumor has it get got dropped or thrown down some stairs as a baby, making him a hunchback—this links him with the thrown-out baby in the Punch narrative, but (putting these items together) suggests that Punch himself suffered a similar fate as a baby. So the “what goes around comes around” karma that Punch deals out to everyone around him in short order also gets a wider articulation by suggesting a cycle of violence starting with his own childhood.

The unintentional difficulty Gaiman introduces by this arises from the fact of Uncle Morton’s Jewish ancestry (and/or, in fact, at least part of the protagonist’s Jewish family on one side of his family). If, particularly against Scaramouch, we read violence to foreigners as at least suggesting (in Gaiman’s narrative) antisemitic violence, then the nightmarish or threatening aspects of a Punch and Judy show come clearly to the foreground; one may readily imagine the (at least partially Jewish) protagonist witnessing such depicted violence and not finding the “humor” of it in light of those of his people who suffered such violence in actuality. Taking nothing from that sense of anxiety or dread, still the laughter of those around him points to a prejudice on his part, a willingness to see evidence of murderous enthusiasm where in fact no such evidence exists, such that where whatever degree of actual antisemitism (percentagewise) might get identified in anyone random person in the crowd, it remains proportionally similar to the amount of actual criminality (percentagewise) one might encounter in any random young black male.

But Gaiman makes the protagonist’s angst arise primarily out of his experiences with adults, particularly those in his family. He may provide a way to track or decipher whether his Jewish (or non-Jewish?) grandfather beats his pregnant mistress in the belly with a 2×4 “slapstick,” in all likelihood to induce an abortion as much as intimidate her into silence, but however all of this lines up, unambiguously Uncle Morton provides a first and clear linking with Puck.

Insofar as Gaiman has Jewish ancestry, it may not seem as dubious if he makes Punch into an image of Jewish people as if a non-Jewish writer asserted this. This won’t, ultimately, save Gaiman from an accusation of self-hatred or antisemitism, but it seems hazardous to describe Jewish people as paranoid deployers of prejudicial violence. (Other unsavory elements of Punch wouldn’t help this picture.)

I suspect Gaiman accidentally implies this; or maybe I really mean that I hope Gaiman only accidentally implies this and didn’t intend to, that he set out to tell a tale of childhood—one full of angst and woe—and seized on the figure of Punch and Judy as (1) a beloved childhood symbol he could “shit” on, in order to illustrate the estrangement from childhood just as King does for clowns, and (2) a place where Punch emerges as something of a hero for showing the truth of the world that adults lie about. But by attaching his own family history to that symbolic nexus, he offers a sort of diagnosis of Zionism that has no shortage of problematic, if not stereotypical, features.

But maybe he “really meant” this, someone insists. No. I’d say rather this powerfully demonstrates what happens when one allows ‘symbolic” content to get literalized in the world. In Gaiman’s narrative, this happens both within the world of the book and as an implication of the book in the world. By literalizing the Punch and Judy symbols into the narrative’s real world people, we arrive at what I’ve called Gaiman’s diagnosis of Zionism, but really (and unfortunately) the childish overgeneralizations that the protagonist indulges in don’t apply to all adults, but only adults in his life, i.e., the Jewish adults. All of this informs the meaning of the book in our own social world as well, then. The violence, neurosis, lying, the babies thrown down stairs, the 2×4 used to induce an abortion—I would like to think Gaiman doesn’t mean for all of this to apply only to people whose ancestry he at least partially shares. Similarly, I don’t think he intends anyone to infer that only by being someone like Punch can (Jewish) people hope to prevail in the world generally. &c.

Again, I doubt Gaiman intended to imply this. Given the not-entirely-clear relationship between a (or the) Punch and Judy narrative as Gaiman utilizes it here and the narrative aspects of the book’s plot (involving Uncle Morton, insanity, extramarital affairs, abortion, adults lying, &c), the clarity n obvious linking of the protagonist’s (Jewish) uncle and the figure of Punch, when the Toby dog bites his nose, makes for the most obvious and least ambiguous of such linkages. After that, things become murky, but because Gaiman establishes this comparatively early on (it being comparatively early in the Punch and Judy narrative generally), it put a lot of weight on imply the “tone” of what follows. But even to follow only the ramifications of the gesture of making the protagonist’s (Jewish) uncle into Punch winds up sending ripples into uncomfortable territory at best. And by this I mean less the bigoted and racist implication that the victims “brought in on themselves” or “asked for it” or “provoked Mr. Punch” (i.e., Trayvon Martin) and more the historical implications involved in a description of victimizers as prejudiced, self-pitying, deluded, and prone to respond to even incidental provocations with lethal violence (i.e., George Zimmerman).

Ugh. I feel like I have to wade through a gross mindset even to formulate these sentences. And so I want to also reiterate the disclaimer at the beginning of this:  I “may misunderstand books or get stuff wrong, or get off on a gratuitous tear about the thing in some way, &c. I may say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff” &c.

Mixed activist CM Byrd’s (2007)[22] Bhagavad-Gita in Black and White: From Mulatto Pride to Krishna Consciousness spends some time criticizing the one-drop rule (and concept); this involves the sometimes racist, always racialized notion that to have even one drop of “Black blood” means that one becomes for the purpose of the Census (here we find the always racialized part) “Black” (or Hispanic, &c) and for the purposes of bigots (here we find the racist part) wholly or only Black. Under this one-drop rule, Obama becomes our first Black president, not our first “mixed” president.

Byrd spends most of his angry ink less against racists who would “slander” his partial whiteness with the “smirch” of non-whiteness and more against what now get called race hustlers, who would deny any whiteness in him at all for the sake of political representation as non-white. And I have to say that Byrd’s solution to this mess involves colorblindness, i.e., from Mulatto Pride to Kṛṣṇa consciousness. But insofar as Byrd seems capable of “passing,” this desire to substitute the white fantasy of “spirituality” in place of any specific matrix of “heritage”[23] fails to address he still ongoing social consequences of heritage, as the Zimmerman situation and verdict makes painfully clear.

Nonetheless, we may still take his carping at race hustlers as a starting point, in conjunction with the racist trope that “won’t forgive” even one drop of non-white heritage. Dyer (1997)[24] notes that white people do not see themselves as a race, but simply as human beings; moreover, whiteness gets defined by an absence (of color). Whites see themselves as (literally) non-colored. Any important consequence of this involves the identification of things like Black literature, queer film, Jewish poetry, while literature, film, and poetry by white people represents “human” culture products. The further corollary o this; Black, queer, or Jewish in this context does not mean “human”.

So cultural productions that “color” themselves lose their “human” universality.  Remembering that Ang Lee’s ultra-celebrated (2005) Brokeback Mountain had no homosexuals in major roles for its production, the following shows the gross incoherence that happens when straight (white) culture tries to come to terms with “non-human” (colored) culture:

There was also disagreement among reviewers, critics, and even the cast and crew as to whether the film’s two protagonists were actually homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or under no sexual label at all. Most often the film was referred to in the media as the “gay cowboy movie,” but a number of reviewers wrote that Jack and Ennis were bisexual. Sex researcher Fritz Klein also asserted his opinion that the film was “a nice film with two main characters who were bisexual”, and further analyzed that Jack is more “toward the gay side of bisexuality” and Ennis is “a bit more toward the straight side of being bisexual”. In an article in American Sexuality Magazine, bisexuality-focused sex educator Amy Andre critiqued the media’s avoidance of the use of the term bisexual in association with Brokeback Mountain:

Brokeback Mountain is a not a movie about gay people, and there are no gay people in it. There. I said it. Despite what you may have read in the many reviews that have come out about this new cowboy feature film, Brokeback Mountain is a bisexual picture. Why can’t film reviewers say the word ‘bisexual’ when they see lead characters with sexual and romantic relationships with both men and women? I am unaware of a single review of Brokeback calling the leads what they are—a sad statement on the invisibility of bisexual experience and the level of biphobia in both the mainstream and gay media.

Gyllenhaal himself took the opinion that Ennis and Jack were heterosexual men who “develop this love, this bond,” also saying in a Details interview: “I approached the story believing that these are actually two straight guys who fall in love.” Still others stated that they felt the characters’ sexuality to be simply ambiguous. Clarence Patton and Christopher Murray said in New York’s Gay City News that Ennis and Jack’s experiences were metaphors for “many men who do not identify as gay or even queer, but who nevertheless have sex with other men”. A reviewer at Filmcritic.com wrote, “We later see Jack eagerly engage Lureen sexually, with no explanation as to whether he is bisexual, so in need of physical intimacy that anyone, regardless of gender, will do, or merely very adept at faking it.” Ledger was quoted as stating in TIME: “I don’t think Ennis could be labeled as gay. Without Jack Twist, I don’t know that he ever would have come out…. I think the whole point was that it was two souls that fell in love with each other.” Conversely, others stated that the characters were undoubtedly gay, including GLBT non-fiction author Eric Marcus, who dismissed “talk of Ennis and Jack being anything but gay as box office-influenced political correctness intended to steer straight audiences to the film”. Roger Ebert also agrees that both characters are gay, although in doubt of it: “Jack is able to accept a little more willingly that he is inescapably gay,” and the film’s producer James Schamus said, “I suppose movies can be Rorschach tests for all of us, but damn if these characters aren’t gay to me.” Annie Proulx herself opined “how different readers take the story is a reflection of their own personal values, attitudes, hang-ups.” … Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, “best-of” list, saying, “Everyone called it ‘The Gay Cowboy Movie.’ Until they saw it. In the end, Ang Lee’s 2005 love story wasn’t gay or straight, just human” (from here, emphasis added)

Thus, the one-drop rule raises Byrd’s complaint against Gaiman’s book insofar as Gaiman ‘colors” it with details that include specifically Jewish ancestry in the book’s characters. In this respect, Punch himself represents a kind of mix—an Italian assimilated to England—and in this respect his violence toward other Italians itself has its corner in the history of immigration; the way that Punch gets construed as “English” or “Italian” shows the anxieties and politicking surrounding “mixed”. The narrative in Gaiman’s book seems to wed English and Jewish as well, so the theme gets that much more entrenched in his book.

But what this means, and what Byrd would want to object to, involves (1) the justice or injustice of reading Gaiman’s book as speaking to the Jewish experience, i.e., not to the human (white) experience generally, and (2) the error or defensibility of “coloring” his book with even a little Jewish detail in the first place. Byrd might wish to, in all likelihood in league with Gaiman, emphasize the “human universality” of the story—notwithstanding the childish overgeneralization (i.e., “all adults lie” and the like). But in which case Byrd might also object that the very inclusion of any coloring whatsoever automatically masks that claim to human universality—the work becomes “Black” literature, “queer” film, or “Jewish” poetry, &c—even a small detail, for all of Byrd’s attempts to object otherwise, functions in a one-drop rule way. Such coloring becomes gratuitous as far as the “human” story goes; he wants to take no account of it. And even if one wants to (rightly) call the mutually exclusive distinction between Black, queer, or Jewish and “human” racist, homophobic, or antisemitic, one a simpler level, a work of Black literature, queer film, or Jewish poetry does constitute something non-white, non-straight, non-Jewish.

We can’t say this doesn’t matter. I just had a conversation where I had to remind a white male that he does indeed have white privilege, even though he does not have the class privilege of wealth. He expressed the desire, understandable enough, to see all people as “human,” n I proposed that the current problem with that comes (obviously) from the fat that “human” = “white”. Or, more generally, if we will accept that we should speak of “the human” rather than specific markers of humanity, then what precisely does “the human” consist of. For Byrd, he emphasizes the underlying spiritual reality expressed in the Bhagavad-Gītā, which of course represents a kind of “solution’ to the problem. I would say, however, that the Indian metaphysic does not emphasizes only the “underlying spiritual reality” of human beings but also keeps in view the variety of expression—the millions of avatars of the Ineffable—that each individual expresses, and which therefore different classes of individuals reflect as well.

Recently, someone offered the advice “choose love” for decision making; I replied, “choose love only when it is appropriate to choose love. I refuse to live a life with only one choice; that’s no life at all.” If the only choice I have as far as describing other people go consists of “human,” then only having one choice, again, amounts to offering no choice and no life at all. Only by acknowledging variety, even as it all issues from one epistemologically unknowable ground, does the “human” show up in the world as far as I’m concerned.

Endnotes

[1] Gaiman, N., & McKean, D. (1995). The tragical comedy or comical tragedy of Mr. Punch: a romance. 1st paperback ed. New York, N.Y.: Vertigo/DC Comics, pp. 1–96.

[2] King, S. (1981). It. New York, N.Y.: Signet.

[3] Blackwell, MJ (1997). Gender and representation in the films of Ingmar Bergman. Columbia: Camden House.

[4] Punch and Judy began as a marionette show with more than one marionette operator, but as it scaled down to smaller, more portable shows run by one puppeteer, hand-puppets became a very common resort.

[5] We tend to underestimate the extent of penetration Punch and Judy have into culture. Few remember that “pleased as Punch” originates in his cackling glee each time he bests someone, but also the board with which he bets people to death gives us the term “slapstick,” being, quite literally, a stick with which he slaps. But Kukla, Fran, and Ollie have a clear ancestor in Punch and Judy, and Lady Elaine Fairechilde (from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, a curmudgeon who, significantly, gets sympathy from her neighbors because they so well understand her) can seem physically evocative of Punch himself.

[6] One might easily identify other issues as well.

[7] In college, my friend’s epic Dungeons & Dragon universe rarely had a place for irony—irony and epic being largely incompatible—but one spot where some humor and irony found official expression concerned the epic NPC Skulldark, who stood in that universe as the ultimate warrior/killing machine. Hence, the “joke” circulating in the world about him begins by holding up any innocuous item, like a piece of straw, and declaring, “To you, this is a piece of straw, but in the hands of Skulldark, it is a deadly weapon” (or a variant). Skulldark, then, possesses a particular genius for discovering how every object affords lethality, but this does not mean that all such objects afford lethality by design.

[8] In children’s cartoons, that figures most frequently get drawn as non-humans points to this as well. But even more important seems the utterly non-realistic reaction to violence—animals fall off cliffs, then get up again; Punch continues to say (accidentally) witty things even as the doctor beats him, &c. Compare this to filmic torture porn, which does afford by design wallowing in Schadenfreude—if one delights in the experience at all.

[9] One may split a hair and say that non-representation offers an impossible distinction, that what I propose by non-representation amounts simply to an incapacity to adhere to any plausible criteria of realism, realism itself being a merely conventional set of tropes in the first place. Every make-up artist knows that to make people look “realistically” human to the audience one must commit all sorts of strange exaggerations. Similarly, in a marvelous parody of Soviet socialist realism (I can no longer remember by whom but I’d guess Voinovich’s Moscow 2042), things get described in terms of incompletely drawn stick figures, which in fact satires the conceit of realms itself, which Tolstoy famously exemplifies in his ability to identify just exactly that one precise detail that brings a whole image into view. All of this being so, one might then equally claim that all representation stands as actually some form of conventionalized non-representation; as Samuel Delany (2009)* noted in his essay “About 5,750 Words,” the genre of realistic fiction or realism denotes a subset of science fiction, in that realistic fiction proposes a parallel universe story in which the only difference between the narrative’s world and ours hinges on the characters of the narrative. Valuable (an voluble) as this insight remains, I still hesitate to too quickly subsume my notion of non-representation under either the total world of art itself (as nothing but, or rather all only, conventionalized representation) or a more conventional notion of realistic representation itself. Whatever (all) art does, whether we (the artist, the audience, the world) assumes realism or representational correspondence between the depiction and the depicted adds an additional consideration on top of that artistic doing. We might say, then, that some art affords a realistic interpretation or correspondence by design while other art does not, but either can (just as we may make a chair lethal) make non-realistic art bend or conform to a realistic interpretation. I suspect that back in the day, theater had much more of the sense of puppet theater about it, that the non-representational aspect of theater generally took the lead in the audience’s experience of theater. This seems very obvious in, say, kabuki or noh. And while times have obviously changed, this does not mean we should deny puppet theater what remains perhaps its most abiding and still essential feature: its non-representational aesthetic.

* Delany, S. R. (2009). The jewel-hinged jaw: notes on the language of science fiction. Rev. ed. Wesleyan University Press.

[10] This—also again of course—without pretending or insisting that “death” provides the only narrative answer for this technical requirement.

[11] McKean’s genius finds multiple resorts to attempt to represent the screechiness of the swizzle, but precisely in this representational transformation of sound into text may we see all over again most of the themes I identify. Punch’s screechiness tends to the annoying rather than the horrifying, of course, and McKean’s fonts and script work—especially in the way that reading them now post Arkham Asylum connects them almost inevitably to the Joker—have more of an ominous than annoying feel or impression.

[12] The ugly historical examples of what happens when Power starts mediating in court against texts that criticize it offers another reason to void this resort.

[13] Again, we should not neglect here to whatever extent Goethe sought to offset or counter-balance the “commit suicide” theme. More precisely, to the extent that he took that counter-motif seriously I would judge his book not artistically irresponsible. Someone might use Camus’ Stranger, by contrast, to insist it suggests a more problematic case.

[14] Oyama, S. (2000). The ontogeny of information: developmental systems and evolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

[15] Toulmin, S. (1982). The return to cosmology. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 21–85.

[16] Shklar, JN (1971). Subversive genealogies. In C. Geertz (ed). Myth, symbol, and culture, pp. 129–155, New York: Norton, pp. 137, 147–8.

[17] White, HV (1972). What is a historical system? In AD Breck & W. Yourgrau (eds.) Biology, history, and natural philosophy, pp. 233–42. New York: Plenum, pp. 239–42.

[18] Black folks and the non-naïve already know the answer.

[19] Failure to recognize this leads many white people to scream about “reverse discrimination” in appropriately.

[20] I won’t event try to disentangle whatever this all entails in the historical context of the character of Scaramouch in his widespread commedia dell’arte tradition in Italy.

[21] Narratively, the appearance of the constable, hangman, and devil all follow “logically” from Punch’s earlier criminality—particularly murdering the Italian.

[22] Byrd, CM (2007) The Bhagavad-Gita in black and white: from mulatto Pride to Krishna consciousness. Palm Coast, FL: Backintyme, pp. i–iv, 1–218.

[23] See Dyer’s (1997) White for a detailed analysis of this fantasy. See the note below.

[24] Dyer, R. (1997). White: Essays on race and culture. New York, NY: Routledge

CONFRONTING CROWDS AND POWER: 6. The Survivor (The Despot’s Hostility to Survivors. Rulers and Their Successors, Forms of Survival)

Abstract

Evidence for identifying the perspective that Canetti writes from is consonant with the clinical features of narcissistic personality disorder continues to heap up. NOTE: I am not saying that Canetti is a narcissist or suffering from NPD; I am saying that the point of view espoused is consonant with the pathological traits of NPD. Moreover, I am not dismissing Canetti as crazy either; I’m saying that the point of view expressed is consonant with the pathological traits of narcissistic personality disorder.

I stress this, because saying people are crazy and consigning them to a nuthatch is a great trick of totalitarian regimes; saying people are crazy is an especially dangerous social thing to do—second in frequency and violence only to calling people stupid, which functionally and socially is probably exactly just a milder form of calling someone crazy.

To illustrate that the point of view espoused by Canetti is consonant with the clinical features of narcissistic personality disorder: he asserts without qualifiers that man’s “way of procuring his prey is cunning, bloodthirsty and strenuous” (250); such an opinion about all people shares the pathological trait of delusional ideas about reality with NPD, sine vast herds of people don’t even procure prey anymore, much less in cunning, bloodthirsty, or strenuous ways.  Moreover, Canetti notes that man[1] “wants to kill so that he can survive others; he wants to stay alive so as not to have others surviving him” (250) is consonant with the pathological trait of NPD that “other people are either manipulated as an extension of one’s own self, who serve the sole role of giving ‘admiration and approval’ or they are seen as worthless (because they cannot collude with the narcissist’s grandiosity)” (from here); it also reflects that “sadistic tendency that is characteristic of narcissism” (from here). And so forth.

Introduction & Disclaimer

This is the thirty-fourth entry in a series that ambitiously addresses, section by section over the course of a year+ Canetti’s  Crowds and Power [2] and the three to address Part 6 (The Survivor), which Canetti breaks up into several sections.  Here I cover sections 6–7, “The Despot’s Hostility to Survivors. Rulers and Their Successors, Forms of Survival.” [3]

As a partial framing, it has become clear that Canetti’s sense of what a survivor is may be equated with people tending toward or clinically expressing what today is called narcissistic personality disorder; these traits include (and it will be helpful to keep this in mind while reading through the following):

Reacting to criticism with anger, shame, or humiliation; taking advantage of others to reach own goals; Exaggerating own importance, achievements, and talents; imagining unrealistic fantasies of success, beauty, power, intelligence, or romance; requiring constant attention and positive reinforcement from others; becoming jealous easily; lacking empathy and disregarding the feelings of others; being obsessed with self; pursuing mainly selfish goals; trouble keeping healthy relationships; becoming easily hurt and rejected; setting goals that are unrealistic; wanting “the best” of everything; appearing unemotional. In addition to these symptoms, the person may also display dominance, arrogance, show superiority, and seek power. … Narcissists have such an elevated sense of self-worth that they value themselves as inherently better than others. However, they have a fragile self-esteem and cannot handle criticism, and will often try to compensate for this inner fragility by belittling or disparaging others in an attempt to validate their own self-worth. It is this sadistic tendency that is characteristic of narcissism as opposed to other psychological conditions affecting level of self-worth (from here).

Although individuals with NPD are often ambitious and capable, the inability to tolerate setbacks, disagreements or criticism, along with lack of empathy, make it difficult for such individuals to work cooperatively with others or to maintain long-term professional achievements. With narcissistic personality disorder, the individual’s self-perceived fantastic grandiosity, often coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically not commensurate with his or her real accomplishments (from here). Other people are either manipulated as an extension of one’s own self, who serve the sole role of giving “admiration and approval” or they are seen as worthless (because they cannot collude with the narcissist’s grandiosity) (from here).

The Despot’s Hostility to Survivors. Rulers and Their Successors

The fundamental drawback in this section is the paucity of evidence and that what is drawn attention to is decidedly ancient. Without mentioning it by name, one may say that Canetti has tried to elevate “don’t kill the messenger” to universal proportions. He construes the fact of the messenger’s survival (in the limited cases Canetti cites) as the offense that warrants the despot’s death, but of course, messengers who were not merely survivors of some disaster are said to have been executed by rulers displeased to have received some news.

We could try to think of these scenes in terms of an offense to the ruler’s arrogation to himself or herself the sole right to survive, but that dog don’t run. Certainly in the world of realpolitik, survival is a bare minimum for any ruler, but taking everything down to that denominator short-sells human practice to a pathetic degree. In places where the certainty of one’s continued power is more or less up in the air, this doesn’t mean survival becomes the only value still held in esteem. In a conversation recently with a friend, the question of what it meant to survive the German Nationalist camps had great urgency at one time: primo Levi concluded one could not survive the camps without sacrificing everything human along the way, while Victor Frankl drew the conclusion that human cooperation, regardless of the specific fate of individuals, remained at least a never entirely lost value. I point to this circumstance because such camps (and similar ones like them elsewhere in time and place) bring the question of the cost of survival urgently to the foreground.

But neither should we lose sight of the fact that rulers are almost never subjected to that kind of mass incarceration. Even with Lear on the heath, faced very probably by physical destruction (if he ever even manages to recover his senses), the plight is different in two major directions. First, because of the hierarchal character of society, the death of the capstone has a profound ripple effect throughout the whole of culture. This is very much the case in “feudal” kinds of social settings, where power is more or less actually focused on a single person (as opposed to our more current parliamentarian arrangements, where power is aggravatingly diffused throughout the ruling strata of culture). This is emblematize in the saying the king is the land, and it would be naïve in such social settings to ignore that the survival of the ruler has broader social consequences for culture generally than the death of a peon. The historical safety net against this disaster is, of course, clear lines of primogeniture and heredity; hence, the king is dead, long live the king. To say this is simply to acknowledge that in such steeply stratified social structures, survival has  more pitched value or consequence because so much depends on the hierarchical head; this does not mean, however, that survival is still the value that trumps all else.

Second, the sort of stories that rulers tell themselves about why they must survive makes them more prone to culturally abominable forms of behavior. In the previous section, Canetti says, “The Romans were perfectly familiar with the Jews’ stubborn belief in God. They knew that the last thing a Jew would do was to take the name of God in vain” (241), and yet that is just what Josephus has done—he writes that he has been given prophecies from YHVH that he should surrender himself to the Romans, because it is part of YHVH’s mysterious work. He’s taking YHVH’s name in vain, and this is the (reprehensible) excuse he provides himself—to the world, through his writing—for not committing suicide like so many others he failed to defend in the town of Jotapata had.

To a certain extent, the ruler is in an awkward position of having to fit the Realpolitik of the actual world into the idealizing doxa of her or his culture. Hence, the United States stands for democracy, &c., and yet we export it with airstrikes that destroy Pakistani children or send billions to governments to continue genocide against Arab peoples as well as notoriously antidemocratic regimes; it professes to be rooted, more fundamentally than anything else, in the rule of law[4] and yet Bush Jr. suspended one of the oldest common law principles of the judiciary, habeas corpus; it constitutionally places privacy, especially of property, at the very core of its ideology and yet regularly violates it through illegal wire-tapping and disingenuously named assets seizure (or assets forfeiture) programs, &c., typically in the name of (national) security. A more metaphorical example of this may be extracted from the Bhagavad-Gītā, where the blind king Dhṛtarāṣṭra, whose name may be translated as “he who holds the kingdom together” and whose principal general  Duryodhana, whose name can be translated as “dirty fighter, ”i.e.,  it is “dirty fighter” who helps keep ego-consciousness on the throne,[5] comprise the basic mechanisms of consciousness. As I wrote elsewhere:

I imagine Dhṛtarāṣṭra as an ego-consciousness figure (that includes a persona). And in the context of “he who holds the kingdom together,” principled ideals may not always be honored when making pragmatic decisions. The statesman (the ego-consciousness) may, as part of its persona, avow freedom of speech as an ideal, but manifold practicalities of “holding the kingdom together” may make that ideal untenable, even if heartbreakingly so. So while the person pays lip service to ideas—even with a complete sincerity—the ego-consciousness cannot be so blasé about it. Hence, the shadow of the persona—the repression of free speech—is precisely the act that ego-consciousness may have to resort to. While the shadow of ego-consciousness comprises a principled assertion of those ideals (¶18).

In such a context, the idealism expressed by the Bhagavad-Gītā’s hero Arjuna must generally be repressed, through “dirty fighting” on behalf of “he who holds the kingdom together”. This is not an advocacy for Dhṛtarāṣṭra, however—especially as Kṛṣṇa continuously reprises the directive to overthrow the blind king. One may, of course, read this story in terms of an actual war, where Arjuna’s idealism has received the imprimatur of Kṛṣṇa’s (god’s) permission to continue—and read this way, i.e., to literalize the metaphor of this narrative, would be to actualize those worst kinds of disasters of which history is full. Just as Scheherazade uses an old metaphysics of Persian folk tales to sting the conscience of the prince listening to her in One Thousand and One Nights, her object is not the literal content of her cautionary fables, but the fact of her storytelling—her transformation of those stories into here-and-now relationships between human beings, in this case the Prince and herself. So too with the story of the Bhagavad-Gītā. It is the essence of narcissistic psychosis to believe the divine has commanded you to do something, just as it would be psychotic for Arjuna to accept that he should kill all of his relatives because god (Kṛṣṇa) says it is copacetic. The point of the story, rather, is an invitation to change one’s thinking about the world—in other words, to change the narrative that we tell about the world. If this seems a stretch, it should be remembered that the entire narrative of the Bhagavad-Gītā is reported to Dhṛtarāṣṭra by Sanjaya—so here, as in the One Thousand and One Nights, the human art of storytelling is used not to report something literal or actual but to serve as an illustration of an opportunity to hinge one’s thinking and one’s view of the world.

And so when the ruler acts like  narcissist, when the ruler starts literalizing the contents of the story that are told about him or her (or that she or he self-narrates), then genocides, bloodbaths, and social misery result. Rulers—it is worth remembering that Canetti actually refers to despots, though it seems he means to refer to all leaders—have the most resources at their beck and call to literalize their self-narratives. So rulers might be paranoid and think that survival is the only thing to be thinking about—and since they have the capacity (generally) to enforce the narrative, they can get people to act as if it is so. And that is why imagining that rulers who kill messengers (who have survived some terrible mishap) are killed because they affront the rulers’ prerogative to survival this amounts to an overstatement; it might just as well be that the messenger is presenting proof that the “limitless power of the ruler” is being called into question. &c. It may remain an open question whether or not most (if not all) of such slain messengers bearing bad tidings are, for whatever various reasons, victims of rulers with narcissistic personality disorder.

As for his examples of rulers and his successors, the cases cited are far too limited and historically narrow to provide a basis for associating survival per se.

Forms of Survival

Canetti sets out to cover all of the forms of survival in this section. At the outset, then, my previous anticipation of a spermatozoon as a survivor gets the official nod here.

All the spermatozoa except one perish, either on the way to, or in the immediate vicinity of, the goal. One single seed alone penetrates the egg cell, and this seed can very well be called the survivor. It is, as it were, the leader of all the others and succeeds in achieve what every leader, either secretly or openly, hopes for, which is to survive those he leads. It is to such a survivor, one out of 200 million, that every human being owes his existence (247).

And hers, we might add—Canetti’s casual sexism getting gratingly obnoxious, if only because I just finished a conversation where the doxic loathsomeness of sexism was an important point of the discussion. Meanwhile, as usual, Canetti makes mincemeat of his own distinction. As a strictly biological detail, it is not always that only one sperm survives, so what does that do to his argument. And Jacob only survives Esau (they are twins, recall) because Rebecca actively encourages him to deceive his father. But to call the sperm that penetrates the egg anything resembling a leader in any of the senses Canetti has insisted upon so far is completely inadequate—certainly at no point does the Josephus sperm in the cave of the vagina persuade all the other sperm to commit suicide so that it may survive. In fact, the very kind of ascription of necessity to (completely) blind chance that Canetti indulges here is exactly the narcissist turn—the notion that this sperm had a go-given mission, that it is merely by virtue of survival unique—notice that it is only after the egg has been penetrate that any such sperm could claim such uniqueness. One is not special until after survival has occurred, and only then if you take up the psychotic fantasies of a narcissist—as Josephus does when he tries to justify his behavior years after the fact.

Canetti insists that the hero is the one who goes out of his way to court danger and, by triumphing over it, increase his sense of invulnerability. It may be in his view that a leader can never be a hero, which I yet another garish overstatement; but if a leader can be a hero, then in no way does a sperm court danger in the sense Canetti means. He then conflates the ordinary hero’s killing—which demonstrates its invulnerability by triumphing over others—with pack killings and larger forms of killing, claiming that the higher one is in the hierarchy, the more one arrogates the sole right of survival. The consequence of this is that the general, who does not court danger, gets to feel the most invulnerable—in theory. Without specifying where, somehow along the line the invulnerability that accrues to the hero’s triumph over an individual or multiple foe turns into the heinous trick of the leader, who persuades everyone else to die before him.

There are then survivals of mass destructions: genocides, plagues, catastrophes of various types. In Osborne’s (1993)[6] dubious The Poisoned Embrace, he describes (based upon a controversial theorist’s work) how malaria and syphilis apparently mutually nullify one another. Thus, in the Mediterranean regions of Europe, where malaria and syphilis co-occur normally, syphilis never became a blight. By comparison, in Northern Europe, where malaria is not so common, syphilis quickly grew to epidemic proportions. In this context, the equation sex = death took on a literality, such that those who actually practiced sexual abstinence immensely decreased their risk to this new and ravaging plague. In this way, the Puritans were spared the depredations that others experienced an eventually came to take on the narcissist’s sense of god-inspired uniqueness, crediting themselves with an especial mission in the world—part of which was to annihilate the North American civilizations, &c. What has to be stressed in this is that the Puritans were a small, sectarian bunch so incapable of getting along with others that they had to cross an ocean to get far enough away from people—in other words, they should not be taken as a human norm, particularly in its response to tragedy (such as an epidemic of syphilis).

The idea that we should give any acclaim to those reactionaries who, in the face of human calamity, sink back down into more brutal, backward, or intolerant forms of human activity—I am thinking of the cultists who perpetrated intolerant monotheism on the former Northern Kingdom of Israel or the self-aggrandizing Puritans who set out to destroy the North American civilizations in the name of sexual hygiene or the current fascists of neoliberalism who would sacrifice everything to their god the Almighty dollar—marks them and those shouting such acclaim the genuine enemies of everything worth being called human.

When Canetti writes of more intimate dying, particular of the father vis-à-vis the son: “The man who, more than anyone else, could once order him about is now reduced to silence and helpless, must endure everything which is done to his body” (248), I feel in the presence of unintentional autobiography.

Here the satisfaction in survival results from the relationship between the two protagonists. One who was once all-powerful is now important, his strength extinguished and his lifeless remains at the disposal of the very being who was for many years weak, helpless and entirely in his power (248).

Doubtless, many people will find in this description nothing familiar, not only in any lack of satisfaction at having survived the old tyrant but also simply in the lack of an experience where the father has the pretense of being all-powerful. Not every household is as rigorously patriarchal s that, not even in the United States in 1960 when Canetti was writing. Father may have known best in all kinds of bougie households, and in those households where bougie pretensions were at a steep pitch, but even in those settings that the narrative about the father is that he is “all-powerful” would, in all likelihood, be a polite fiction, and acknowledged as such. In Canetti’s description here, however, my corpse’s helplessness and that my body must now “endure everything” is a fantasy only the living can have—unless of course one wants to take seriously notions of souls, spirits, or whatnot.

The respectful handling of the dead serves at least three purposes: (1) to the extent that any notion of afterlife or spirit is taken seriously, it guards against offenses to one’s reputation after death; (2) it ameliorates by a kind of implicit social contract that once I am dead my wishes will be honored, even though I’m in no way still around to see them fulfilled; (3) socially, it acknowledges the death as a loss to our general cultural sociability, which requires various forms of (ritual) redress. So the body that “endures everything” is either #2 (our own future dead body) or #3 (the social body, that has suffered the loss of a part of itself).

Just as the death of God is very pleasing, because it signals the cessation of the tyrannizing presence, the satisfaction Canetti describes, as a form of vengeance against the previously unjust (all-powerful) being, who could do anything he wanted to the son and who now may have anything done to him by the son, necessarily arises only out of (1) a reaction to previous tyranny or (2) paranoid-schizophrenia and/or a persecution complex, i.e., something akin already to a narcissistic personality disorder.

Canetti points to the fact of merely living a long time as having some prestige in certain cultures. He states that the desire to have a long life is “really” the desire to outlive one’s contemporaries, and says that “the most wholesome embodiment of longevity is the Patriarch, one who can survey many generations of his descendants, but is always imagined alone in his own generation” (249, emphasis in original). Given the loathsomeness of sexism in general, to refer to the patriarch as “the most wholesome embodiment of longevity” marks a new low for Canetti. Although he then goes on to say merely being alive after the point of the already-dead ancestors and “preceding humanity as  whole” (250) should be counted as survival. At which point, the term survivor once again becomes rendered empty and nonsensical at best. It seems a sign of narcissism to imagine that being born later than those annihilated in Pompeii should count as aggrandizing my own sense of survival, etc.

So Canetti’s sudden interjection, “At this point it may be objected that the concept of survival, as I have described it, has long been known under a different name: that of the instinct of self-preservation” (250). As you may see for yourself, this is not at all the question that needs asking at this moment, and Canetti canard on self-preservation is a distraction.

What Canetti discards as feces may be valuable in point of fact. Under the notion of self-preservation, he allows that man must eat and defend himself; “we see it before us rather as if it were a statue, with one hand reaching for food and with the other fend off its enemies. A peaceful creature indeed! Left to itself, it would eat a handful of grass and never do anyone the slightest harm” (250). Canetti then rhetorically asks, “Is there any conception less appropriate to man, more misleading and more ridiculous?” (250); my answer, yes, i.e., the very conception Canetti advances, for one.

Canetti writes, “It is true that man does eat, but not the same food as a cow;” (250)—this would be because Canetti chose an inappropriate illustration when he wrote “grab a handful of grass”; it is a pathetic irony that the word “grass” co-occurs in the same passage where Canetti strawmans his own non-argument. Man’s “way of procuring his prey is cunning, bloodthirsty and strenuous” (250); since when? “There is certainly nothing passive about it” (250); since when, and where? “He does not mildly defend himself, but attacks his enemies as soon as he sense them in the distance” (250); where is this the case, in the outdated books of primatology Canetti seems to think comprise the last word on the very individual, for instance, who is writing his book? “True, he wants to ‘preserve’ himself, but he also simultaneously wants other things which are inseparable from this” (250); at last a true statement, however, Canetti asserts these things are: “he wants to kill so that he can survive others; he wants to stay alive so as not to have others surviving him” (250). Murdoch’s phrase “solitary imaginer” rings loudly here.

Endnotes

[1] It has to further be noted that, given his reference to Patriarchy—the capital P and italics are his—as the most wholesome embodiment of survival, then his use of “man’ as the generic reference for humankind in general becomes very difficult to separate from the sort of chauvinist bigotry often imputed to such usage; if I use “man” it is only to stay true to Canetti’s deployment of it when quoting him, and I do so under protest nonetheless.

[2] All quotations are from Canetti, E. (1981). Crowds and Power (trans. Carol Stewart), 6^th printing. New York: NY: Noonday Press. (paperback).

[3] The ongoing attempt of this heap is to get something out of Canetti’s book, and that of necessity means resorting to the classic sense of the essay, as an exploration, using Canetti’s book as a starting point. I can imagine that the essayistic aspect of this project can be demanding—of patience, time, &c. The point of showing an essay, entertainment value (if any) aside, is first and foremost not to be shy about showing the intellectual scaffolding of one’s exposition as much as possible. This showing, however cantankerous the exposition, affords the non-vanity of allowing others to witness all of the missteps, mistakes, false starts, and the like—not in the interest of merely providing a full record (though some essayists may do so out of vanity or mere thoroughness, scholarly drudgery, or self-involvement) but most so that readers may be exasperated enough by the essayist’s stupidities to correct his or her errors and thus contribute to our collective better human understanding of ourselves.

[4] Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Let this be the distinctive mark of an American, that in cases of commotion he enlists under no man’s banner, but repairs to the standard of the law” ** Quoted from Barber, BR (2002). Constitutional faith, in MC Nussbaum, J. Cohen (ed.)  For love of country? pp. 30–7, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

[5] His actual name was Suyodhana, but he changed it to Duryodhana, which Wikipedia says means literally “hard to conquer”.

[6] Osborne, L. (1993). The poisoned embrace: a brief history of sexual pessimism. 1st American ed. New York: Pantheon Books

NOTES ON THE BHAGAVAD-GĪTĀ: chapter 10 (Vibhūti-Vistara Yoga – Yoga of the Divine Manifestations)

negative theology in metaphysics; positive theology in ethics

This the thirteenth post in a series that memorialize a study by a friend and me of multiple translations of the Bhagavad-Gītā­ (including Prabhupāda’s As It Is edition and commentary)[1] and Satchidananda’s (1988).[2] This is commentary on chapter 10.

Other resources for chapter 10 may be found here, along with the following summary of the chapter (under the title “The Infinite Glories of the Ultimate Truth):

Chapter ten reveals Lord Kṛṣṇa’s exalted position as the cause of all causes. Also specifying His special manifestations and opulences. Arjuna prays to the Lord to describe more of the opulences and the Lord describes those which are most prominent. Thus this chapter is entitled: The Infinite Glories of the Ultimate Truth.

Commentary

This chapter immediately precedes the rather famous chapter where Kṛṣṇa manifests his actual cosmic form, so in effect this is the prelude to that gesture. Logically, it demonstrates how one may infer the Inconceivable by seeing wherever there is excellence in the world (in particular) but, in fact, in everything. With verse X.10, Kṛṣṇa thus introduces the concept of buddhi yoga, the yoga of discrimination. Satchidananda (1988) translates this as: “There are some who are sincerely devoted and worship me simply out of love. I bequeath them buddhi yoga and through this they come to me” (p. 151).[3] Prabhupāda comments of this, “Buddhi-yoga is the process by which one gets out of the entanglement of this material world. The ultimate goal of progress is Kṛṣṇa” (618), remembering Satchidananda’s declaration in chapter 9, the Kṛṣṇa (or liberation) is “peace”—the experience of peace, the attainment of peace, the realization of peace.

Negative Theology in Metaphysics

To characterize buddhi-yoga, or the yoga of discrimination, Satchidananda (1988) employs the familiar example of a wave:

Water appears to be a wave. But the wave after all is nothing but water. If we see the wave only as a wave, and not as water also, then it’s an illusion. We should discriminate: “Yes, I see it as a wave. Because it rises up, I give the name, wave; but it’s the same water rising up.” That’s discrimination—seeing the same essence behind all the names and forms (152).

An objection immediately arises, however: if the wave is just an appearance, why isn’t the water also an appearance? Yes, exactly. Hence, Satchidananda (1988) declares, “Discrimination means you can distinguish between the real and unreal, the permanent and the impermanent. Actually, nothing is unreal. We may think some things are unreal or impermanent” (151–2).

One understands, for the sake of presenting an idea, certain metaphors get resorted to. Thus, he says, “That’s discrimination—seeing the same essence behind all the names and forms” (152, emphasis added), except there can be no question of seeing the essence; we can never see this essence, but only its manifestations. Thus the example of water and wave can be misleading. The notion illustrated is that, despite all of the changes of form that a body of water undergoes, nevertheless there is still the “unchanging” ground of the water itself upon which or because of which all of those changes are possible. So in the same way, despite my manifestation in this form and your manifestation in that form, let us not lose sight of the “unchanging” ground of the “water” itself upon which or because of which all of our various manifestations are possible.

So, perhaps, rather than saying, “I see the wave but I remember the water,” one might say, “I see the water and the wave, and sense or orient toward a third thing that I can never “see” directly”.

However, Satchidananda makes  crucial point.

We all may sit together using different names, appearing in different forms. This is good for functioning on the worldly level. But even as we notice the differences, even while doing different things, at the back of the mind we should be seeing it all as one consciousness: “Why it’s all nothing but the same, expressing itself differently.” ¶ But when everything is seen as only the same consciousness, then there is no fun in life (152).

I am not sure how attentive to his language Satchidananda is being here, but it contains a pitfall, that it also (usefully) illustrates. We may note in the phrase “why it’s all nothing but the same” a sense of negation or deflation. I suggest that this is why he immediately “corrects” himself (supposedly his commentary arose originally from discussions with students) and says “when everything is seen as only the same consciousness, then there is no fun in life.” Sticking with the water and wave example for a moment, I propose that there is a subtle, but extremely important, difference in thinking of all of the waves as “not different” rather than “the same”.[4]

The difference between “same” and “not different” may be illustrated by typical translations of the word ajñana. Most frequently, one encounters this as “ignorance” but it may also be translated as “partial knowledge.” Thus, one may compare the effect of saying, “You are ignorant” about a situation compared to “You have a partial understanding” of a situation. The first seems likely to evoke offense but also may simply seem unconvincing for being inaccurate, while the second hardly can be objected to, because don’t we always have an only partial knowledge of anything? This distinction prevails in the use of “same” and “not different”. If I insist to you that we are the same, even if that manages not to be offensive it will likely remain unconvincing for seeming inaccurate; by contrast, if I insist that we are not different, this can hardly be objected to, because aren’t we all at least in some ways not different? Of course we are different in other ways as well, but the statement is not claim we are not different in every way.

Returning to the water an wave example, to say that all the waves are the same involves invoking their sameness as water; it necessarily requires positing some “essence” that all waves share, despite differences of appearance. By contrast, to say that all waves are “not different” does not need to name, identify, or invoke whatever essence it is that all waves might share. This is where and why the example of water and wave breaks down, as I noted above. In the manifest world, we can see the forest for the trees; we can see the water for the waves—but we cannot see the humanity for the human beings; we must simply assert that it is there and then act accordingly.

I can imagine objections to the assertion that we cannot see the humanity for human beings. I would first say that what is meant in the Bhagavad-Gītā by the “humanity” of the human being—the universally human part of a human being—is the atman, which in other religious circles might be taken to mean soul or spirit. In whatever metaphorical language we want to wrap this atman/soul/spirit, it most assuredly is accorded a literal (metaphysical) reality—it’s not just a metaphor. In the waves and water example, it is as concrete and real as the water—we all are waves and it is out of water that we arise, so focus on the water, and you will be in Kṛṣṇa consciousness, &c.

To say we see the “humanity” in human beings is to claim to know and name “human nature”. Those who like to have a brutal and cynical view of the world—as simply their way of making a living in the world at the expense of others—see the “humanity” in human beings in our “animality”. In this case, the water is pure and adulterated instinct, sometimes sublimated, sometimes not, but it’s taken to be every bit as concrete as the atman/soul/spirit in religious or spiritual circles.

I don’t think that most Indian philosophy makes the mistake, in using the wave and water example, of implying that the water is real and the waves are unreal; thus, Satchidananda is careful to say, “Actually, nothing is unreal. We may think some things are unreal or impermanent” (152); one may add, keeping in mind the illusion of distinctions that propose the distinction between “unreal” and “real’ in the first place, that nothing in those terms is real either; that we may think some things are real or permanent. Like waves and water, unreal and real is just another description, is another example, of the notion being described—which is that as soon as we believe we have conceived of the inconceivable, we may be certain that we have not. Not even the word “Inconceivable” is correct.

Saying that whatever I conceive of as the Inconceivable is not it does not mean we should not make the attempt; in fact, we cannot not make the attempt. It’s the condition of conditioned beings to experience the illusion of distinctions. The injunction, then, is never to be deluded into thinking that one’s conceptions of the Inconceivable (whether as Kṛṣṇa, Viṣṇu, or minor demigods like Ahaḥ, YHVH, or Jesus) are true or factual. In many Christian settings, this gets expressed as not putting god in a box, but even to scribe omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence already puts god in a box. It is more accurate to say that the Inconceivable is neither omniscient nor non-omniscient.

What this all points to is what was once called negative theology, which is simply the idea that anything one might say about the divine can only be limited, limiting, and thus not true. It’s a perfectly rational position to hold, when one is speaking of the divine in its ineffable, unknowable, inconceivable state—all of which attributes one may say are of course limited, limiting, and thus not true; I would have to say, rather (risking a massive appearance of paradox, though it is not paradoxical at all) that the Inconceivable is neither inconceivable nor not inconceivable.

More simply, one may always say what the Inconceivable (the divine) is not. It’s worth remember that a most consistently used word in Indian philosophy for “the Inconceivable” is the word Brahman, which simply translates as “that”. What are you talking about: “that”. You can imagine the finger pointing along with the statement—a human being pointing in some direction away from herself. What is the Inconceivable? That. That pointing finger points in a direction, but could point in any direction without contradiction or paradox, but what is significant is that the gesture points: it orients another person (and the one pointing) in a certain direction—not to look at anything concrete, because “that” is not perceptible, of course, but is still “that” way.

All of the words of Indian philosophy—words like Kṛṣṇa, Viṣṇu, Ganges, rope—exactly function like this pointing; the finger that points is not the point, the name/word used is not the point, the direction pointed is not the point: it is the reorienting that the pointing affects that is the point. To see the water for the waves points to orienting in the direction of the Inconceivable for the conceivable, for orienting toward “that” from “this”.

This is the sense that I mean “negative theology in metaphysics”. At its simplest, it is a point of view that acknowledges and operates from an understanding: everything anyone says about anything arises from an only partial understanding of things; it is not true.

I suspect that all of the violence in the world, of every sort, arises because people take what they say about other people and the world to be true—you may provide for yourself your own litany of examples to support this contention, but it would be even more valuable to examine how taking the things you say to be true dominates your own life, if not sows havoc in your life and others’.

As one note before going on, however: it is clear that the religions of intolerant monotheism absolutely operate strictly from an understanding that everything said about “God” are true. This alone makes them a partial understanding and, both historically and presently, one of the most violent, socially destructive, and misleading. It means they’ve pulled a bait-and-switch, substituting their idea of god for God.

Positive Theology in Ethics

I read a rabbinical commentary once that greater spiritual merit accrues to obeying a commandment when it is in the negative form “thou shalt not …” than when it states the aim in positive terms (like “give to charity”). In contrast, the Bhagavad-Gītā advises (certainly in some problematic ways and arguably to an oppressive degree) “do your dharma (you duty),” where one’s duty is heavily prescribed by all kinds of cultural requirements. I’ve discussed the ins and outs of this extensively (here and here); the point is not to defend the specifics of the cultural injunctions, but only to point out the difference in orientation, where a very vast amount of Indian religiosity is tied up in implicit and explicit “thou shalts”. Neither do I pretend there are no biblical or quranic “thou shalts” and no Indian “thou shalt nots”; both world traditions are far too large to only emphasize one and not the other.

Whatever other advantages accrue to a “thou shalt not,” one of the downsides of framing things this way is precisely its open-endedness.  I have lived with a housemate who tried to excuse bad behavior or tried to mitigate his degree of bad behavior by pointing out he had not acted worse. The “thou shalt not” paradigm fails to address this. Thus, one might attempt to mitigate “thou shalt not forget to take out the trash” by claiming, “I didn’t forget last week.”  Similarly, “thou shalt not” takes no account of those who are not tempted. If there is an injunction, “though shalt not masturbate,” the person who is not confronted by the temptation to do so accrues spiritual merit by not doing what she had no intention of doing in the first place. These two factors could be combined: if someone said I was immoral in carrying on an adulteress affair, I could reply, “At least I didn’t murder anyone.”

Of course, we can call this kind of shiftiness morally duplicitous and disingenuous, but it is made possible because merely the absence of a behavior is said to accrue (spiritual or social) merit. If there were 500 thou shalt nots, one of which was “thou shalt not rape children,” and you obeyed all 500 except that one, you would be more morally ahead of the game than the man who obeyed all 500 thou shalt nots except for “thou shalt not mix wool and flax” and “thou shalt not eat meat and milk together” &c. There are, of course, other social factors—including criminal proceedings—to deal with this sort of moral finagling, but other correctives are necessary precisely because something like a negative theological approach has been taken to ethical (social/moral) behavior in culture. Rather than specifying what shall be done (with respect to moral behavior), what is not to be done is specified.

Elaborate a rule, people will begin to find ways around it. Specifying what you do not want can help to avoid this. The positive injunction “harm none” may end up being made more ambiguous or disingenuously flexible by those who believe they need to harm than “though shalt not kill,” but it is also patently clear that “thou shalt not kill” equally gets evaded by states with their wars and death penalties, and individuals with their lynch mobs, vigilance committees, and religious delusions. At least in a comparison of “thou shalt not kill” and “harm none” as preeminently central social injunctions for people getting along in the world, it seems to me there would be more and continuous value from keeping always in mind “harm none”. Of course, such regulation of my behavior  avoids the accumulation of negative karma for me, but more importantly it places the integrity of the social world before any vanity on my part that I murdered no one today. “Thou shalt not kill” compliments me for refraining from wiping out a bunch of people today, which puts the selfishness of my ego above the very sociability that makes my ego into an entity in the first place.

Having said only this could hardly suffice to address such a far-reaching issue, but I do not think it is incidental that Indian philosophy maintains a negative theological emphasis as regards metaphysical matters and a positively theological emphasis on ethical (social/moral) issues. In the case of metaphysics, it says, “all we may all have is an only partial understanding of metaphysical matters, so let’s not fight about it.” Intolerant monotheism, by contrast, says, “we have the truth of metaphysical things, and those who do not agree are damned”—whether this means I will go out of my way to exterminate the unbeliever or not. At the very least, I will leave you to your damnation; if you come around to my way eventually (Christian, Jewish, or Islamic) that’s your business, and I may have obligations at that point. Indian philosophy says, “Whatever you decide on those matters, we are all in this together.” That sense of we, I say again, arises from a negative theological standpoint that asserts “we are not different” rather than a positively theological position that asserts “we are (must be) the same.”

Conclusion

If we take metaphysics as involving what we hold to be most desirable (in culture) and ethics as involving how we act toward others and ourselves in light of metaphysics, then whatever gets named god as the ultimate good and whatever gets named right as the most essential orientation to take toward other people may be said to form the central core of how one lives in the world for a given culture.

Under intolerant monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and its sects), this may be symbolized in the phrase: “Our god is true; thou shalt not kill”—, i.e., a dominant tendency toward positive theology in metaphysics coupled with negative theology in ethics. Most Indian philosophy, at least as expressed in the Bhagavad-Gītā,  may be symbolized in the phrase: “Everyone has a partial understanding of god, so let’s harm none about it”—i.e., a dominant tendency toward negative theology in metaphysics couple with a positive theology in ethics. Or, if you prefer: “our understanding of what is best for society is true; thou shalt not kill” and “everyone has a partial understanding of what is best for society, so let’s harm none about it.”

If we actually take seriously these paradigms and live them with respect to other people, if we don’t just fuck around and make exceptions for ourselves whenever convenient for the sake of getting by, then the best that can be achieved in the case of intolerant monotheism (when other people fail to convert to my view) is that I pity them (as damned), whereas in the case of the latter the worst that can be expected (if they refuse to come around to my view) is I pity them (as deluded).  The worst of the former is genocide an totalitarianism; the best o the latter is genuine tolerance and social pluralism.

Unfortunately, cultures of India don’t always achieve their best; luckily, the cultures of intolerant monotheism don’t always achieve their worst.

Endnotes

[1] All references to this commentary will refer henceforth to the online PDF of the text and commentary found at http://ebooks.iskcondesiretree.info/pdf/00_-_Srila_Prabhupada/Bhagavad_Gita_As_It_Is.pdf

[2] Satchidananda (1988). The living Gita: the complete Bhagavad Gita, Buckingham, VA: Integral Yoga Publications.

[3] Prabhupāda (1972), under the chapter title “The Opulence of the Absolute,” translates this as: “To those who are constantly devoted to serving Me with love, I give the understanding by which they can come to me” (p. 617).  This does not differ a great deal from Satchidananda’s (1988) translation or commentary on this verse. In Prabhupāda’s purport to this verse (below), the second paragraph frames the major types of yoga; and the usefulness of this distinction aside, I nevertheless question whether buddhi-yoga should be equated with bhakti-yoga:

In this verse the word buddhi-yogam is very significant. We may remember that in the Second Chapter the Lord, instructing Arjuna, said that He had spoken to him of many things and that He would instruct him in the way of buddhi-yoga. Now buddhi-yoga is explained. Buddhi-yoga itself is action in Kṛṣṇa consciousness; that is the highest intelligence. Buddhi means intelligence, and yoga means mystic activities or mystic elevation. When one tries to go back home, back to Godhead, and takes fully to Kṛṣṇa consciousness in devotional service, his action is called buddhi yoga. In other words, buddhi-yoga is the process by which one gets out of the entanglement of this material world. The ultimate goal of progress is Kṛṣṇa. People do not know this; therefore the association of devotees and a bona fide spiritual master are important. One should know that the goal is Kṛṣṇa, and when the goal is assigned, then the path is slowly but progressively traversed, and the ultimate goal is achieved.

When a person knows the goal of life but is addicted to the fruits of activities, he is acting in karma-yoga. When he knows that the goal is Kṛṣṇa but he takes pleasure in mental speculations to understand Kṛṣṇa, he is acting in jñāna-yoga. And when he knows the goal and seeks Kṛṣṇa completely in Kṛṣṇa consciousness and devotional service, he is acting in bhakti-yoga, or buddhi-yoga, which is the complete yoga. This complete yoga is the highest perfectional stage of life.

A person may have a bona fide spiritual master and may be attached to a spiritual organization, but still, if he is not intelligent enough to make progress, then Kṛṣṇa from within gives him instructions so that he may ultimately come to Him without difficulty. The qualification is that a person always engage himself in Kṛṣṇa consciousness and with love and devotion render all kinds of services. He should perform some sort of work for Kṛṣṇa, and that work should be with love. If a devotee is not intelligent enough to make progress on the path of self-realization but is sincere and devoted to the activities of devotional service, the Lord gives him a chance to make progress and ultimately attain to Him (617–8).

[4] I explored this distinction in a previous post, and an example may be more confusing than helpful but: but imagine for a moment you and I are having an argument, a squabble about this or that. If, in an attempt to mitigate this argument, I suddenly insist, “Look, we want the same thing here,” that has a certain rhetorical appeal and might work. But a problem with such a claim is exactly obvious in the fat that we are arguing; if we were the same, we wouldn’t be arguing; it’s exactly that, at this moment about this issue, we are different that we are arguing. So, in that context, that we are “the same” may not resonate very well. What the statement is pointing at is that there is something “thing” between us which we both want—it’s the wanting that is the same—but that we are coming at that wanting from different directions—that’s where the difference and argument arise. And so, you might say something like, “Look, we’re not so different here.” On the one hand, we are obviously different, or else we would be agreeing and not arguing, but we are also not different, in that we are both wanting after the same thing. Both statements, “we want the same thing here” and “look, we’re not so different” point to a kind of “middle ground” between labeling ourselves 100% the same or 100% different. But this example has the defect of assuming that our “wanting” cane be made “the same”. I want the last piece of pie; you want the last piece of piece. In this case, saying, “We want the same thing” is true and only makes the problem worse. You want to take the pie from me, and me from you. I’m hungry and greedy, and now I imagine you as hungry an greedy as well. Or, if I say, “Look, we’re no different,” now I’m saying, “We’re both greedy and hungry”. You’re greedy and hungry in your way and me in mine, but I can feel a greater sense of solidarity for you at least to the extent that we are sharing an urge. It seems a bit strange or paradoxical, but it’s as if saying “we’re the same” creates less of a sense of “we” than saying “we are not different”. Ultimately, I don’t think this is a paradox at all. To say “we are the same” presupposes that I have drawn a conclusion about myself and then isolated the same features in you. So in the final analysis, there is still (more distinctly) me and you. Whereas, when I say, “we’re not different,” I am not specifying in any way whatsoever what qualities I have that you share; the “we” of “we’re not different” seems to do  better job of creating a more experienced sense of a real “we” that encompasses both of us.