🐵 "We are alive only to the degree of which we are willing to be annihilated.” –Glennon Doyle (Untamed, 2020)
🙉 Neil Young, “Hey Hey, My My (Out Of The Blue)” (Rust Never Sleeps, 1979)
🙈 Ghulam Rasool Santosh, “neo-tantric” painter, unknown reference
Pierre Clastres, anthropologist, showed in the 70’s that societies can be understood from what they reject the most. He described the Guayakis of Paraguay as a society against the State, a society whose entire social body is orientated against the emergence of a central and coercive institution. The character of the leader does exist but it only possesses the prestige of speech –it is an archetypal, theatrical chief. Defining our humanity as opposed to their animality is a central theme for most societies. More often than not, people’s names match with the word that refers to “human”.
When I was 13, I decided stop seeing my father because I did not want to become like him. I thought I looked like him too much. If I was not to stop this relationship, I was well on my way to become its carbon copy. By rejecting him, I thought I would be safe.
At the individual level (which contains “dual” by the way), are we ourselves what we persist being against? An exemple. Being critical of the system –I’m not immune to it– can become a vital need, in which case, the existence of who opposes it is conditioned by the existence of the said system, not by its end. Every dream aims its annihilation. But that’s another story. Back to the initial question: are we that we criticise? When we express irrefutable arguments in order to question domination, we use the same hegemonic tools used by the power that we aim to criticise. Activists are thus potentially the monsters against which they fight. The problem initially comes from creating monsters. When we dehumanise someone under the cover of an hypothetical greater humanity, we are actually using the same way of thinking that has allowed the other to become an enemy in the first place.
Fourteen years later, after a few nights sitting with ayahuasca, I offered my father to see each other. We met Place Saint Michel in Bordeaux. He talked to me during various hours. And I just told him I forgave him. Forgiveness was not intended to him but for my own self. This is because only forgiveness frees. Forgiveness is the ability to see yourself in someone else and to accept your own frailties. I forgave him because I could see the human beyond his wounds and the woundings he created. It does not make him a better man, it just makes him be seen the way he is. I never saw him again after that.
We would probably be better by becoming friends with our opponents and by observing the darkness inside us. When we blame someone, we often project our own shadow. It’s by differentiation –by seeing clearly the other inside us– that we may integrate the different pieces of ourselves. The other is the only possibility of knowing yourself: the other is first of all what’s alien to you; then it is what can bring to self-alienation; and thus to reconciliation with yourself. “In love the separate does still remain”, Hegel writes, “but as something united and no longer as something separate (…)”. In Mesoamerican thought, there is no opposition either between dual pairs but an effort to weave together what is seemingly separated: sky and underwater are united by the line of horizon drawn by the hills and mountains. Together they make up the Whole, what’s complete.
To forgive an old enemy is just the first step to integrate the parts of ourself that we recognize in the other, may them be hated or admired. But in love, which could potentially be the place where manifests the most the possibility of triggering trust that allows oneself to be what he·she is, everything goes wrong. At least for me. I think this is because it is only in those intimate relationships that exists the potential to work deeply on childhood wounds. Me, I’m prone to faceplant in walls, the ground, blocks, wooden beams, it depends. The first time, it was straight to the ground, a skate-board accident: two small head traumas, a broken shoulder and 5 days in the hospital. And a huge black eye. When I went back to work at the lab, one of the comments was “You should think of changing boyfriend.” It wasn’t that far from reality.
One of the issues of the contemporary world, at least the way I understand it, is a desire of eternal youth, that matches with an inability of transcending the wounded child inside us. Fear of abandonment, of not being enough, of rejection, etc. If we have been successful at protecting ourselves from suffering, this firstly means that we have escaped from it. And it will end up killing us if we keep avoiding it. Because the soul wants to heal. The wound will forever come back until we turn around and consciously decide that it is not a monster to hide from but a precious treasure to seek for. We have to learn how to dive into the void –on the other side of it is our vocation. And I’m not making up anything here : void and vocation come from the same Latin stem.
I’m not entirely sure of having understood what my soul aims to heal. The threshold is thin between transcending your ego and hurting yourself; respecting the other and disrespecting yourself; transforming and destroying yourself. In two years, I fell from a wall and landed on my face, a beam fell on my nose and broke it. My dog got her skull pushed inside. A few weeks ago, I hit a wall with my car. Even my car is starting talking to me. The nearest village from the accident was called… The Paradise.
Death and love, that which creates desire and generates fear are the two poles in between which life happens. They are two feelings working like magnets –attraction and repulsion. For the Ancient Greek, Eros is the god of love, one of the only gods who does not procreate by the way. Eros is the son of Chaos or Night who procreates him with Darkness. Eros’ brother is Thanatos who is the archetype of death. Eros and Thanatos, love and death, are the existential couple, because they provide the thrill of feeling alive. They demonstrate how to sublimate what could potentially annihilate. Thanatos incarnates not only one’s destruction but one’s dissolution thanks to what is alien –the unknowable, the unfathomable, or the other. Disintegrating a little bit is not dying. The goal is not to reach the bottom, but to open oneself to the possibility of radical change brought by each encounter with what’s different. Following Joseph Campbell paraphrasing Nietzsche, “Be careful, lest in casting out your devil, you cast out the best thing that’s in you.”
In physics, annihilation refers to the meeting point between a particle and its anti-particle, from which they produce energy and/ or other particles. In other words, annihilation = creation.
We often talk about fossil energy without necessarily knowing where it comes from. During the Carboniferous era appeared the first big bark trees made of lignin. But the mushroom who facilitates the disintegration of lignin and the insects who help rot did not exist yet. The Earth was soon covered by dead trees who did not decompose. And it is this non-destroyed matter, this interruption in the cycle of decomposition and renewal which produced the fossilised matter our extractivist and capitalist culture depends on today.
To identify an object industrially produced from an original artwork is the defect, the thing that ought not to be here and that makes the creation unique. A defect may thus well be the greatest quality –it is as if the seeming lack of something which provides value. Without breach, no repair is possible. Without wound, no healing. This abyss is what gives depth to all that remains. From hole to whole. From this crack light can pass. May this solstice be the consecration of the darkness from which daylight will emerge again.
Some of this post’s sources:
Michael Meade’s “Living Myth” podcast who brillantly tells mythological stories in order to inform our reality
the interview of Sophie Strand in November 2022 with “For the Wild” podcast where I got the fossil energy explanation from and where she links, amongst other very interesting things, love and the sane process of altering