A young Prince and his trusty Servant set out to seek their fortune. At night they come to a hut in the woods. A young girl invites them in but warns them Grandma is a Witch so don’t, you know, touch anything.
Grandma is very polite and tends the Prince with all kinds of goodies which he wisely refuses and so they make it through the night. At dawn, as the Prince rides off, the Witch comes hurrying out and grabs a hold of the Servant who is still adjusting his saddle, forcing into his hand a foaming vial of something vile….
If you stick your tongue out in Tibet you’re being ever so polite by demonstrating that you are not the incarnation of a wicked ninth century king, Lang Darma, who had a black tongue. If you stick your tongue out in the West you’re being rude or suggestive.
The reason you take instant like or dislikes to other folk is because their gestures say everything about them. The eyes are windows of the soul because the look which goes with the gesture speaks volumes in spite of whatever else you might be saying at the time.
Language is to gesture what pink mayonnaise is to lobster thermidor. And if the mayo is slightly off all kinds of strange taste sensations will ensue.
”Give this to your master,” insists the Witch, thrusting the horrible brew at the Servant. He accidentally spills it on his horse which promptly dies a terrible death. Panic stricken he runs off to tell his master what has happened. When they return to retrieve the saddle a raven is pecking at the dead horse. The servant grabs the bird to make a broth for their dinner and gives it to the innkeeper to prepare at the next tavern they find.
When what’s being said and what’s being done are out of whack dissonance is created. Strangely, whether we are damaged by it or can have a good belly laugh at events seems to depend on where you are in the room at the time. When the dissonance is on stage and declaring itself, it’s hilarious. When its hidden in the wings, it’s poison.
Little did our heroes realize that this tavern was a secret den of a dozen cut-throats who then capture them and steal their dinner whilst dreaming up fancy deaths for the unfortunate pair. Luckily, the poisoned horse poisoned the bird, which now poisones the thieves and all twelve keel over before ever even getting around to pudding.
When dissonance is named it’s fun. When it’s hidden, it’s a killer. When someone is visible with their idiosyncrasies it’s disarming, when they act them out it’s dismembering.
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield made his career out of juxtaposing mafioso hard man with eternal anxious tie smoothing. Ronnie Corbet made his out of being a small man in a big chair. Sarah Bernhardt exploits the mismatch of being utterly vulnerable yet totally street wise. Homer Simpson is the confident fool.
Though the dissonance is unexpected it’s upfront and happening to someone else. There are several degrees of protection. When the dissonance is concealed or denied it becomes poison because you must forgo the integrity of your own vantage point and bend yourself out of shape to accommodate it. This destroys our connection to the natural world and our instinctual selves represented by the poisoned horse.
In the next town the motif of the Evil Witch has evolved somewhat into Wicked Queen, thanks to the Prince and his servant managing to stay alive, even if only by a happy fault. This Queen is still pretty toxic but she is at least willing to negotiate and offers her hand in marriage to anyone who has a riddle she cannot solve. If she can answer it you get to be boiled alive and eaten. At least there are rules.
The Prince asks, ‘What killed none yet killed twelve?”
She can’t get the answer, so she steals into his room at night hoping he will betray himself in his sleep. The Prince is waiting for her and tells her the secret whilst quietly hiding her cloak. She is too excited to notice the loss and next day claims to have discovered the answer. The Prince responds by telling everyone what happened, producing the cloak as proof, and so her game is up.
Deception loses its power as soon as it is shown the light of day.
A riddle is a puzzle that has to be solved not by cleverness or guile but by insight, not by additional information but by shifting your mind set. Riddle and poison come together in our world with the perplexing dissonance of why it is that we pollute the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink. Like a riddle, it doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems impossible to get your head around the murky dissonance of planetary destruction in the name of progress.
As with the Queen’s secret deceit, there is something still unstated in the mix which stops us collectively acting upon what we know.
The clue is in the kind of reality created by toxic dissonance, the double message of, ‘make yourself comfy while I brew up a nice cup of venom’. The mind set of a split reality does more than live happily with contradiction. The world itself is split. There is the world in which I am a gracious host and then another in which I want to kill you; and never the twain shall meet.
We escape feelings of dissonance…
“by splitting the contradictory feelings so that one person is only loved, another one only hated … the good mother and the wicked stepmother in fairy tales”. Melanie Klien
A two tier society pretending to be democracy is a terrible toxic riddle. When we split humanity into Us and Them, we also split the world into ‘our world’ and ‘their world’. If the toxins we create pollute the earth, it doesn’t matter, so long as it’s not my bit of it. As soon as it is a l’autre cote de la riviere, it ceases to exist.
This attitude mirrors the individual defenses of early childhood in which baby has had to lodge its unwanted toxins in another, from which it may then be split off so as never to have to deal with them. It becomes someone else’s problem despite sharing the same roof.
This defensive capacity to split reality so that discordant truths can continue to co-exist but without jarring entails toxins from my world being exported into yours.
The riddle, ‘what is it that destroys its nest in the name of self interest?’ has, as its answer, not Homo Imbecelicus, who is too dumb not to shit on his own doorstep but Homo Discordus who is under the delusion he’s crapping on someone else’s.
The petrochemical chief exec is not polluting his rivers. He is polluting yours. You might think your river and his river are the same thing. You could draw attention to the fact they are named the same and run through the same country… but split reality chews logic for breakfast. Its your river and your problem.
So we’ll put the pipe line through the Indian reservation because that’s not God’s Green Earth. It’s in the alternate reality of alternate facts. And therefor not my problem.
When the fragile narcissist gets super insecure it’s not enough to be designating shithole countries, whole nations to dissociate from, as if they exists in some faraway nebula. The weakest leadership requires more than scapegoating to cohere. One’s own members must be attacked and made Other.
Whilst its comforting to be able to export plastic recycling to Bangladesh for child slaves to pick through, it’s less effort to identify the Them within and just go dump it on their block, even if their block is in your town. Splitting is like that, you feel safe on a sinking ship just because your bit of it is still dry.
The fracking debacle at Flint has left that town without water. Stokes County in North Carolina reports cancer clusters in proximity to coal ash ponds. Residents of Vicente Rivera in California have recently been exposed to Pyrifos after a mandarin grove was sprayed with the insecticide. The skies over north Dakota are black with natural gas flares that no longer require regulation.
What do all these places have in common? They are home to Them. They are Hispanic, Black, Indigenous communities. Sixty eight percent of African Americans live within thirty miles of a power station. The pipeline at Standing Rock was pushed ahead not because of sovereign right but precisely because of the tacit understanding that the land is Indian and can therefor be polluted with impunity in what can only be described as environmental racism.
Of course there is some splash back. White kids drink Aspartame just as much as black kids and Fukushima salmon aren’t fussy about whose table they land on. But that doesn’t matter either because the next generation are also Them.
At one time our world was also theirs. One day son, all this will be yours. It doesn’t seem to work like that anymore. The alienation required to make dust bowls of other lands has made deserts within our own just as the disaffection necessary to starve children half a world away has consequences for the emotional nourishment of those you tuck in at night.
”You say you love your children above all else yet you are stealing their future. Our biosphere is being destroyed so that rich people can live in luxury. If the solutions are so impossible to find maybe we should change the system itself.” Greta Thunberg (16)
We are used to individual instances of parents ‘dumping’ emotional toxins on their kids. This is increasingly assuming collective expression and is being acted out on a grand scale. After all, what are we destroying if not their legacy?
What makes us turn on our own? Why would we trash our own garden and grain store? It is the fact of our children that makes us custodians of the land. If we behave to the contrary what does that imply about our commitment to future generations?
So there is some toxic contract in these collective family dynamics. The clue to unpicking the riddle is in what’s shared between the next generation and the minority or indigenous group; which is that they are close to Nature, a world of primal unity against which consumer culture has not only set Itself apart, having put aside childish things, but also secretly envies and yearns for, enough to want to spoil everyone else’s tomorrow.
