Month: February 2019

A Special Kind of Madness.

I went to a posh white supremacist public school. Its main lesson was in power and how to abuse it. This began with your own abuse and debasement, ‘in order to build you up and create character’.

The new boys had the great honor of being ‘fags’, tending the eighteen year old prefects, warming toilet seats on a winter’s morning, sucking dick as needed, hanging off the hook at the back of his door for an hour..

Of course, you could rat. But then your life would go from being a living hell to something far worse. There was a suspicious death, a few slit wrists, several disappearances….

and so we swore on our mother’s graves that we would never be like that when we were seniors. We would be different. And yet, and yet, the overwhelming feeling upon passing between the great school gates on the first day of my senior year, raising my straw boater as required, was a rush of power and pleasure… Now it was my turn.

I had become one of them.

People tend to think of corruption in material terms. It is the financial shenanigans or the sexual scandal which catch our attention. But there are some very specific ways in which excessive amounts of executive power do a great deal more than make you drunk. Drunkenness passes. More dangerous is the clinical condition bound to overtake even the most rounded personality when it begins to feel appointed by God…

along with the urgent need to project vulnerability and torment on some third party.

To that end both History and Tabloid are littered with mad kings, and not a few mad queens. The salutary tale of Empress Messalina, auntie of Roman emperor Nero, will tell what curious shapes such inflation can take.

Messalina was true to the homicidal traditions of the Julian family, bumping off several nieces and a good few senators along the way, with failed attempts against her sister-in-law Agrippina who eventually did her in before being taken out by Nero. So, nothing too out of the ordinary.

But Messalina had a double life. She might have been Empress by day but she spent her nights in the whore house. According to the Roman scribe Suetonius, she had a sex competition with the top prostitute of the city, which she apparently won with twenty five men in a day. The detail which concerns us is Suetonius’ throw away line that she then went home unsatisfied….

Messalina’s story is not simply one of privileged immorality, though it’s the salacious details which are bound to grab attention. Here is someone who must have been experiencing profound emptiness to go to such extraordinary lengths .. and still fail in her endeavors.

Meantime her husband Claudius is trying to fill his emptiness by gorging on stuffed hummingbirds. Nephew Nero is gorging on young boys he likes to have fucked to death which I suppose he thought was a shade more wicked than great-grandfather Tiberius who only threw the children he’d raped over a cliff.

What’s the point of that? How can you have fun without blood?

Rubbing shoulders with the Gods leads to all kinds of trouble. Not least of these is Paranoid Anxiety. You’d think that the inflation and omnipotence of being a Majesty would be an ample shield against anything as petty as unnamed fears or delusions of persecution and yet Messalina’s privileged life was seeped in subterfuge and plot.

Freud associates paranoia with suppressed aggression, Klein with unconscious envy; but you have to wonder, in addition to the torturous childhoods many a tyrant endures, just what the fallout of being divinely appointed might be…

For Narcissistic Entitlement to work you have to be at odds with those who are not. More to the point, you have to sell out your own common clay in the process, the ordinary self which identifies with others and with the land while still having its own point of view, which is able to keep company and share togetherness whilst still forging a unique path through the jungle.

When you are Divinely Appointed you have to trade in Belonging for the privilege. The problem with this is that you can own the castle and even the ground its built on but if you don’t belong, none of it can be enjoyed.

which is going to feel like someone is out to get you… or that some hidden hand has taken what is rightfully yours….enough to induce homicidal fury..

Meantime the organic unfolding of the Self must be derailed for the feeling of entitlement to be maintained. So, not only your redeeming ordinariness but also your unique potential has to be projected out into the world where it comes at you, if not as destiny, then as fate.

For Messalina and her exalted family, the paranoia inducing projection is eventually so great that a shooting star is taken as an oracle to mean that an assassination of some mighty person is about to take place. Of course, all the mighty persons want to make damn sure the prophecy is not about them so they become agents of prophecy instead, the right hand of the Gods. Everyone winds up dead except Nero, who will soon turn his blade on himself…

having run out of family.

”People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ C G Jung

Facing your own soul has a prerequisite, ordinariness. For want of this workaday humility, being one amongst many, what Klein calls ‘the depressed position’ there is no sense of a vessel to contain the Self, now compelled into the role of a vengeful fiend visiting humiliation on you instead.

Both Nero and Messalina are compelled to act out their common clay in lieu of its integration. Nero tops his auntie’s whore house sexploits by publicly getting some strapping lads to have their way with him as if he were a common slave. He would give performances dressed as a lowly bard… make sure you applaud just right if you feel brave enough to go and watch… you might wind up becoming the entertainment.

Be careful what you ask for. To ‘have everything’ can constitute a loss of soul, the becoming of a hungry ghost, paranoid and insatiable, poor in apparent wealth, a victim behind the safety of castle walls.


Truth will Out.

You have the right to remain silent…

Isn’t it curious.. the first thing agents of law enforcement do upon your arrest is to remind you of the human tendency to blurt out a confession. It is as though, against all the combined forces of your better judgment, including the instinct for survival, you harbored a traitor hell bent on dobbing you in.

And you do…

Conscience.

Having your Miranda rights read to you stems from the case of one Ernesto Miranda who confessed to kidnapping and rape charges while in custody. His lawyers sought to overturn his conviction after they learned during a cross-examination that Miranda wasn’t told he had the right to be protected from self incrimination.

In fact the halls of jurisprudence are filled with examples of people being their own worst enemies. An episode of Judge Judy has the defendant angrily condemn himself while the plaintiff tallies the contents of her stolen purse.

‘Keys, ten dollars, a driver’s license..’

‘There was no driver’s license in the purse!’ he yells out. But… how could he know that unless he had taken the purse? The whole case lasts under a minute.

More serious is the example of Robert Durst, subject of the documentary, ‘The Jinx’, who pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and looked as though he might be headed for acquittal until he took a bathroom break and forgot his mike was still on,

‘There you are. You are caught. What the hell did I do? Why, killed them all of course.’

He tried to wriggle out of it.. if only he had not also kindly supplied the police with a sample of his handwriting at the scene of the crime he might have gotten clean away…

Throughout the debacle of the Russia Collusion you see one conspirator after another inadvertently putting his foot in it, all the way from Trump calmly admitting on live TV that he fired James Comey to obstruct his investigation, through Rudy Giuliani saying, ‘I never said there was no collusion., ‘ to Roger Stone giving the Nixon salute on the courthouse steps after his indictment, a gesture which means the opposite of the plea he had just submitted to the judge.

Literature has a number of famous examples, the best of which is Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘Tell Tale Heart’. A man commits a murder and has gotten away with it.. The police are walking away….

‘‘ Suddenly I could bear it no longer. I pointed at the boards and cried, “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him. But why does his heart not stop beating?! Why does it not stop!?”

In ancient times we have the story of King Midas who was cursed with ass’s ears. He tried to keep it a secret. Nobody knew but his barber who whispered the secret into the ground and buried it there, but reeds grew up and as the wind blew between them the secret was teased into the breeze…..

How does this happen? Shakespeare explains..

” An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d, burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage: So of concealed sorrow may be said; Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage: But when the heart’s attorney once is mute, the client breaks, as desperate in his suit.” Venus and Adonis.

Something in us defies our own best efforts to lead an easier life. In mythology this is embodied by the dreadful Furies, three dark goddesses in the service of Hades who met out justice and rectify any imbalance in it’s scales.

What this means is that Conscience is not a part of you. It is an autonomous complex with its own agenda. It cares not a hoot for conscious intention or self preservation. Given space and time they have their way and find some form of expression, perhaps in moments of crisis or moral jeopardy.

‘‘All men are liars, certainly. I just let them sit there and lie…. then they begin to tell the truth.” Jung (quoted by Elizabeth Sargeant)

A curious detail to do with the Furies is that the three goddesses have four collective names (Furies, Erinyes, Eumenides, Semnai). They are representatives of what the Alchemists call ‘the problem of three and four’. Three into four won’t go and so the problem of three and four is an expression of the difficulty of bringing the opposites of consciousness and the Unconscious together. They could equally have called it the problem of oil and water, how to find common ground or some kind of bridge between worlds.

Conscience is one such bridge because the Furies are messengers as well as dispensers of justice. They answer directly to Hades and so if they turn up on your doorstep it’s because Hades wants a word. Their retribution is also a form of communication.

Fortunately, the Furies also take orders from Persephone who has a tad more bedside manner and so their justice tends to be of the poetic variety, something you might learn from as well as being left to dangle.

Dying of a heart attack, James Washington of Tennessee told police that he had “to get something off my conscience”. He revealed that he had killed a woman 17 years earlier. The Furies arranged for his miraculous recovery to full health, just in time for his new 51-year jail sentence for murder.

In ancient Greece, Orestes was driven mad by the Furies for killing his mother Clytemnestra, something he was required to do by ancient law since she killed his father Agamemnon who then had to be avenged. Orestes appeals to Athena who eventually acquits him but she asks the Furies to stay on and be patrons of the city.

The goddess of Wisdom understands humanity needs its sense of guilt because it has within it the power to transform omnipotence into a sense of human proportion. Guilt is necessary for the integration of the personality. It makes us aware of limitation, of the possibility of being and doing wrong without which self awareness is impossible. In fact guilt can protect us from….

“a disturbing form of narcissistic personality where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized” H Rosenfeld.

As for Ernesto Miranda, though his case was set aside by the Supreme Court ruling, he was retried and sent to jail. After being released, he was fatally stabbed in a bar fight. His suspected killer was read his Miranda rights and didn’t answer questions from police. He was never convicted.

Adonis and the Spornosexual.

‘Spornosexuality’, the cut and shut love child of Sport and Porno, is the latest fad in male beauty. It is Narcissism on steroids, but the bodies beautiful are strangely asexual; more metro than macho and absorbed with themselves rather than each other or the opposite sex.

‘‘Capitalism has transformed our bodies into accessories. By toning and perfuming and recording every ripple with Facebook selfies, they’ve converted their bodies into their own masturbatory aids.’, Tim Stanley.

The Spornosexual icon is Adonis; gorgeous, hench and aloof. Different versions of the Greek myth, from Ovid to Shakespeare, agree that his relationship with Venus was characterized by indifference.

She does her best to point out, as politely as possible, that he has an issue with his mother..

‘‘Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel, Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth? Art thou a woman’s son, and canst not feel what ’tis to love? How want of love tormenteth? ‘ W. Shakespeare

Of course it was his perfect right to refuse her but he does so on the basis of boredom rather than the healthy fear of divine retaliation for so bold an aspiration or making an informed choice.

So Venus gets aggrieved ..

‘Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, well-painted idol, image dun and dead, statue contenting but the eye alone..ibid

and withdraws her protection from him.

Adonis then comes to a swift death. Supposedly, he dies from an injury to the ‘knee’, gored by a boar while hunting. My guess, given that no-one ever died of a mortal knee wound, is it’s a euphemism for having his groin torn out. Even the usually bawdy Shakespeare demurs, referring to the wound in his ‘soft thigh’.

This polite double entendre is the least complicated aspect of Adonis’ death, a demise well worth a bit of detective work given the prevalence of this archetype in the Collective Psyche and its shortlisting among Hansard’s top ten gruesome ways to die.

Adonis’ death is not an accident. In fact, the more the story unfolds the more it seems like an episode from the Sopranos. The boar has been sent by Artemis, Goddess of the Forest and the Hunt in revenge for the killing of one Hippolytus, a faithful and chaste devotee.

Artemis holds Venus responsible for Hippolytus’ death since it was the madness of love and lust that led to his murder. So she takes Venus’ favorite down in vengeful retaliation. Poor Hippolytus had certainly not deserved his fate. His step-mother Phaedra tried to seduce him and when he refused her advances she accused him of rape, persuading her husband Theseus to use a wish given him by Poseidon to destroy the boy. When Hippolytus is next out riding his chariot on the beach, Poseidon sends sea monsters to terrify the horses which then drag him to his death.

Adonis is killed because of what happened to Hippolytus. Their fates are linked. So are their pasts. Both are sons of incest and have their destinies came at them in violent, monstrous forms.

The symbolism of incest has to do with having your destiny hijacked by someone else. Adonis’ parents are father and daughter, Theias and Myrrha. He comes from a world where people’s stars are inappropriately mingled, so he can’t tell his feelings from other people’s, which makes it way too scary to have any at all. They have to be packed away, along with the carefree uncomplicated spontaneity and belonging-in-Nature personified by Hippolytus, whose wish to have his own destiny gets him killed.

Hippoltus’ fate represents..

‘the terror of dissolution which a baby experiences when, for lack of good enough maternal care, he cannot separate out from the mother and feel that he exists in his own right.” R Ledermann.

Psychoanalyst Masud Kahn’s concept of Symbiotic Omnipotence further amplifies why it is that increasing numbers of lads feel emasculated and attacked by the world, swallowed up by Poseidon’s monsters, or dragged to their death by their own instincts.

Symbiotic Omnipotence is a scenario whereby a frustrated and suppressed mother lives out her unmet needs and unexpressed passions through her child, compensating for absent preoccupation with shared specialness that kills off the boy’s instinctual life. Any efforts to escape this otherwise pristine arrangement are exemplified by Hippolytus’ terrible end, psychopathic gaslighting , the paranoia of being swallowed up or pulled apart.

On the surface everything is ideal. The pair are awash in mutual admiration and overstated affection, exaggerated gestures and shared secrets..

Gradually it emerges just how exclusive this ideal situation is..

”It excluded other phase adequate relationships and actively discouraged, through collusion and indulgence, cathexis of other objects as valuable or nourishing.” M Khan.

Google translate..”The child is deliberately isolated, then forced to collude with such deprivation by joining mother in her scorn of the world.”

Her own destiny having been denied, mother’s unfulfilled potential spills over into the unwitting child who then takes it for his own….

This has severe consequences for the boy. He can never live up to the archetypal expectations placed on his young shoulders. Moreover, the secret shame of wanting to lead his own life, the suppressed desire for love and affection, the feeling of having betrayed some sacred pact by daring to become his own man, all this can then make intimacy seem overwhelming.

‘I know not love,’ quoth Adonis, ‘nor will not know it, unless it be a boar, and then I chase it. ‘Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it;My love to love is love but to disgrace it;  ibid

In other words..

“I don’t know anything about love,” he said, “and I never want to. All I care about is hunting boars. Love sounds like a lot of work that I’m not willing to put in. All I can say about love is that I love to reject it.”https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/venus-and-adonis

Venus points out this checks all the boxes in the DSM5 under Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

‘‘Is thine own heart to thine own face affected? Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected, Steal thine own freedom and complain on theft.”

But Adonis is impervious to the last. It has all been too much. He strolls off in contempt, oblivious of the fate about to overtake him. He says to himself that he just didn’t fancy her but if truth be told he couldn’t cope. It felt too much like mother’s..

”over cathexis of the child (being in his face, which leads to..) an early bias that they are special and cannot be understood, so communication is futile.” M Khan.

This leads to the blanket objectification of others and ultimately, of himself. His secret porn addiction is not about misdirected lust or desire, nor even the objectification of women. Its the ‘booby’ prize, given the pointlessness of actual relationships.

This capacity to despair over relationships whilst contemptuously dismissing them is a fancy piece of dissociation which carries quite a price tag. It costs him the healthy aggression which wants to make its own way in the world. He has had to split it off in order to maintain the omnipotence promised to him in the symbiotic small print of his contract with mother…

….split off aggression that has now grown tusks and wants nothing more than to tear into his ‘knee’.. for want of an autonomous life.

Its easy to judge Adonis for being a self destructive jerk, but he hasn’t been able to separate from a mother who was never ‘there’ enough to separate from. Myrrha was depersonalized by the Patriarchy to begin with and turned into a tree just before Adonis was born, so not a lot of ante-natal care for him, except as a fruit that must not fall too far from the bough..

The secretly feared consequences of becoming his own man, exemplified by Hippolytus’ dreadful betrayal and summary assault by maternally invoked sea monsters, seems way too great a price to pay. He’s better off taking his chances with the boar, locked in eternal conflict with that which would feed him, if only he would feed it.