I read somewhere that the average adult, male or female, has a sexual fantasy every eight seconds. What I want to know is, what are the rest of you doing with your other seven seconds? ‘Cos it seems to me that most of mine last quite a lot longer than the time it takes for the next one to kick in; giving rise, if you will, to the frolicking joy of fantasy overlap. Or is it that everyone else somehow manages to compress the heaving bosom of their carnal saga into an infinitesimal sound bite, extrapolating, Zen-like, some quintessential erotic marrow, enough to sustain one at least until tea time, just a fleeting moment but one of buoyant reassurance….
Analyst Otto Kernberg makes the observation that the fantasies we have, our attitudes to sex and the extent to which we can let ourselves enjoy it largely depend upon and are recapitulations of early experience had at the breast. Both are potentially orgiastic, life affirming one moment, frustratingly autonomous the next, fraught with the possibility of denial and rejection, with-holding and manipulation.
We learn about life at the breast and not at the knee. It is the template of carnal experience. Complications at the breast will play out in the bedroom. Yes, its your mother…
or rather, the two thousand years of shit that’s been laid at her door.
When mother and child are ‘a bad fit’ then lining up your bits with an other in later life might well become problematic. Moreover, the otherness of the breast and just how that is experienced informs fundamental patterns of relatedness. So it is not just sexuality that is molded by it, our relation with the human other, but also our relationship with Nature and the Gods.
If there is no on-going orgiastic connection in infancy, where baby’s pleasure in receiving and Mama’s pleasure in giving merge in a love train of mutual feasting then its difficult to feel connected to or care about the wider world in later life. Sex and spirituality are all too often pitched against each other as if they were natural foes, yet they are both expressions of engagement with the other. Jung goes as far as to refer to the libido as, ‘the lower soul,’ a different form of the same thing, the transporting awesome encounter. Its no wonder our response to the sublime is all too often, ‘Fuck!’ nor that sex be attended by a litany of ‘OMG’s’.
Without some sense of sustainable between successfully negotiated with the earliest other, then none of the above unfolds too easily, leaving both lower and higher souls itchy and frustrated. The price the Patriarchy pays for the denigration of women and the desacralizing of motherhood is that we predominantly get to be cut off from life’s joys. In place of feasting we have consumption, porn instead of friendly pleasures and your inner compass traded for stone tablets.
So whilst Trump is hopefully removed from office without too much further bloodshed, the danger is that he is made into ‘the problem’, forgetting that he is the natural expression of a collective something which increasingly struggles to be part of life, that denigrates and demonizes the Other.
‘Even before Donald Trump entered politics America had clearly entered the most mediated, entertainment saturated, celebrity era ever.’ Ari Melber.
We have collectively achieved what any infant does in the absence of and denigration of Mother, we regress. Instant gratification and idealized grandiosity become the highest good. Truth becomes fluid in a pre-moral state of undifferentiated opposites, not quite so sophisticated as Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ or ‘double think’, which require annoying reflection, the intrusion of implied purpose.
Centralized power requires such regression. Huge collectives cannot hold together without the additional glue of a depressed and demoralised population carelessly sinking into magical thinking in lieu of being stuffed full of good things.
Political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along, admiring the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. The people were conditioned to..
“believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” The Atlantic.
These are not new ideas, from the sixth century in China you can find official advice in keeping a population pliable..
‘A ruler should on no account encourage ‘perfecting the individual life’, for should he do so his minister’s will apply themselves with alacrity. And what is this ‘life-nurturing’? It consists in feasting music and love.’ Kuan Tzu.
The larger the collective it seems, the more autocratic, the more both the lower and higher souls of all the individuals involved get eroded to make the wheels of faceless government turn more easily. You can lie and deceive openly those whose souls have been immured. It’s not that they no longer care, they haven’t begun to.. Alternative facts are pre moral, pre-fact. Right and wrong have sunk back into the primordial soup of it is what it is.
I had the most terrible nightmare. I was being chased through thick forest by a pack of hunting dogs. Though they were still a ways behind but there was no escape. They would find and tear me to pieces. It was just a matter of time. My trying to escape was futile. The only freedom, the only meaningful expression left to me was to prepare for my end. I lay down, held and comforted myself, half in despair, half in acceptance. As I did so the bank against which I lay gently swallowed me into a warm, dry, egg like chamber. The dogs could not get in.
Without the Earth womb of the Great Mother, life is a jungle of Running Dogs, the Sky God left to himself unravelling over millennia into a blind madness of tooth and claw. We’re asking the wrong questions. The issue is not whether god exists but whether or not he ought to have a fucking chaperone.
