Death and The Other World

"I think it's more a matter of realizing that there is a porous permeability between the living and the dead. Between life and death. And the way we have set it up is that death and life are opposed and you must hold off death and it's the ultimate other, and you die alone, this sort of existential whatever. And it seems to me that this offers a completely different way of realizing that the day world is permeated with the other world--in all kinds of small ways, that they're always inner voices, that the dead are cautionary figures. That you are living with the dead. And what you think of as the way of life may be the way of more death. And the way of death may be the way of more livingness. That these are not necessarily alternatives or that first you do one and then you do the other."--James Hillman, pg.25, Lament of the Dead

Derrick Jensen made it clear to me with his work that our "way of life may be the way of more death."

Not Enough Death

"Our Culture is singular for its ignorance of death. The great art and celebrations of many other cultures--ancient Egyptian and Etruscan, the Greek of Eleusis, Tibetan---honor the underworld....The soul...desires to go beyond, to go ever inward and deeper."--James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld

Death Urge and Sexual Fantasy

Years ago Derrick Jensen made it clear to me in his monumental book A Language Older Than Words that we have a death urge. What I'm understanding that to be is an urge to destroy life on this planet. Otherwise we wouldn't be driving a couple hundred species extinct a day by our actions.

This morning I was paging through my notes that I've written down from books I've read in the past and I ran across this:

"The majority of sexual fantasy and desire points to the erotic dynamic in life and not to actual sex."--Thomas Moore, Pg. 176, The Soul of Sex

Perhaps the less pleasurable and erotic our day to day lives become the more the porn industry grows. I don't know, it's just a thought. I like entertaining ideas.

If I Had The Chance

If I had the chance to sit down with the poet Robert Bly tomorrow I'd ask him this: Mr Bly, back in 1996 you wrote this in The Sibling Society, "We are drawing nearer to what Freud call the 'the pure culture of the death instinct.[Pg.42].'" Given that you're in your mid-eighties now, and it has been over 15 years since you wrote that, do you feel that we're still headed toward "the pure culture of the death intstinct?"

Death Instinct

Robert Bly wrote this 4 years after I graduated from high school:

"We are drawing nearer to what Freud called "the pure culture of the death instinct."[Pg.42, The Sibling Society]

He Is Already Dead

After spending about a month of really trying to understand John Trudell's point of view by listening to his music, watching YouTube videos, watching Trudell:The Movie, reading his poetry, and reading interviews, I think I might have a bit of an understanding of that point of view. After the FBI killed John's family and collected 17,000 pages of information on him, he said that he visited a very dark place for awhile, and what saved him was that some "lines" appeared to him. He has been following those lines ever since. He said they saved his life.

Last night this passage from Derrick Jensen's book, A Language Older Than Words was calling as I was thinking about John's description of the dark universe he visited after his family was murdered (which John says was an act of war performed by the FBI.)

In the seventeenth century the Zen poet Bunan wrote, "Die while you're alive and be absolutely dead. Then do whatever want: it's all good." We are, of course, already dead. There is no hope. The machine is too powerful, the damage too severe. There are too many child abusers, too many rapists, too many corporations, too many tanks and guns and airplanes. And I'm just one person: I can't do anything. You're dead right, so what the hell are you waiting for? An Irish friend of mine once told me his favorite saying: "Is this a private fight, or can anyone enter?" Give up. Capitulate. Realize there's no hope, then have at it. If you're dead, you have nothing to lose and a word to gain.

Trudell died, and now he has "nothing to lose and a world to gain."

This culture clearly has a death urge. We are obviously trying to kill ourselves. Maybe most of us have to die first before we can expect this death urge to go away.