Litima

My son's 14 years old. And has friends around the same age. They exhibit, among many other things, a sense of heightened irritability and energy. The body races. The head is ready to explode with plans. It could just be a dragon in the blood. Or is it what Michael Meade and the Gisu of Uganda call Litima?

"To them [the Gisu], Litima is the violent emotion peculiar to the masculine part of things that is the source of quarrels, ruthless competition, possessiveness, power-driveness, and brutality and that is also the source of independence, courage, upstandingness, and emotional force that fuels the process of becoming an individual ... Litima is ambiguous ... it has two sides. The source of independence and high ideals can also be the source of ruthlessness and brutality."--Michael Meade

I find it easier looking at this way compared too seeing it as a thirty-fold increase in testosterone.

Government Does Not Need To Show A Profit

I have been searching for the excerpt below for a couple of months now. Low and behold it appeared this morning while I was looking for another quote. It's important to me for a couple of reasons. One, is that I have been carrying mail for the USPS for close to five years now. And since then jobs have been eliminated and wages cut so that it can be run more efficiently. It must show a profit, they say. Secondly, my grandfather serves at the town and county levels of government, and he is one of the biggest opponents of the "lean government" trend. For example, in the county that I live in, certain public servants under the spell of Tea Party ideals want to cut the number of county board members from 21 to 15 to run the government more efficiently. This time to save the taxpayers money.

I like the idea of judging government institutions on the quality of the service they provide rather than the profit they show. In other words, the post office and other government institutions don't necessarily have to show a profit. I think James Hillman has done a good job of expressing below.

"It is well to keep in mind the image Treblinka when we ask government to be more "efficient." To expect the post office, the passenger railroads, the interstate highways, the prison system or the national parks to show a profit forgets that government is fundamentally a service industry as stated in the Constitution. It's efficiency can be judged only in terms of the services it provides--that they meet the needs of the people who grant its power. For a candidate for political office to campaign on a platform of efficiency in government suggests an infiltration of fascist ideals. Mussolini made the trains run on time--but at what cost?

"The extermination camps belong continually in our Western consciousness, not only to remind us of the human capacity for atrocity, the pathological potential in systematic technology, the virulence of racism, the existence of evil or the death of both the Jewish and Christian God. The camps belong continually in the consciousness because the devotion to efficiency continues unconsciously in the Western psyche, bearing witness to the shadow side of the current living god, the Economy, the god continues to urge Western civilization onward by means of ever more efficiency." [James Hillman, Pg. 44, Kinds of Power]

Peter Pan and Puer Projections Of The Future

"Hopeful Greening: A New Age of Aquarius. Global village, self determination of ethnic cohesive societies like Slovakia and Slovenia. New conflict-resolution models. Billions of trees reforested like a thousand points of light; biotechnology for 'cleaning up' after environmental disasters. Racial and gender equality. Community care, hospices, day-care centers, parental leave, integrated schools, rebirth of the arts with spiritual and social purpose. Peace dividends. Permissive suicide, permissive sexual affiliations. All the walls tumbling down. Legalized prostitution, legalized marijuana. Creative education. Universal access for the impaired and deprived. Health care and wealth share." James Hillman, Pg. 228, Kinds of Power

Political Feminism and The Absolutism of Equality

"Wherever we would do something as agents, power appears, and where power appears so does our Western history in the word. We dominate in the image of our God, Dominus.

"We can immediately see why political feminism has focused on hierarchical organization as the keystone of 'patriarchal consciousness.' Hierarchy subordinates; power becomes domination and despotism. So, dismantle the table of organization and the declension of power downward from above. Restructure, either in utter equality or into flexible, cooperative, leaderless groups--production gangs, assembly teams, task forces--so as to remain horizontal and not pinnacle upward.

"For this radical shift in direction, sideways rather than up and down, new sins replace the old. Ruthless leveling--no head dare stick up too high. No one to look up to is the price of not looking down on anyone. Respect, admiration, awe go by the board. Other kinds of conformism and political correctness begin to dominate. A new tyranny emerges: the absolutism of equality."--James Hillman, Pg. 99, Kinds of Power

Candy Wrappers, Children and Enjoyable Animism

"Instead of the old punishing moralisms about dropping litter on the street, we need a new and enjoyable animism that children would be the first to understand. 'Don't throw that candy wrapper on the street'--not because it's dirty or bad manners; not because it's wrong; not because 'what if everybody did that?'--but instead 'because your candy wrapper doesn't want to lie around in the gutter or be stepped on; it wants to be in the trash basket along with all its friends."--James Hillman, Pg.89, Kinds of Power

Environment, Religion, and War

"Environmental battles are where the wars of religion are fought today, showing the old pagan nature Gods have not altogether been subdued by the world unification plans of god, the Economy."--James Hillman, pg.4, Kinds of Power

Vitality of a Culture

"The vitality of a culture depends less on its hopes and its history than on its capacity to entertain willingly the divine and daimonic force of ideas"--James Hillman

Power Without Resistance

I was thinking about resistance to power this morning. As a result I've got books scattered about looking for quotes and ideas. I stumbled across this idea in James Hillman's Kinds of Power that has got me thinking.

"Power, without the resistance of a counterforce, mimics the intertia it strives against, becoming an unhindered, tensionless expansion, following the lay of the land, flattening out into stagnant accumulations without intention, much like the pictures we make of inert despots on fat pillows in their pleasure domes, all resistance to the plenipotentiaries overcome." Pg.144

In search for clarification I read the sentence to my wife as she was lying on the bed nursing our daughter. I wanted to know what inertia power was mimicing. I read it. She, like usual rolled her eyes and said speak English. So, I read the first part of the sentence. We still couldn't figure it out. Oh well, I thought, just another question gone unanswered. Nothing new. But as I was randomly paging through the beginning of the same book I ran across this:

"The deeper syndrome is inertia of the spirit, a passivity that feels no vocation and shies from imaginitive vision, adventerous thinking and intellectual clarification. That we imagine ourselves today as a nation of victims attests to a vacuum in the spirit of the nation. These are symptoms of the soul in search of clarity. Clarity is the essential.

If I'm understanding Hillman right, he's saying that without resistance power mimics spirit. Without the process of soul-making spirit becomes passive, shallow, expansive and unclear. It reminds me of a poem by Swedish poet Harry Martinson:

When Euclid started to measure Hades,
he found it had neither depth nor height.
Demons flatter than stingrays
swept above the plains of death....

There were only waves, no hills, no chasms or valleys.
Only lines, parallel happenings, angles lying prone.
Demons shot along like elliptical plates;
they covered an endless field in Hades as though with moving
dragonscales.

victims of flat evil,
with no comfort from a high place
or support from a low place

That's how I'm starting to see the removal of mountaintops to provide us with coal to light and heat our homes. It's all part of the process of what I've heard poets call flattening. And now I can understand why author/activist Derrick Jensen ended an email to a fellow activist with this phrase: Welcome to Hell.

Concentration Camp Existence

"Concentration-camp existence...taught us that the whole world is really like a concentration camp...There is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality, crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power."--Otto Friedrich, quoting the poet Tadeusz Borowski in The End of the World

Not so Fast

This thought sets the mind at ease to some degree:

"For a predominantly Eurocentric culture, the Greek/Roman patterns are the most relevant and most differentiated, and thus the most powerful. By powerful, I mean influential, authoratative, prestigious, controlling, and tyrannical. Even if these patterns of imagination that govern our thought and action are utterly patriarchal and therewith condemned as dangerously death-dealing, like a toxic dump of the spent fuel on which civilization has live for millenia, they are the roots. Inescapable. Multiculturalism cannot jump out of the melting pot that was cast in bronze in Greece centuries ago. So long as this culture is traditionally and officially committed to Indo-European languages and institutions of government and education, of family structures, and modes of thought that define the arts, sciences, religions, and human nature, we cannot change our minds, though we may beautifully extend them, revise them and reimagine them.--James Hillman, pg. 245, Kinds of Power

Reimagining the Boss

I ran across this quote in James Hillman's Kinds of Power. It gives us something to think about when it comes to our expectations of a boss, and also when we are bossing others.

"Enjoy, says the waitress; why not also the boss when you sit down to work? Not only to take pleasure in the work but to give pleasure, like a lover. Isn't this a capacity of power, as much as control, leadership or influence?"

My god, I'm 38 years old, and I don't think I've ever had a boss consider this.

Diakrisis

Picking up old ideas out of Kinds of Power. This is one reason why I like James Hillman's writing. He is always bringing ideas that are thousands of years old to the table.

"The old theologians called this filtering diakrisis, discerning the spirits. Without discernment, they thought you could become a dupe of the devil. Discernment allows you to be more sophisticated about the forces, hearing them metaphorically and not yet literally, so that you do not become a mouthpiece of your mentor or a channel of visionary wisdom masking as genius."--Pg.143, Kinds of Power

Our Secret Companion

"What I am calling the 'angel' that was born with us and is our secret companion, Socrates called his daimon, who guarded him from wrong moves. The same figure appears in German thought as the Doppelganger and in ancient thought as the genius. Our birthday celebrations with cake and candles originate in a ritual honoring, not you, but your genius who was born with you. You are never a genius, can never be a genius, but you are guided and protected by a genius, and your life must be led so that the genius is not damaged. Damage to it through wounded reputation (and Cassio uses the language of wounding as Gaunt uses the language of shame) reflects especially on the family, for one's genius derives partly from the family and is generated in the family marriage bed (lectus genialis). Your genius or angel is concieved with you, descends into you through your generators and like an invisible twin at birth, part of your psychic inheritance."--James Hillman, pg.138, Kinds of Power

An Auden Quote

Deer hunting is over, for the most part. I'm back with a quote I picked up out of James Hillman's Kinds of Power.

"We are lived by powers we pretend to understand."--W.H. Auden