THE DARKENED THEATRE

Oedipus

A dark, painful stream of thought comes down from the past, responding to the suffering of life.  Arts, including ceremony, help us to withstand the poisonous chaos.  I’m going to quote a bit, since this is dangerous ground.

The following comes from Thomas Moore’s “Dark Eros” (1990) a book the readers loved but the publishers feared.  This is from the “Afterword” written in 1994.  “The fundamental paradox, forced upon us in daily tragedies, is the bitter reality that we maintain a world of atrocity by refusing to acknowledge the role of dark desires in our own communities and individual lives.  We live in a divided life: us versus them, good versus evil.  The shadow in human life cannot be brought home as long as we concretize it in some objectionable others.”

Thomas Moore

I first met Moore at a workshop in Bozeman, some years before this book was written. I audited the workshop with permission, but two young men gate-crashed and interrupted the proceedings with their urgent need for dream interpretation about a snake run-over on a highway and dying.  The content wasn’t as important as the way Moore went about coaxing out the dream and its meaning as constructed between these two young men, possibly lovers.  Today we might easily accept their homosexual and intimate fusion.  In 1983 or so, with rural college-aged people, it was more shocking.  I don’t think I realized the gay element and most of us weren’t yet aware of the genocide imposed by HIV.  Yet Moore gently worked out the puzzle, barely before the registrar arrived and threw the young men out.  

James Hillman

Backtracking from Moore, I found Hillman, the Jungian, and his remarkable body of work.  He was fearless and yet nowhere near as historical and analytical as Jung or Freud.  This is from  Moore’s “The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology.”  Even this short passage addresses Barrus’ complaint about my theories, which is the same complaint Bob had -- that I go off into the intellectual clouds and lose the focus of reality.

Very recent neural discoveries reinforce the work of Hillman and Moore:  the basis of thought and analysis is ALWAYS sensory.  Everything else is metaphor.  In fact, the XO of the senses, eros, is signaling in code.  But our brains are censors -- we may not perceive what is there.

“Hillman (1983a) discusses a patient's dream about a huge black snake. The dream work would include "keeping the snake" and describing it rather than making it something other than a snake. Hillman notes that "the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions ... and you've lost the snake. The task of analysis is to keep the snake there, the black snake...see, the black snake's no longer necessary the moment it's been interpreted, and you don't need your dreams any more because they've been interpreted"  (p. 54). One would inquire more about the snake as it is presented in the dream by the psyche so to draw it forth from its lair in the unconscious. The snake is huge and black, but what else? Is it molting or shedding its skin? Is it sunning itself on a rock? Is it digesting its prey? This descriptive strategy keeps the image alive, in Hillman's opinion, and offers the possibility for understanding the psyche.”

Barrus has a refrain he repeats, a key to his world-view that had its origin in the times he has lived in the American South, once in a tree house full of rats and snakes.  They are very real to him.

“The attic rats have their pink little babies up there in the insulation nests the rats have made. Mama licks her young. The rats are safe until the bullsnake comes, and the bullsnake always comes.”  -- Tim Barrus

James Hillman, who belongs to a Jungian context, and his compatriot Thomas Moore, are metaphor-friendly, non-Freudian, and fearless.  They accept all manifestations of flesh, but insist there is more, whether one calls it soul, psyche, or metaphorical felt meaning.    “Dark Eros” is one of Moore’s strongest books, in my opinion, but probably least read.  People who look for “spirituality” will veer off from the dark, revealing that they are really looking for safety and pleasure.  They are the pink little rat babies.  That leaves some of we bolder explorers with materials people are afraid to read for fear of pain, embarrassment, or dirt. 

And yet the darkness of eros, even without the element of violence, is a body of thought, always in process through time.  It will probably NOT be explored in schools, not even seminaries.  And that’s just the thoughts ABOUT dark eros.  Here is John Hawken, a respectable source, proving that you can find anything on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_wfXsftLG0

John Hawken Tantra

Hawken makes the transition from the Dark Eros trope to the traditional Tantric sex system.  He’s relatively non-threatening in this vid, a sort of Ollie Sacks with a missing tooth.  He doesn’t quite make up for the loss of Satan when the liberals took over God and made him into Santa Claus, easy to dispense with if you don’t respond to bribes.  There is no lascivious exploitation.

Now that Ollie Sacks comes closer to stepping into Charon’s boat, he reveals his own struggle with the dark side, almost completely repressed in his lifetime. He’s a man who values control and may try to swim the River Styx by himself.   (He probably could do it.)  We are now willing enough to face these terrors that excerpts from biographical notes written by an old friend, Lawrence Weschler, are in this month’s “Vanity Fair.”  http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/04/oliver-sacks-autobiography-before-cancer

I reviewed “Dark Eros” by Thomas Moore on Jan 31, 2010 (“The Dark Eros of the Big Backside”) and Oct 5, 2011(“More Intense than Lyric Poetry”).  Even since then there has been much increased tolerance and frankness about sex, torture, dismemberment -- most of it shallow and mostly uninformed.  Movies keep pushing the limits:  “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Game of Thrones,” are not Doris Day movies.  It would be more interesting and useful to look at the real life dark side of Doris Day or her acting partner, Rock Hudson, who died of AIDS.

Early in the long conversation between Barrus and myself, which I hope will continue for a long time, I proposed a Gestalt “dream interpretation” of an empty theatre between performances with only a single charwoman present.  I made it as concrete as I could, the smell of hot stage lights, the dust of paint flaked off of flats, lingering hints of greasepaint, and then the rustling scurry of rats under the ranks of red plush seats out there in the dark.  Tim’s response was a series of images of empty raked seats in a theatre somewhere.  More eloquent than words.

The imagery is seductive, more subtext than script, most powerful to the initiated who have been on that stage.  He tells me that instead of the “light cage” I knew, where the crew sat inside a real cage to keep people away from huge rheostats that controlled the lights, now the light crew manages the shifting patterns of color and movement from a tablet, maybe in the front row, using Blue Tooth so there is no trailing power cable.

The arts should stop short of acting out in real life, which is too dangerous, but can be managed this side of madness by admitting in image and word, framed on the stage, that dark desire exists.  Moore:  “By treating sex as a biological instinct and strong, persistent desire as addiction, we lose touch with the soul of sex and desire -- with their depths, their poetic resonance, and the meaningfulness they carry.” 

But the young, the unprotected, the vulnerable, will need shelter, both emotional and physical, to withstand what may be loaded onto them, whether it is the cartoon death of the mother (“Bambi”) or being sexually abused by their own family members.  They shouldn’t have to crash a workshop or pay a registrar in order to get the key.