We knew that rising population would eventually trigger rat behavior: that is, individual violence and gang raids, drug use, infanticide, and so on — all based on territory and the need to claim a place of one’s own. We knew that diminishing resources (what happens when we come to the end of palladium for smart phones?) would mean increased deception, racketeering, swindles and bribes. It has always been true that sex and religion are potent forces in turmoil of this kind — not “real” sex based on appreciation of other human beings and not “real” religion based on cooperative living and spiritual generosity. But “sword and sandal” gladiator morality in an imagined world is always with us and taken as “truth” by those who wish to excuse their behaviour.
Now women moving in men’s worlds are getting powerful men fired without any trial — the crime of sloppy kissing without invitation. And we’re told the worst is yet to come. Not the Trump tapes that were successfully suppressed, but the Russian Trump tapes used for blackmail.
Rachel Maddow keeps saying, “Fasten your seatbelts.” And “follow the money.” Around here the rule is “the way to deal with bad stuff is to deny it.” Keep rowing or the whip will come down on you. People worry about teens committing suicide while the rate of old farmers committing suicide keeps rising. People worry about groping while indigenous women are murdered, coast to coast.
That’s just the social stuff. I worry about the ecology: climate change, rising seas, and the wheat genome changed by industrial strategies to the point of triggering subtle but destructive molecular poisoning like gluten allergy.
Then there’s private personal examination that a writer does, and the exposure of all the shortfalls, wrong guesses, betrayals, and self-destructive acts that seemed innocent enough at the time. One’s flesh body, counted on to preserve identity, can head off in some new direction never chosen by one’s mental self. The good-to-go self that could leap out of bed at first dawn, leaving underwear behind in order to save time, mount a horse in order to move fast, and laugh at any dangers — that person is gone.
If I did all the stuff I’m supposed to do now for the sake of my health, it would take more than an hour: the diabetic foot soak and search, the steps of dental hygiene, the protocol for dealing with dry-eye syndrome, the testing and record-keeping for diabetes and for weight control, the exfoliating and moisturizing, the plucking and shaving to control two inch hairs in eyebrows and a luxuriant lady-beard, the ear wax and eye drops — not to be used in the wrong orifices — it’s all humiliating and interferes with thinking about serious matters — like the maintenance of money levels and uses.
All this without even major trauma damage or serious chronic disease. So far. It’s all just a money-sink of maintenance.
Which is symbolic — is that the right word? Which is participant in the general confusion and preoccupation with national and world events, as scary as during WWII which dominated my earliest years and was only narrowly survived by us all — and yet has imprinted so many people born later as being “good old days” that they want to return to those years. They obsess even over holocaust images. Now we see the photos of horror that were never shown at the time they were taken.
When I look over the set of Netflix movies suggestions — presumably “chosen just for me” by an algorithm that no one can remember composing — they are all about humans in extremes, mouths open to howl. It’s evidently prompted by a conviction that people want to feel something and that the only thing intense enough to feel is ghastly.
The alternative is PBS where the Durrells are reduced to cute little Disney vignettes that will encourage tourism to Greece and gay culture is represented as wrist-flapping and cutting remarks. An historical account of the Vietnam War faced the reality, but one had a choice of three versions, one with the profanity masked. And all the while the two arbiters of culture — one for the droll Minnesota folks and the other for the so-sophisticated tabletop conversationalists — had secret lives based on transgression and exhibitionism.
These issues were never discussed when I was the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow of my high school. No one ever suggested there was anything to know about when as a teacher dealing with a girl who came to ask me what to do because a boy had demanded sex with her and when she refused, went around telling everyone she did anyway so that all the boys came like dogs begging at the supper table. She assured me her parents would blame her. I suspected the school mechanisms for counselling would do the same. High school rules: conform or suffer.
No one discussed in seminary how to minister to the father whose life was destroyed because he molested his daughter and who threatened suicide as the only possible reparation.
In the end my refuge and healing are those of Antaeus. (I googled to check spelling and this time, instead of a rock band, it turns out to be the name of a perfume. (“Anteous” Chanel for Men)
Google also offered this: “ANTEOUS numerology analysis. This path is a symbol of freedom, change, mobility, strength, adventure and dynamism. But may also indicate frivolity, instability, recklessness, excess and eccentricity. The esoteric meaning is life.”
I finally had to go to a book to get the spelling. “Antaeus was the son of the gods Poseidon and Gaea, one of the Gigantes, in Greek mythology. He drew strength from his mother, earth, and was invincible while he was in contact with her; he challenged people who passed by his area to wrestling matches, in which he always won, and killed them in the end.” It’s all part of the Euro-world’s love affair with contention, dominance and control of nature, a subversive reminder that the planet is always the winner in the end and will be, even if we reduce “her” to a radioactive rock.
We’ve reduced our real bodies to a scent of wealth and power, all dressed-up but sterile. We want spray-on lives. But I’m afraid that the real Antaeus smells like sweat and dung. Maybe a hint of fish.
If you still stubbornly prefer the perfumed life, here are some images. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbMFolt5YfA
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