THE DARKEST DEEP DOWN EVIL

A running controversy about the nature of Evil is whether it is a malign purpose of the essential universe itself, or whether it is a human concept personified by the Devil.  Other possible positions to take include the rational conclusion that the universe is not capable of human emotions and imposes death and suffering on humans without any purpose at all, only a consequence.  Or the more Asian and indigenous ideas are that one allows evil by wanting things so it's wise to eliminate desire or that the whole thing is a big joke and one's best defense is laughter.

If the purpose of life is most purely survival, because otherwise life by definition is lost, then what is moral is what supports survival and what is evil is whatever cuts against survival.  Ironically, much evil comes from the effort to survive in terms of a specific group, maybe at the expense of another.

Humans are vulnerable.  In fact, of  the close to a hundred hominin variations we know about, all but ourselves have lasted for millennia but then in the end have not survived.  Is that evil?  Or has the struggle and happenstance of survival been a purification that left us standing alone until we are snuffed by something better?  If we define ourselves as a specific creation, a precious accomplishment of a supernatural hominin, then the loss is an evil interference with creation.  But if all these others were merely rough drafts, then they were outside morality.  No one is shaken by the loss of Nutcracker Man or Lucy and others of the Olduvai Gorge.

It's not hard to understand that the current American determination of Republicans is to hold onto the power they think preserves them by any means necessary.  So far they have not overtly killed anyone, unless you count collaborating Russians and Mafia, but they have let death happen and sacrificed thousands of people to dictators and famine.  That's evil.  In the process they have destroyed what were once the defining characteristics of the Grand Old Party.  Evil. And ironic.  Trump is accusing of even changing the name, and he has certainly destroyed them as a party.

What is deeper and harder to assign any kind of demonic purpose is the dissolution of morality that has come from technological advances like contraception, the internet, transnational corporations, and fossil fuel.  Old gender arrangements arising from sexual anatomy and capacity, have made old morals --  like the capture and assignment of females and their babies or the monetizing of sex to make money -- unbalanced and even unreasonable.  They are no longer enforced moral norms arising from stigmatizing sex, which were far too susceptible to gaming anyway.  Despite frenzied efforts to impose romantic notions like "one true love" and supernatural participation, some people defy the rules.  Others do things like burning unwanted wives alive.  It's hard to argue that's not pure evil.  Death and suffering oppose survival, but humans have always been willing to eliminate those who threaten them, maybe by burning heretics at the stake or by shooting home invaders.

Until now we have not been able to threaten the survival of the planet.  We have not even been able to wipe out all humans, just all of many other species.  We still cannot kill the planet, but we are destroying the part of the planet that sustains us, like the quality and temperature of the atmosphere.  We have always been willing to prevent survival of those we call "immoral" which is part of survival on the broadest social terms,  saying those who have no right to live must be controlled.  The final result of this is that the stigmatized and endangered categories of people have evolved in unpredictable ways.  Some have left all moral constraints and act only on their individual behalf.  Others have participated in the development of rules and governance that improve life for everyone.

One of the practices of survival is becoming wealthy and powerful.  Badly managed, this can easily become evil by disregarding the interests of everyone but the guy who controls the wealth, legally or otherwise.  This often pits the ambitious individual against the larger community, however it is defined.  If the larger community is all humans, that may seem a happy consequence, but it can destroy both other life and the land from which humans arose, the land-scape.  Destroying whatever attachments humans have, whether to place or wealth or each other, is a key to the description of evil.

Using the terms of justice or even legality addresses evil at this level, but doesn't go to the most basic level of human affinities which are the source of the social structural arrangements that guide and protect us.  When an affiliation or institution -- whether genealogical derivation or labor unions or religion -- offers help in surviving and in WANTING to survive, then we feel it is by definition "good."  But the corruption of a common good into a cabal of greedy individuals can only be evil.

It is not only the goals of society but also the means they use that qualifies them to be called Evil.  Means that include murder and suffering, whether direct violence or what I call "pencil murders" by cutting off funds, are evil.  People who consciously do such things are evil.  But the means we use to oppose and diminish them can also be evil -- whether shooting them in the streets, incarcerating them in hellholes (even children), or portraying them as subhuman.  Sometimes these evil means are not conscious or seem blindly justified or have become a pattern outside human control.  That's when it likely that evil will be seen as originating in the unliving universe.

Attachment, sometimes in the form of love and other times a kind of loyalty, must be a means of survival or it would not be so persistent.  They say that maybe one out of a hundred people is a sociopath, someone who cannot attach to other people because of organic damage or experience that taught them not to care whether or not they or others survived.  If that's true, then this village of several hundred must include several sociopaths.  Group pressure and standards hold most of them in place though they may create a certain amount of suffering and death.  If there begin to be a higher proportion, then we will have a corrupt community until we rise up to take action.

I remember always Bob Scriver's two observations:  one can do anything until someone stops them; and if you do something outrageous enough, no one will take it seriously.  All this seems highly relevant right now.  And evil.

SEX IN THE DARK

The trouble with sleeping is that you don't know you're doing it, so you can't really enjoy it.  Something else people do in bed is coitus, but sometimes it seems as though they neither know what is going on nor do they enjoy it.  It happens to them as much as they "do" it. 

This is because more than 90% of what people do is unconscious.  Some say 98% but how do they know if the unconscious is not accessible to something as mathematical as percentages?  The truth is that sex, maybe more than anything else, is a product/victim of evolution -- everything we do is built on something that started when animals crawled out of the water so some way of getting sperm-to-ovum had to happen that protected the little half-bits.  Usually the answer was penetration: one side poked its way into the other side so it could deliver its part at the doorway of the ovum.

A lot of things had to happen: warm and responsive blood travel within the receiving creatures, renewing sources (they call them "nurse cells") of sperm, storage of sperm that didn't cook them (they call the cool storage "testicles"), changes to the defence mechanisms of the female body so white blood cells didn't kill the sperm or conceptus, but one aspect didn't change.  The primitive deep irresistible desire to do the act: seeking, near-blind, overwhelming desire for penetration.  As we know, it's stronger in males and stronger in some males rather than all.  This is characteristic of every evolutionary advanced feature.  It's so complex and so woven with culture that some don't get any and some get too much.

First, it's not often perceived that sex is dependent on a whole sequence of minute characteristics accumulating over millennia so that one little glitch can throw the whole function off.  Second, since so much is unconscious, one can't always figure it out with introspection.  At least at the physical level, technical investigation and analysis might help.  Third, since so much is unconscious and since so much is entangled with emotion, the whole thing is best addressed with the arts.  Artists might be operating on instinct, which they have encouraged and intensified enought to get a bit of access to the subconscious. 

Fourth, in terms of survival, a great many individuals are deprived and even destroyed if the survival of the whole group doesn't need them.  Thus, gays, sterile people, non-participators on cultural grounds, or people who penetrate but deliver un-viable halves of a new person, may be subject to despair and sorrow, but others will "give birth" in a different way by making cultural contributions to the whole.  Or even offering themselves as sacrifices in times that demand them.  Thus the moral issue of suicide or the kind of non-moral instinct illustrated by the "stotting Tommy," the phenomenon of a Thompson's gazelle on the veldt where one animal separates from the herd, "stotting" or bouncing to attract attention so that stalking lions will kill it instead of attacking the whole herd.  Thus, unconsciously, the ungulates illustrate sacrifice humans may put into a novel.  

Since even now we have a hard time achieving conception,  though we ask women to gestate each other's conceptus, or to donate eggs to be gestated by a woman who wishes to give birth, or give the nucleus of one ovum to another woman whose ovum has a faulty nucleus so that the baby has three parents.  Men in our time have grown used the idea that being a father is both physical and cultural, so that they may willingly "father" a child produced by another man's penetration and become deeply attached to that child.  Attachment is another evolved phenomenon that is produced by experience as much as instinct.

In a culture based on materialism where children are considered owned or maybe extensions of the father or mother over generations of succession, penetration becomes a weapon of war.  Penetration becomes the same as the thrust of a spear and is laden with the cultural trappings of war.  Or maybe penetration becomes something marketable and people who have nothing left but their bodies can sell access to it.

Again, rather strangely, actual penetration or associated intimacy by access to bodies, is a phenomenon of one or two people interacting.  Even in an orgy people only have so many holes and so much skin.  But in the associated emotional participation, millions may be sharing artful thoughts and images that prepare bodies for penetration.  This, in itself, is marketable.  Also, advertising in particular has managed to entwine "porn" with sales so that we have "penis cars" and "fuckable" markers for shoes.  Often this is subtle enough that we only think of it later when all the seductive images can be hauled into rationality.  

The hardest aspect to analyze is desire.  The dominant culture in the US has been dictating that only early-teen girls with long blonde hair and slender bodies are the most desirable.  Certainly Epstein and his high-class clients believed this.  But that ignores the allure of, say, Anna Magnani, and totally denies expertise and deep intimacy between adults.  All over America teenaged girls try to be thin, blonde, and mindless, a cultural sinkhole.

Desire arises from the unconscious.  It is not rationally decided, though it can sometimes appear as a product of two people knowing each other deeply.  If that has happened with someone once, the type may imprint, which is an echo of attachment, so if the lost loved one is big, brunette, and dark, someone like that (either sex) might call the same feelings.  But it doesn't have to be physical.  It might be a matter of sharing minds.

As we approach Christmas we witness many scenes of birth, meant to imply that there is a supernatural "inconceivable" being who loves us and shows it by "penetrating" us with love and delivering a baby.  Handled badly, this can be rape.  Handled well, it can deliver near a orgasmic climax of bliss.

But, as always, there is a dimension of ridiculousness. Once a student asked me to explain "orgasm."  Knowing that I could be fired for telling the truth but wanting to give an honest answer, I told her it was like a sneeze, meaning it was an uncontrollable bodily response.  Fifty years later she tells me it was a very long time before she figured out what I was saying.  Some people never figure out the Christian nativity.

BLACK DECISION: Suicide

When I embarked on my third-year-of-four ministerial internship, the seminary advisor fought me as hard as he could because of the previous intern's experience.  Since I was always opposed to this advisor, I insisted and as a "free" denomination, I had my way.  It was Hartford, Connecticut, at the beginning of the Eighties when Hartford was a counselling town.  They wouldn't be anxious to tell you why, but the woman with whom I lived that year took me to the cemetery to show me the headstones of more than a dozen of her son's classmates who had committed suicide.  (It was forty years ago.)  Her own adult son suffered with bipolar disorder.  Every spring he bought a sports car he couldn't afford and a few weeks later his mom took it back.

I was willing to join a group meant for future clergy who were wrestling with their own guts.  The leaders of my group were two colleagues, one female and one male.  In their just-previous group one of their participants had committed suicide by hanging with no previous indicators.  It took a lot of work for the counselors to get over that, which meant they had thought about suicide and the right to do it, intensely and at length.

One of the participants and I locked into hostility. He had had an indulgent mother who taught him as a child that he must always show her the results of his bowel movements, probably for health reasons, which he interpreted as admiration, so even now he kept a photo record of every production and was upset that his wife wouldn't look at it.  He thought she didn't love him.  One didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

The woman counsellor agreed to take me on privately and the denomination agreed to pay for it.  I would probably have been washed out except that my home clergyman (I've stopped saying "minister" because to Canadians that's a government role.) was powerful and backed me.  So did that Black Baptist counsellor in Chicago.  I made a lot of mistakes that year, which was a good thing because that counselling woman understood mistakes to be valuable "research."  And she was not afraid of suicide.  She did her job well.  We sorted my past.

In the Sixties in a marriage that ended in near-madness for both of us -- not because of the age mismatch but because of the all-out desperate struggle with fame and fortune -- I longed for some kind of escape.  My step-daughter, my age, was dying of cancer. She looked much like me and her death was almost like a prescription, even a demand. It was almost as though if I died, she would not.  Before we left for her funeral, a thousand miles away, locked into a cyclone, a vortex of emotions, I slashed my wrist.  No one noticed.  I did it wrong and it was never treated.  I just lost a little blood.  All the reading I did talked about how it was attention-seeking, narcissistic, meant to punish everyone else.  But all I felt was misery.

At first I went to a psychiatrist in Great Falls because everyone agreed the pain and chaos was all my fault.  He was partners with another shrink and one had a basset hound named for the other, but I never knew which one had the name and which one had the dog.  He interpreted me as just another selfish little bitch trying to snag money and prestige by marrying a famous artist.  He wouldn't have put it that way, since he was a kind man who meant well.  After a while e was bored and waved me off.

After Bob's daughter died, we decided we would both go for counselling.  Everyone had always told him he was "bad seed" as well, and he was taken aback that his success didn't shut them down.  First he sat down at the adding machine to make a list of our sales that year: half-a-million dollars in Browning, MT.  The psychiatrist was impressed.  Bob asked me to leave the room while he told the man something.  So I did without any idea why.

The two of us had been fighting at an unbearable level and I had threatened to hang myself in front of him.  I had the rope in my hand.  What stopped me was that he cried out, "NO!  I won't be able to save you!"  He was older by then, had had a heart attack, wasn't invincible anymore.  At first I thought that even then he only thought of himself, but later I realized this was the truth.  No one can stop you from suicide but yourself.  Others might be able to help address the reasons.

While I was out of the room, he told the psychiatrist about this.  That man called me back in alone and asked me if I wanted to tell him something.  I had no idea what he meant.  I didn't think suicide was important -- I didn't even remember the incident.  He asked me not to come back unless I was willing to tell him everything.  Many people in that town were suicidal. It wasn't special. I never went back.

The third time was close to the end and wasn't suicide at all, though everyone saw it that way.  Bob was taking Nembutal to sleep, and he kept the pills bedside.  I had what I understood as "flu" but now recognize as serious depression.  All I wanted to do was sleep, so I took a couple of Nembutal.  Later I woke up and took a couple more.  What I didn't know was that Nembutal is a drug with no room for mistakes.  It's pentobarbital, used for euthanasia.  The dosage must be carefully calculated according to the person's age, weight and so on.  A little bit too much, not a LOT more, can cause death.

So a nurse friend of Bob's took me up to Lethbridge and checked me into the hospital for detoxing.  I was high as a kite, drunk, jumping up and down on the bed.  They assigned me a psychiatrist, who listened to the long sad tale and laughed and laughed!  He was handsome and Scottish and knew a desperate grandstander when he saw one.  He had a fine sense of the ridiculousness of life.  Bob divorced me while I was up there.  When he told me,  they had to knock me out.  Such irony. He didn't save me, because I'd already saved myself, but the divorce put things in order.  I could move forward into a new life.

At the hospital I kept phoning Bob, quickly tiptoeing down the hall in my nightie like Bugs Bunny to get to the pay phone without the nurses putting me back in bed.  Now that we weren't married anymore the pressure was off.  He came to get me and I spent the winter on our little ranch with five horses and three cats.  Those months been a lifelong key time for me, returning to a sensory life with the only obligation being to put out the food.  Bob brought it out and paid for everything.   It snowed deeply and the velvet black of death converted to white.  Beauty returned and I wrote.

The Hartford counselling was many years after this.  Bob was remarried, probably in the country way.  He was proud of me, he said.  I had survived the welcome black night of wanting to die.

BLACK DEATH

Death is often depicted as black, or possibly red, but perhaps it ought to be white, as it is in some countries.  We think of black as loss of consciousness, then of lost life processes, then of entering the velvet night of outer space or, if you are brave, nonexistence.  The total lack of light.

"Recently, Scientists have developed a color (nanosubstance), blacker than black, named as VantaBlack. It's so dark (black) that it absorbs everything except 0.035% of visible light."  The color for the death of a planet.

Black is associated with invisibility, though that would technically be "transparent" and some claim that dead people, though invisible, are still with us.  Not only individuals but also events can be either invisible or transparent, particularly disease pandemics.  It is clear and visible to us that the smallpox pandemic that destroyed North American civilization as it existed before 1492 is still with us and sometimes invited.  Trump has blocked the administration of flu vaccine to the immigrants held in unhealthy camps.  People have already died.  Trump himself is suffering from an inherited dementia, a disease with no cure so far and no known disease either, simply a prion -- a misfolded molecule.

Another killer disease is ebola, which comes out of the jungle population but has been prevented from sweeping across the planet -- so far.  A second jungle disease, at first undetected, has changed our lives:  HIV which progresses into AIDS.  These are only the contemporary versions of many waves of plague.

The following quotes come from DelancyPlace.com as it quoted Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

"In the 1300s, Europe's Black Plague brought death to 25 million people, by some estimates a third to a half of its population, and is one of the most famous episodes in history. But that plague had started in China just a few years earlier and killed more people in Asia -- perhaps as many as 40 million -- than in Europe."

"A person [with the plague] could appear healthy in the morning, but suddenly break into hot fever that rapidly gave way to chills accompanied by both vomiting and diarrhea. The bodies of individu­als who had only a short time earlier appeared active and robust suddenly and inexplicably broke down and began to dissolve before the horrified fam­ily observers. Blood began to ooze beneath the skin, which discolored the skin, lumps formed and oozed blood and pus in the groin. The lumps, sub­sequently called buboes from the Greek word for groin, then formed in the armpit and neck, and from them came the medical term for the disease: bubonic plague. When the lumps grew too large, they burst open. The lack of oxygen moving into the body and the dried blood beneath the skin made the person appear to turn black; from this dramatic symptom, the disease became known as the Black Death. After only a few agonizing days of tor­tured pain, the person usually died. In some victims, the disease attacked the lungs rather than the lymph nodes, and as the air in the lungs turned bloody and frothy, they drowned. As they died, they infected those around them by violent coughing, sneezing, and gasping. "According to the most plausible, but not completely verifiable, accounts, the disease originated in the south of China, and Mongol warriors brought it north with them.

"In 1331, chroniclers recorded that 90 percent of the people of Hopei Province died. By 1351, China had reportedly lost between one-half and two-thirds of its population to the plague. The country had included some 123 million inhabitants at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but by the end of the fourteenth century the population dropped to as low as 65 million."

"In the sixty years from 1340 until 1400, according to some estimates, the population of Africa declined from 80 million to 68 million inhabitants, and Asia from 238 million to 201 million. The total world population ­including the Americas, where the plague did not strike for another two centuries -- fell from approximately 450 million to between 350 and 375 mil­lion inhabitants, a net loss of at least 75 million, or more than a million people a year for the remainder of the fourteenth century."

Emphasis added by myself.

These are known, recorded, deadly plagues and I urge you to read both the whole quote on DelancyPlace.com and the Weatherford history. (I don't own it, but it's on my list.)

But particularly in present times the pandemics have moved from microbe invasions to our own production of toxins and spreading of poisonous additives in our food, cosmetics, and houses.  Asbestos, lead. air pollutants, and a plague of killer-intensity weather.  We don't see most of these, unless we take samples into labs for analysis and even then we don't always know what we're looking for, as in the deadly ingredient in electronic nicotine devices.  But they function as plagues -- addictions are plagues.

Perhaps the most deadly plagues of our times are cultural.  Once globalization began and television, the internet, world trade, travel and other forces of survival and expansion covered the globe, culture was no longer local, no longer woven into the ecosystem, but set free from previous limits that had prevented bad consequences.  This is uneven.  There are still people damaged or merely hampered by hanging on to old ways in quiet places.

More than any other dark issue I can think of, disease pits the individual against the group.  Because of attachment and empathy, which are biological and inescapable, we cannot let people we know and care about suffer without being tended and an attempt made to save them.  Though sometimes it is rational to let an individual die or be injured for the sake of the whole -- as in war or sport or the allocation of resources like money -- the Whole rules.  

In fact, this is the position of the authoritarians who want control of nations.  They want to make the Whole primary, even though these authorities are individuals or members of a small group privileged through wealth or heredity.  Maybe they are sincere in imposing deadly mass movements like seizing Ukraine's wheat crop to feed Russia or moving all intellectuals to menial jobs in rural places to prevent them from meddling or organizing concentration camps.  But as individuals, the suffering is immense.  How can it be moral or even effective in the long run?  Not even Trump's wall (a prime opportunity for draining money) can force people to stay on their own side when they lose people they love.

DARK BLOOD

My mother died at age 89 of a blood cancer.  It was a kind that interfered with clotting and it takes five years of gradually increasing fatigue until death.  The treatment of last resort is transfusions of platelets but one can only accept transfusions a limited number of times.  In the end her intestine developed a small hemorrhage that killed her without much pain.

We learned the hard way.  My mother interpreted the sensation as constipation, a familial concern, and took a dose of Milk of Magnesia.  The result was a flood of digested blood, black, that luckily happened in the bathroom. (Very black feces are a sign of cancer.)  Towards the end in the hospital she managed to swindle and pressure the nurse into giving her Milk of Magnesia again and this time it was a black flood of the bed and the adjacent floor.  The woman who came to clean it up was an older Black woman.  She didn't complain but my mother raged indignantly that no human being should have to do that kind of work.

Married to a taxidermist and hunter, I saw the insides of a lot of animals, but was impressed that there wasn't usually much blood.  Most organs and cavities of mammal bodies are lined with silvery membranes that keep muscles grouped.  The exception was the first time I went hunting with Bob and he shot a deer in the high fall snow of the Rockies, gutting it quickly and washing his hands in the crimsoned snowfall.

Vertebrates, meaning creatures with backbones, all have blood.  The fuel of their cells is hemoglobin which is iron-based and capable of carrying oxygen.  "The cell membrane is composed of proteins and lipids, and this structure provides properties essential for physiological cell function such as deformability and stability while traversing the circulatory system and specifically the capillary network.  In humans, mature red blood cells are flexible and oval biconcave disks. They lack a cell nucleus and most organelles, in order to accommodate maximum space for hemoglobin; they can be viewed as sacks of hemoglobin, with a plasma membrane as the sack."  (Wikipedia)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_blood_cell

Unlike all the other cells who stay put, red blood cells move through the body at the rate of one circulation a minute.  "The only known vertebrates without red blood cells are the crocodile icefish (family Channichthyidae); they live in very oxygen-rich cold water and transport oxygen freely dissolved in their blood."  Not only are they cold-blooded, they are also "bloodless" while alive.

Oxygenated vs. depleted

Because of a brilliant high school science teacher, I've watched the exhausted dark blood be infused with oxygen that turned it back to scarlet.  We can see cold extremities and chilled lips turn blue.  In seminary I had a Black Baptist counselor who was fascinated that my face changed color with changes in emotion because my blood circulation changed.  My face didn't go blue, but it did flush and blush.  This is how it is often an indicator of emotion to observers.  From the inside one feels the pulse, the shift, the dizziness.

Metaphors based on blood are everywhere, even in the legal governmental system for indigenous people developed in their dark past, where it stands for provenance, which is genetic relationships.  In the 19th century, when indigenous people were culturally and vividly different enough to be labeled a "race" and get that mixed up with "species", the cavalry tried to cope by listing everyone in each "tribe" which they understood to have distinct edges and be something like nationality.  Today when we have evidence that even Neanderthals could and did interbreed with early modern people, the artificial categories are breaking down. "Species" is defined arbitrarily as creatures who are fertile together. This idea was destroyed nine months after Columbus landed in America but no one admitted it. 

What was called "races" was simply adaptation to place, but the issue is so emotional that "blood" has become a war cry and access to money as well as things like education.  Because the humanity of the indigenous was proven by world wars in which they served, spilling blood alongside everyone else, knowing the four protein types of blood cells -- necessary to know for transfusions -- made "blood" even more vital.  It was noted on dogtags. It became confused with DNA, which is a different cell system that is present in the nucleus and a few of the "inclusions" like mitochondria.  Red blood cells off-load their DNA nuclear instructions to other cells once they have become mature.  This is because they are meant to squeeze through tiny capillaries and can deform themselves to do it but need to stay small.  

A result of diabetes when the sugar load of the blood is high is that getting red blood to the extremities is befuddled.  When I go to bed at night, my feet sting as though they have been frozen and are warming again, because when I sit too long to keyboard, my foot cells don't get blood all the way to the end.  My feet are always cold now, though I used to have hot feet.  Fingers on the keyboard stay warm because muscles moving help the heart push blood to the ends. If blood is blocked too long, as with a tourniquet, cells can die.  If I sit in a way that pinches arteries, my legs go to sleep.

Blood is movement, a rush, darkly plunging through the body, taking up and putting down the load of oxygen it gets from its body partner, the lungs that give it the oxygen.  Not a sensory organ, yet it sustains all relationships with the environment and supports the frame of reference that communicates both raging and gentle attachment between people.  The temperature of blood is controlled by the thalamus, which is kept informed by connection to the skin so it controls both shivering and sweating, indicators of emotion as well as environment.  The sweat rolls off visibly from guilty politicians. Their blood pressure is high.

Blood is passion, the color of love and gallantry, the indicator of wounds and sealer of loyalty oaths.  Crime vids are splashed with it, usually as vivid and bright as possible, but sometimes it can be depicted with chocolate syrup, dark, but bitter rather than sweet, old blood rather than pulsing new, as bright as poppies in the wind.

ATTACHMENT STYLES

"Attachment" is the beginning of a new creature's life in the process of meiosis, which was an evolutionary step that began each new life inside the body of the female parent, the one with equipment for supported such a thing.  When a sperm penetrates the ovum in the  mother, for a brief period it is a one-celled animal, floating, hopefully in the uterus after a trip through the fallopian tube.  The ovum develops in the ovaries and makes a little jump from there through the fallopian "tubes" which are misnamed since they look in a photo more like little roses that beckon the unfertilized egg to the proper place to be fertilized.

These are photos of fallopian tubes, looking like roses.  One might say a rose was actually a fallopian tube to carry pollen to the germ of the flower.

"Attachment" is the moment when the new microscopic creature literally attaches to the internal wall of the uterus.  We tend to think of this benignly as though it were like a suction cup, but in fact the new conceptus bores or eats a hole to get access to the blood feeds that come to the uterus through arteries.  Access is what keeps it alive.  Otherwise, about half of the little beginnings fail and are absorbed or washed out by menstrual sluffing.  

Thus, attachment is a biological event.  It is not conscious, maybe not possible to feel, even for the mother though some will claim they  do.  More likely the mother feels the changes in her body when  the process begins because her body interprets attachment as invasion from a foreign entity and tries to get rid of it.  We sentimentalize conception.  Here is a vivid account of the war to begin living.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-between-mother-and-baby?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=34ea80cfe5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_11_27_11_51&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-34ea80cfe5-68600437

This is the first dark and bloody ground of being, a war based on survival as are most wars.  The conceptus is a predator.  This is a paradigm that underlies what in the mother may be nausea because she IS the ground of being.  It is her blood that carries nutrients to the new being as it develops an envelope and umbilical tube so it can float safely, cushioned by the amniotic fluid.  In the meantime the mother will need to have a social embrace to keep her body fluids safely constituted with hormones, proteins, her own emotional chemistry and general health.

Once born, the new being must make a new kind of attachment, an invisible but impelling desire to relate to the environment, which is mostly the mother who provides milk and cleaning and protective embrace.  Sucking, stroking, rocking and, in some cases, licking are vital beginnings of construction in the baby's body, brain included, of person-ality, the conviction of what the environment is like, based on experience and its own capacity to absorb experience.  This work continues through the first few years of life and shapes its "operating system."

We sentimentalize gestation and birth, making something bloody and painful into an emotional event.  Before modern medicine and today when apart from access to care, mothers die. In the 19th century it was not unusual for a woman to give birth several times but then then die,  so that a second wife raised the children, which interrupted the world-building of the child.

Attachment as an origin of personhood is a body of research and reflection today.  A "typology" has developed in that relentless way of research.

The four child/adult attachment styles are:

• Secure – autonomous;
• Avoidant – dismissing;
• Anxious – preoccupied; and.
• Disorganized – unresolved.

The idea is that the quality of one's original attachment will be reflected in the person's "style".  Of course everyone wants to be secure and confident, but in later intimate events -- or maybe something so environmentally prescribed as school and work -- this "style" can translate in other ways.  The avoidant child can become the dance-away lover, or the employee who never settles into a job but always quits and moves on.  The anxious or disorganized child can need help to manage tasks and beliefs in various coping ways or compensations.  There are many examples in the literature.  Of course, the co-habiting family and the mother continue to provide a kind of social uterus.  At least in an ideal world, but no world is ever ideal for very long.  

The struggle to stay attached to the environment -- which of course includes other people who may be the biggest threat  -- can create major achievements.  I would add to this list of styles a 5th way, which is the provoking child, the one who attacks providers, always testing their level of commitment as well as his or her capacity to feel alive by smashing into other people.  Nice therapeutic psychologists try to avoid such cases.  They are often self-destructive and even suicidal, which can be an ultimate provocation.  "If you are attached to me (love me) give me what I want, which is control of you."  Attachment to such people (love) is often powered by a desire to help others, to heal the world, which is obvious in a good caregiver.  This impulse can become problematic, smothering the object or provoking the provider to violence.

All of this is story fodder.  Even a source of poetry.  It affects religion.

In the Unitarian movement there is a public example, a man who calls himself the "Emerson Avenger."  He had a mystic vision of great significance to him, but when he took it to his minister, that man pushed him away, scoffed at visions.  His style was dance-away, sceptical, based on cool prestige.  As a revenge, this visionary man began to attack all Unitarian ministers, comparing them unfavorably to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a kind of Unitarian saint in a time when the American movement was just forming, a man whose private life was quite different from the way he was seen.  Part of one's attachment style often involves distortion of reputation, performance.  

Since this modern man was living a century later, the shift in moral values about sex had just responded to the new contraceptive pill by allowing the discard of a lot of 19th century tenets, weakening the prohibition on clergy having sex outside marriage, particularly within the congregation.  Thus the Emerson Avenger had plenty of material for attacks and started a blog, the modern way to get and keep attention.  He defeated all attempts to shut him down or shoo him away.  I gave it a little try.

Our whole culture, the whole world's culture, is struggling -- sometimes murderously -- to understand.  Holidays and heart-shaped jewelry thrive on all this.  But the underside is very dark, violent, and lethal.  Much of biology is like that.

HURLED INTO THE DARK

My manuscript for "The Bone Chalice", or at least one version of it since it began as my Div School master's thesis in 1982, has been posted to Academia.com where I'm told it's being read.  Academia makes its money by charging membership to see who reads it and where they are, but I don't really care about specifics and am not nursing a career, so I don't pay them anything.   Others, esp young scholars, probably should.  They are more motivated and worldwide than the Humanities network. (H- preface, like H-Amerindian)  Book publishers should note that I'm getting more readers from Academia than from Amazon.

Two forces now:  one is that the ideas about sensory thinking and basics like liminal time and space, have become common among many people.  The other is the scary impact of more recent research:  the illimitable vastness of time and space, the actual mechanisms of the cell, the shared horizontal web of DNA, the shared deaths of climate change, the intractable nature of political nations.  As the solstice approaches (Dec. 21) we are doing studies of the Sun with a small theoretically heat-compensated satellite circling ever closer.  That is, as the darkness comes, the danger of knowledge increases.

So I've ended "The Bone Chalice" because it is too close to the perversion of the "brain in a bucket" thought of the past, augmented by computers to believe that thinking is everything.  I meant to suggest the fire of thought contained in the cup of the skull, but that's outdated.  it's just another strategy for compliance to goals defined by someone else, someone guarded against the protests of the general population.  Now I go to feeling and what I feel is the dark.

The dark is not as much of a problem of what one realizes when the dark pulls back, revealing who one really is, what the world really does, and the basic fact that this universe feels nothing, responds to everything, gives "hominins" no privilege which is demonstrated by how many versions have come and gone without leaving more than their bones and a little of their creations.

We are narcissists, all of us, no exceptions.  Yet self-care is one of our worst dangers, leading us into blindness and numbness.  Our families are not as nurturing as those of chimps, and yet we can't settle on a new alternative and maybe we shouldn't.  Some families are killers.  I'm not talking about hired assassins but about narcissists who can't even extend their circles to the children who come out of their flesh.  And they actively seek to kill the children of others.

The answer to famine is not some laboratory where fake meat is invented.  The answer is people who are close enough to the earth to make food from plants and animals.  The first to die of hunger will be the city dwellers, but they will come marauding the rural.  The records of this happening again and again are ten thousand years old.  War, displaced people, desperation, are as old as agriculture.  Once fishing was a dependable alternative but not anymore.

The internet and satellites give us a whole new world, but it is very fragile and depends upon the harvest of energy.  Our power grid could be ended in a flash by a solar outburst, a hacking teenager, a powerburst of mammoth proportions, by the breakdown of the polar jet stream, a hostile rival, or corporate fear of starting overwhelming insurance claims from fires started by unmaintained powerlines.

Because the lives of humans are short, but not as short as those of dogs, we ignore the big shifts that have previously wiped life away from the face of the planet.  We don't let people know or like anything that is different, stigmatizing and starving them, entangling them in preying behavior so we can justify killing them.  Amazingly, the victims of stigma who learn to help each other can create alternative civilizations, like those that have grown up around deafness or HIV, so that eventually they become powerful enough to force what they need out of the main culture.  Two capacities save humans:  the tendency to group for a common reason and the tendency to be different, to resist all groups, so that there is always a survivor.

Probably the hardest part of investigating the "dark" is going into the subconscious because it contains the accumulated history of all previous creatures from fish to reptiles to mammals to primates.  Our jealousy, hatred, sociopathy, territoriality, and a lot of other destructive wiring is in all of us.  Realizing that is so dangerous that one needs a guide, a supporter, someone to prevent us from choosing death long enough to figure out our lives.  In my experience, most therapists are not strong or responsible enough to do this.  Some are. Their strength doesn't come from learning but from facing human struggle.

I'm keeping a random list of random importance or relevance as ideas occur.  As follows so far:

• Suffering: why do we? It's not all physical but sometimes mental and emotional.  Nausea is a torture strategy. So is grief.
• Mystery: not only do we not know stuff, but we know that there is stuff we can't even grasp or imagine, stuff we can't know we don't know.  Knowing it exists is not to realize what it means anyway.
• Blood soaked earth: the image of the blood of the victim is renewed by every murder mystery.  We can find traces of battles that are noted in the Bible, valleys with no blood you can see, but plenty of bone.  Blood is an excellent manure.  It is also a powerful laxative.  Blood cells have no DNA.
• Dark wash of sleep:  Without sleep our brains are overwhelmed by hallucination.  When we sleep the brain cells pull in their edges and plasma fluid washes among them like the canals of Venice taking away the unwanted.  Not all dark is bad. 
• Evil:  The universe is not capable of morality. It is indifferent. Evil is in our response but we project it onto other sources.
• Violence:  Using force to compel some end is a slippery subject.  The taboo on using violence can cause violence or BE a kind of violence, failing to act.
• Death:  One of small legal entities that allows physician-administered death has had so many requests that they think of withdrawing the provision.  They'd rather see people die in plain sight on the sidewalk, or in the view of monitoring cameras during confinement.
• Truth:  One could say this is the death of the self-image.
• Deception/performance:  At what point does theatre become a lie?  Or does it tell us what is truly true?