I lament the loss of subtlety. We live in a contentious time, where every debate, from the inane to the profound, pricks us to the barricades, torches and pitchforks held high. I long for adult conversation. I long for depth of opinion. I long for complex discussion where a dark subject leads to a brilliant discourse.
Take the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The suffering of innocents in Gaza, especially children, is an affront to humanity. Netanyahu and his right-wing government is a disaster, and their continued disregard for and provocation of Palestinians has surely contributed to this mess. I am disgusted. I am outraged. I am horrified. I am in support of a Jewish state.
What, what? But those things are completely opposed!
I trust nothing and no one that smacks of anti-Semitism. None of us raised in the last 2,000 years should ever underestimate this bigotry’s insidious power upon our individual and collective consciousness, and where rejoice the anti-Semites, the racists, the homophobes, the misogynists are not far-behind. As a teen and then into college, I studied the Holocaust, perhaps in an attempt to stare into the heart of darkness that is the soul. No answer did I discover, but a recognition that the abyss is bottomless. Given that, I brook no Jew-hating, obfuscated or overt.
Trump is a monster. I can’t wait until he’s dead. I’ll dance in the street when he is. I think his devotees and the self-deluded, “socially liberal” Republicans who fear the Democrats more than authoritarianism will, if they gain power, destroy the tatters of our American experiment. I also feel sympathy for his middle-America voters dispossessed of education, good nutrition, and workers’ rights. I see how this basket of deplorables got woven into that basket by Republican treachery and Democratic arrogance.
I worry about queer kids. I want them to grow up in a world where they can be who they want, where they can express themselves as their inner compass guides them, where they can declare themselves liberated from hierarchical concepts of romance, gender, and sexuality. And I don’t believe children should be given puberty blockers and certainly not taken in for any surgical alterations before they’ve reached adulthood. (Well, at least not before they’ve reached legality; frankly, the frontal cortex isn’t fully developed until our late 20s, but that’s a big ask.) That being said, I never vote for the Republicans who use this issue as a cloak for their hatred, false pieties that are as transparent as anyone who claims to care for children and yet cuts funding to public education.
Let’s dig into the last example, because it’s the most personal. In my childhood, I never thought of myself as a boy. It never crossed my mind. I was a fey kid, who loved art and opera, who sang “The Ladies Who Lunch” on the front lawn at eight years-old, who wore his turtlenecks unfurled because it made the neck more graceful – you get the idea. While I didn’t conceive of myself as a boy, I also didn’t want to be a girl. I didn’t want a different body, but if I had grown up today with well-meaning, liberal parents, and a kind-hearted, ill-informed medical team, I would have been shoved into the medical pipeline of gender-affirming care, and it would have been a fucking calamity.
I knew then, and know more now, that I am both. I am body of a man, soul of a woman. I am third-gender. I contain multitudes. The balance of archetypes dwells within my very frame – the male form and the divine goddess power that swirls through it. I don’t get into pronouns, because I don’t care what other people think of me or call me. I’m not looking for validation from a culture in collapse, and no three-to-four letter word reflects my glory.
My incarnation is embodied metaphor for what I know spiritually: I am not one thing, I am all of it. Whenever I’ve been deep in meditation, or ritual, or any of the ecstatic practices I’ve explored – tarantella, Sufi whirling, trance dance, bellydance, kirtan, chanting, prayer, astral projection – I’ve known myself as a beautiful combination of masculine and feminine, as a priestess of the Great Mother, as one of the asushunamir of Inanna, as one of the galli of Cybele, as one of the Mollies of England, the aesthetes of fin de siècle Europe, the Radical Faeries of 20th-century America, all these and more.
And therein lies my lament for the loss of subtlety. Through my own experience and exploration, I’ve learned that I am full of, what Keats might call, negative capability, and more than that, so is everyone else, if we allow it. When we embrace the pairs of opposites, instead of staking a claim on shallow ground, we break down the walls we profess to be against, but perversely support. This takes work. It takes commitment. It takes an investment in our own depth, but what else is there in life?
Joseph Campbell’s map of the heroic journey includes the exciting parts we all imagine – the call to adventure, supernatural aid, meeting the monster, slaying the dragon of our own limitation and trauma – but it also includes the return to society. Obsessed with trauma and colonization and rage, we forget what it’s all for: a re-integration into the world as we carry the wisdom of a wild, transcendent/immanent consciousness, thereby awakening divine beauty within our homes, neighborhoods, communities, cities, even nations. We’re not to get trapped in the jaws of the dragon; we’re to slay it, or, sometimes, make a friend of it.
Until we embrace complexity, we’ll devolve deeper into tribalism, into absolutes, into a new Terror. I see too many Madame DeFarges on the news and in the streets, and as much as I love her as a literary character, she’s not a hero: she’s a fanatic.
(The photo above of “Keep Calm and Destroy Hamas” I took in my neighborhood. The lady with the big mouth is the great Elaine Stritch in the original cast of Sondheim’s “Company.” The frieze is of a gallus, one of the ancient, gender-bending priestesses of the Magna Mater of Rome, Cybele. The last picture is of the riveting Blanche Yurka as Madame DeFarge in the 1935 film “A Tale of Two Cities.” If you don’t read the book, at least watch this gal chew the scenery in the movie.)
This is a superb piece. Your best yet imho. Crisp, clear and illuminating. And so profoundly relevant. The world needs this medicine.
Such an incisive piece and, like you, I bemoan the loss of subtlety that plagues us.