Not Defeated, Defooted

 

I broke my foot. All it took was a simple stroll through a small forested park behind grandma's house. The walk lasted less than five minutes. At the doctor the next day he told me the ligaments in the ankle tore the cuboid bone out of place when it rolled, breaking it. It's called avulsion. That's why I can't walk now. Of course the timing of this injury is atrocious. For 4 - 6 weeks I'll need to wear a boot and keep weight off the foot. Once the boot is off the damage will need to be reassessed. According to sources online, some number of additional months will be needed for the bone to recover, if at all. There goes my dance career.

What this will mean for our current journey in the van is still unclear. In this condition I cannot work as a farmhand or laborer in any capacity. It goes without saying that this threatens to entirely derail our plans. Our upcoming trip to Ireland, slated for next week, will need to be cancelled or postponed. Now I find myself jobless, homeless and disabled. When it rains it pours. I'm trying not to succumb to defeat, but it's hard when you're de-footed. Currently, I'm horizontal in Austria. Previously we'd made plans to join Asia's family down here for an extended weekend of hiking. They'll be pulling me up the mountain in a special extreme off-road wheelchair. 

Yesterday I recorded a podcast episode in an attempt to make sense of all of this. Perhaps it's too soon to do so. How long after the house has burned down should we wait to begin asking ourselves why? During this recorded session of sad self-inquiry alone in front of the microphone, I tired to explore the rich range of feelings erupting inside the confines of my skull. A great stirring of birds; anger, sadness, frustration, guilt, shame, helplessness, confusion, remorse. They caw and screech and cluck and wheeze with tormenting alacrity. One topic which emerged during the process was of certain archetypal or mythological energies: The Wild Man, The Trickster, The Disgusting Man, The Lawnmower Man, etc. In particular, I was contemplating the role of alcohol as an anti-moderating agent on some of these forces. For the most part, I've stopped drinking. Admittedly there's still the occasional beer or, even more occasionally, the glass of wine, but all-in-all my drinking habits have improved steadily over the past 5 years. Still, though, complete sobriety hasn't been something in the cards for me. Why?

Something about alcohol opens the lock on the door where I've hidden the clandestine, bastard love-child of these three mythological men. The wild, disgusting trickster rears his ugly, cackling, salivating, flatulent head when enough booze has entered my bloodstream. A possible hypothesis is that I haven't yet found a way to summon this entity in a socially acceptable way, so when it appears, it expresses itself in a kind of compensatory fashion to make up for lost time. So badly it wants to elicit a reaction, to discover a boundary, or to bend the shape of a conversational container, that in its excitement it leaps balls-first into the most depraved, raunchy and puerile end of the pool. Obviously, this can be jarring for some. Particularly if those people - listeners in this case - are of modest sensibilities, or have a more conventional sense of humor.

This morning I woke just after 6:00 thinking about the episode I'd published the bay before. Instinctively I felt that I needed to delete it - that it should be pulled. It's too lewd, too crass, too dangerous. My mind went on. What if a previous guest listens to that? Or an upcoming one? Don't you have a duty to your listeners and your guests to conduct yourself in a way that doesn't unsettle them? Do you really want to shoot yourself in the foot for a blowjob joke? Look what happened to Bill Clinton! Is it that important to talk about shitting and farting? The answer, I think, is yes - but perhaps not for the reasons you might initially think. Ultimately it comes down to authenticity and self-censorship. A podcast is an experimental space. It's a mixture of art and conversation. The medium is inherently expressive and it rewards - at least in the current climate - vulnerability and the honest presentation of self...even if some of those parts of the self are uncomfortable. Imagine for a second a child afraid to tell her parents that she's gay. She lives her life concealing a part of her identity for fear of rejection, or fear of offending her parents' conservative values. Isn't it better to be rejected for who you are than to be accepted for who you're not? Sure, my situation is different (some might say, perhaps rightly, that it's incomparable and easy for me to say as a straight white male), the stakes are not nearly as high, but the guiding principle underneath is the same. Being seen and accepted for who we are is something fundamental to the human experience.

Risk is a necessary ingredient for any artistic endeavour or creative project, and sometimes things don't land as the author intended. In this regard, imperfection is essential. Without missteps it's impossible to properly calibrate the artistic impulse. Despite this, something about the concept of artistic self-censorship bothers me. I'm my own content creator, editor, and music maker, and by virtue of this, I'm not beholden to the interests of any sponsor or label. Artistic liberty is one of the hallmarks of being an independent creative. So then my mind whispers. Isn't it possible to channel the wild disgusting trickster without talking about adult themes or using offensive imagery. Yes. That's the task. But shouldn't offensive content always remain on the table!? While reading Robert Bly's Iron John I came across the following passage:

Sometimes when friends are talking in a closed room, the heat of the conversation begins to increase: witty things are said; contributions flow from all sides; leaps of imagination appear; the genuinely spiritual follows an instant after the genuinely obscene. Hermes has arrived. At some beautiful moment of the conversation a silence falls that feels mysterious; everyone hesitates to break it. In Spain until the fifteenth century that silence was called "Hermes' silence." So Lopez-Pedraza says in his fine book on Hermes.

The old tradition maintains that true learning does not take place unless Hermes is present. That is depressing, because university English departments, and sociology departments, and religion departments usually get rid of teachers with Hermes energy first. The whole Ph.D. system was created by Germanic Hermes-killers. Hermes is magical, detail-loving, obscene, dancelike, goofy, and not on a career track.

I've bolded the portions of the piece that I think get at the heart of what I'm trying to name. It should seem obvious then that Hermes is the patron saint of psychedelics. What are psychedelics if not the mystical alchemical chemicals of the trickster? Left to its own device the modern mind, conditioned by capitalist interests and a compulsive optimization towards comfort, seeks to think in straight, orderly lines. Our lives, by virtue of the larger society in which we currently find ourselves situated, is predicated on forecasting, planning, prediction - logical repeatable laws and patterns, which, above all else, are knowable, observable and measurable. Then, unexpectedly, the trickster comes along. Suddenly those straight lines begin to bend. Abrupt blind turns appear. All predictability and knowability are lost, replaced with frightening irregularity and a bewildering, dreamlike imagination capable of catapulting us to towering heights or unfathomable depths. There is little to hold onto as we spill into the void. Sprawling. Falling. Drifting. Floating. Dissolving. The edges of our conscious container rattle and warp. Reality is reborn anew. Once this occurs, once this new Hermetic energy unseals the old self, an enchanted awareness emerges. This new state of being is charged with curiosity, creativity, mystery, and a dizzying elasticity. It is no small wonder that from this deformed yet formless container the liminal and numinous give rise to the mystical, the spiritual, the sacred and the obscene.

Personally, I've always found the blending of the genuinely spiritual with the genuinely obscene to be deeply satisfying and essential. The sacred needs the profane. Just like the darkness needs the light; each produces blindness absent the other. But how to profane while holding all things sacred? Does that seem a contradiction? It needn't be a paradox or a puzzling Buddhist koan. Is nature perverse when it strikes down one infant while nurturing another? When it culls an entire forest in a fire? How can such a live-giving, life-serving force be so heartless, destructive and cruel? Perhaps because it's both and neither. We as humans have the tendency to perceive things in binary, dualistic terms and then stretch that map over the fabric of reality like some cartoonish condom preventing us from interfacing with reality as it is. We do this in our evaluations of people, too. We seldom view a person in their totality. Instead there's a tendency to define others by their best and basest aspects...

A backpacker is traveling through Ireland when it starts to rain. He decides to wait out the storm in a nearby pub. The only other person at the bar is an older man staring at his drink. After a few moments of silence the man turns to the backpacker and says in a thick Irish accent:

"You see this bar? I built this bar with my own bare hands. I cut down every tree and made the lumber myself. I toiled away through the wind and cold, but do they call me McGreggor the bar builder? No."

He continued "Do you see that stone wall out there? I built that wall with my own bare hands. I found every stone and placed them just right through the rain and the mud, but do they call me McGreggor the wall builder? No."

"Do you see that pier out there on the lake? I built that pier with my own bare hands, driving each piling deep into ground so that it would last a lifetime. Do they call me McGreggor the pier builder? No."

"But you fuck one goat.."