I had a professor of cultural anthropology at U Michigan who was considered the bad boy of the field, ripe with revolutionary rhetoric and writings. He would now be considered mainstream, but at that time, the department had actual social scientists who saw him for what he was: an enormous ego inflated by moderate talent and a ripe – and reciprocated – lust for women. The phrase I remember him most for was “epistemic murk,” which he used to describe people or cultures with limited or negligible boundaries to their realities. “I love chaos,” his third wife once told me just before they headed off to the New School in New York, where I heard he had a literal harem of female admirers. I do hope she continued to love chaos, but somehow I doubt it.
Chaos: every rebel artist sees himself as the avatar of chaos, and for good reason. In chaos, new horizons are discovered which are lived as separate realities, or even new dimensions. For reasons both known and unknown, our society lives for the new, as opposed to traditional societies that cling to the perfection of the old, and the author of novelty is often treated to great wealth or even popular deification, if only for that person’s fifteen minutes. I have had a personal fling with it myself, although I have never had the talent to be an artist. For me, getting involved with the novel ideas created in the epistemic murk of hallucinogenic drugs and cultural deconstruction was (supposed to be) enough to propel me to sub-genius status, hopefully genius enough to get a small harem of hot co-eds myself.
Alas, we know the end to that story. But it is true – in chaos we CAN find new realities, powerful enough to appear as new dimensions. Thing is, only the greatest of megalomaniacal egos can handle such chaos. As inflated as my ego was, it was brought to the altar of the weird and found wanting. I found it scary and nightmarish in that distorted church, and - sniff – I wanted to go home. After a time, I did.
Years and decades later, I found myself cruising the less frightening frontier of Netflix, that area that exists after all the good stuff has been watched, and there I was confronted with someone who’s ego was not only big enough for that other dimension, but owned it as much as any human in this world could.
The documentary is called “Struggle – The Life and Lost Art of Szukalaski,” directed by Leonardo DiCaprio and his father, about the Polish/American artist and sculptor, Stanislaw Szukalaski. His sculptures were done with great skill, but were also grotesque in ways oddly familiar to me. After watching the documentary for a while, I found out why: once in America, Stanislaw discovered the pre-Columbian art of Mesoamerica, including the Mayan and Inca’s, art that he considered “pure” and free of degenerate Western influences. He had been a recognized artist without that presence, but it was this influence that truly made him known to me. In was in this alien world where he found ripe material for his genius and a gift for stunning novelty. And it was to this same world that I had once traveled and had been repelled, and was now reminded with shuddering certainty that I could go to again.
American Indians: as with many in our country, I had long been drawn to them, but primarily to the woodland and prairie cultures within our current national boundaries. But I had also always had a fascination with Mexican culture, and by college had been drawn into studies of Spanish, of Latin America, and of pre-Columbian art. The latter I found both compelling and disturbing, more so because it was clear what a lot of that art was meant to represent: death, suffering, blood sacrifice, and inevitable, crushing doom. Towards the end of these undergraduate studies, I came to know a graduate student of mycology who was paying the bills by growing and selling psilocybin mushrooms, which were called the “food of the gods” by the priests of several Mesoamerican cultures (in fact, this “food” was rediscovered by the West in Oaxaca in the 1950’s, where its use had continued secretly in the shadow of Spanish cultural dominance). I visited his “farm” more than a few times, and it was in the trips lent by his crop where I had come to better understand the greatness and ferocity represented by this art.
Chaos cannot exist by itself, but only by a disturbance of a formerly firm reality. The Mesoamerican reality was not chaos, but was another form of understanding so alien to the West at the time of the Conquest that is seemed diabolical – which in many ways it was – and to the Western mind of today appears to be chaotic. But that is only so because its premises cannot fit within our shared cultural tapestry.
Broken down to the simplest terms, the universe of the Mesoamerican empires was dominated by the reptilian mindset, where the crudest of human desires were matched with the steaming and consumptive reality of the tropics. In that world, one lizard eats another, which reproduces with another, whose offspring eat another, and so on and on forever until, as this form of logic holds, the universal energy is eaten by itself – the classic dragon or snake eating its own tail. In this world, then, life must be given to the source of life, the sun, or all life will die out. There is no pity or respite here, just as a snake will not have pity on its prey, or on its offspring. Here, nature is automatic and final, as loving as a falling bolder and just as inevitable.
This world also must come to an end, as no amount of human sacrifice of life can match the overall loss of life force. The energy of the living inevitably must peter out, but there is always the eternal hold beneath all reality that defies logic and creates life out of nothing. From this, another age is born.
On the other hand, the Christian world of the West is based on mammalian logic. Here, we might find warm and fuzzy consolation, as self-sacrifice and peaceful cooperation is emphasized. Here, the gods – represented in one overarching God – sacrifices himself so that humans will not die out, but will live forever. This world, too, will end, but not because of entropy; rather, the reptilian forces - the snakes in the garden – must instead be vanquished first before a new and permanent kingdom of love is established.
It is telling that Stanislaw’s work was heavily influenced by Nazi philosophy, combining the concept of the Man-God (the Nietzschian superman) with extreme nationalism. This is the abode of the reptile, where force and existentialism (that is, living only for today) prevail. Ideally, this was the opposite of Marxism, where people were destined to become One, a proletariat of equals, each giving and receiving selflessly to and from one another. However, the later was a false premise, based on an abstraction that was blind to the full reality of what it is to be human. Because the ideal was unachievable, the Marxists, too, were (are) compelled to use force as relentlessly as the fascists, turning the promised warm fur of collective comfort into the far colder and harder scales of a totalitarian state.
Which leads us to the confusion of today. Szukalaski was well aware of the American paradox in the post-war years, where he saw US culture being shamelessly manipulated by market forces, giving us a form of headless (mindless) materialism. This did not square with the noble image of a free and democratic society. In time, the marketing firms learned to play with this unease, co-opting the mammalian cultural structure to extend goods to everyone in a superficial bow to humanism, while increasingly pushing forward an agenda where all are indistinguishable, either by race, nationality, or gender. There is little that is warm or fuzzy about this. Rather, raw power was unleashed to extinguish our differences, to make us into working and consuming widgets in a one-world oligarchy, in what is now called by some the “Great Reset” or the new “One World Order.” This has brought our collective anxiety to unbearable levels.
The confusion is between the message and the reality of this new system. Unrelenting force – the reptilian mindset – is being used to make us into good little mammal-sheep, whether we want to be or not. In pushing back at this force, we are told that we are fascists or racists, ‘et al’ – that is, reptiles. At the same time, we are told that the reptiles running the show are only good shepherds, although it is very clear that self-interest rules above all. Thus we have entered a vast, world-wide era of cognitive and cultural chaos.
And so, we must welcome in this new era of chaos so beloved by artistic genius. As we are neither reptiles nor sheep, but creatures of reason who long to pull opposing forces together into a cohesive whole, this era will not last long. Something new will come, and be upon us relatively soon. The new era on the horizon will probably tip towards either the mammalian or the reptilian templates, but not necessarily. In chaos, as my professor said, is epistemic murk, and out of this cognitive muck, anything can arise, utopian or dystopian, or something altogether, something well beyond our cultural contexts. In this time of increasing confusion, then, we must ask for prayer, for it is there in the fields of chaos and creativity where the gods, or God, walks. Out of this infinite garden, anything is possible. So let us pray, especially so that the god who answers us is the Good Shephard and not the hungry snake.
I had a professor of cultural anthropology at U Michigan who was considered the bad boy of the field, ripe with revolutionary rhetoric and writings. He would now be considered mainstream, but at that time, the department had actual social scientists who saw him for what he was: an enormous ego inflated by moderate talent and a ripe – and reciprocated – lust for women. The phrase I remember him most for was “epistemic murk,” which he used to describe people or cultures with limited or negligible boundaries to their realities. “I love chaos,” his third wife once told me just before they headed off to the New School in New York, where I heard he had a literal harem of female admirers. I do hope she continued to love chaos, but somehow I doubt it.
Chaos: every rebel artist sees himself as the avatar of chaos, and for good reason. In chaos, new horizons are discovered which are lived as separate realities, or even new dimensions. For reasons both known and unknown, our society lives for the new, as opposed to traditional societies that cling to the perfection of the old, and the author of novelty is often treated to great wealth or even popular deification, if only for that person’s fifteen minutes. I have had a personal fling with it myself, although I have never had the talent to be an artist. For me, getting involved with the novel ideas created in the epistemic murk of hallucinogenic drugs and cultural deconstruction was (supposed to be) enough to propel me to sub-genius status, hopefully genius enough to get a small harem of hot co-eds myself.
Alas, we know the end to that story. But it is true – in chaos we CAN find new realities, powerful enough to appear as new dimensions. Thing is, only the greatest of megalomaniacal egos can handle such chaos. As inflated as my ego was, it was brought to the altar of the weird and found wanting. I found it scary and nightmarish in that distorted church, and - sniff – I wanted to go home. After a time, I did.
Years and decades later, I found myself cruising the less frightening frontier of Netflix, that area that exists after all the good stuff has been watched, and there I was confronted with someone who’s ego was not only big enough for that other dimension, but owned it as much as any human in this world could.
The documentary is called “Struggle – The Life and Lost Art of Szukalaski,” directed by Leonardo DiCaprio and his father, about the Polish/American artist and sculptor, Stanislaw Szukalaski. His sculptures were done with great skill, but were also grotesque in ways oddly familiar to me. After watching the documentary for a while, I found out why: once in America, Stanislaw discovered the pre-Columbian art of Mesoamerica, including the Mayan and Inca’s, art that he considered “pure” and free of degenerate Western influences. He had been a recognized artist without that presence, but it was this influence that truly made him known to me. In was in this alien world where he found ripe material for his genius and a gift for stunning novelty. And it was to this same world that I had once traveled and had been repelled, and was now reminded with shuddering certainty that I could go to again.
American Indians: as with many in our country, I had long been drawn to them, but primarily to the woodland and prairie cultures within our current national boundaries. But I had also always had a fascination with Mexican culture, and by college had been drawn into studies of Spanish, of Latin America, and of pre-Columbian art. The latter I found both compelling and disturbing, more so because it was clear what a lot of that art was meant to represent: death, suffering, blood sacrifice, and inevitable, crushing doom. Towards the end of these undergraduate studies, I came to know a graduate student of mycology who was paying the bills by growing and selling psilocybin mushrooms, which were called the “food of the gods” by the priests of several Mesoamerican cultures (in fact, this “food” was rediscovered by the West in Oaxaca in the 1950’s, where its use had continued secretly in the shadow of Spanish cultural dominance). I visited his “farm” more than a few times, and it was in the trips lent by his crop where I had come to better understand the greatness and ferocity represented by this art.
Chaos cannot exist by itself, but only by a disturbance of a formerly firm reality. The Mesoamerican reality was not chaos, but was another form of understanding so alien to the West at the time of the Conquest that is seemed diabolical – which in many ways it was – and to the Western mind of today appears to be chaotic. But that is only so because its premises cannot fit within our shared cultural tapestry.
Broken down to the simplest terms, the universe of the Mesoamerican empires was dominated by the reptilian mindset, where the crudest of human desires were matched with the steaming and consumptive reality of the tropics. In that world, one lizard eats another, which reproduces with another, whose offspring eat another, and so on and on forever until, as this form of logic holds, the universal energy is eaten by itself – the classic dragon or snake eating its own tail. In this world, then, life must be given to the source of life, the sun, or all life will die out. There is no pity or respite here, just as a snake will not have pity on its prey, or on its offspring. Here, nature is automatic and final, as loving as a falling bolder and just as inevitable.
This world also must come to an end, as no amount of human sacrifice of life can match the overall loss of life force. The energy of the living inevitably must peter out, but there is always the eternal hold beneath all reality that defies logic and creates life out of nothing. From this, another age is born.
On the other hand, the Christian world of the West is based on mammalian logic. Here, we might find warm and fuzzy consolation, as self-sacrifice and peaceful cooperation is emphasized. Here, the gods – represented in one overarching God – sacrifices himself so that humans will not die out, but will live forever. This world, too, will end, but not because of entropy; rather, the reptilian forces - the snakes in the garden – must instead be vanquished first before a new and permanent kingdom of love is established.
It is telling that Stanislaw’s work was heavily influenced by Nazi philosophy, combining the concept of the Man-God (the Nietzschian superman) with extreme nationalism. This is the abode of the reptile, where force and existentialism (that is, living only for today) prevail. Ideally, this was the opposite of Marxism, where people were destined to become One, a proletariat of equals, each giving and receiving selflessly to and from one another. However, the later was a false premise, based on an abstraction that was blind to the full reality of what it is to be human. Because the ideal was unachievable, the Marxists, too, were (are) compelled to use force as relentlessly as the fascists, turning the promised warm fur of collective comfort into the far colder and harder scales of a totalitarian state.
Which leads us to the confusion of today. Szukalaski was well aware of the American paradox in the post-war years, where he saw US culture being shamelessly manipulated by market forces, giving us a form of headless (mindless) materialism. This did not square with the noble image of a free and democratic society. In time, the marketing firms learned to play with this unease, co-opting the mammalian cultural structure to extend goods to everyone in a superficial bow to humanism, while increasingly pushing forward an agenda where all are indistinguishable, either by race, nationality, or gender. There is little that is warm or fuzzy about this. Rather, raw power was unleashed to extinguish our differences, to make us into working and consuming widgets in a one-world oligarchy, in what is now called by some the “Great Reset” or the new “One World Order.” This has brought our collective anxiety to unbearable levels.
The confusion is between the message and the reality of this new system. Unrelenting force – the reptilian mindset – is being used to make us into good little mammal-sheep, whether we want to be or not. In pushing back at this force, we are told that we are fascists or racists, ‘et al’ – that is, reptiles. At the same time, we are told that the reptiles running the show are only good shepherds, although it is very clear that self-interest rules above all. Thus we have entered a vast, world-wide era of cognitive and cultural chaos.
And so, we must welcome in this new era of chaos so beloved by artistic genius. As we are neither reptiles nor sheep, but creatures of reason who long to pull opposing forces together into a cohesive whole, this era will not last long. Something new will come, and be upon us relatively soon. The new era on the horizon will probably tip towards either the mammalian or the reptilian templates, but not necessarily. In chaos, as my professor said, is epistemic murk, and out of this cognitive muck, anything can arise, utopian or dystopian, or something altogether, something well beyond our cultural contexts. In this time of increasing confusion, then, we must ask for prayer, for it is there in the fields of chaos and creativity where the gods, or God, walks. Out of this infinite garden, anything is possible. So let us pray, especially so that the god who answers us is the Good Shephard and not the hungry snake.
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