A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.
Introduction
No, I am not qualified. Nobody is when it comes to the necessarily uncharted territory we will explore in this article. Indeed, the ground I want to cover simply cannot be clearly charted. And no ‘expertise’ other than the intuitive and instinctual can be earned in this territory – where neither intuition nor instinct yield expertise as commonly understood, strictly speaking.
I want to delve into masculinity and femininity, rationality and irrationality, intellect and instinct, mind and body. I want to examine how opposites might be better ‘understood’ (or ‘felt’) and so reflect on how oppositional thinking (diabolical – that which divides into two) is a profound problem when you identify yourself with one side and demonise the other. As with my previous post, then, this one is slippery and unlikely to yield clear-cut conclusions. But – I argue – it is precisely this uncertainty and confusion that may hold the keys to the subtle and nuanced wisdom we will need to gracefully navigate the collapse of civilisational categories now rampantly underway.
How confusing is confusion?
Duality and polarity are concepts easily conflated into a single domain of opposites. Sunlight elucidates, moonlight deceives: opposites. Masculinity penetrates, femininity yields: opposites. Black opposes white because each is the total absence of the other. The truth is not a lie and a lie is not the truth; they are mutually exclusive. And yet such pairs don’t all belong together in the same set; there are very important distinctions to be drawn.
For example, a truth stands alone as a whole, while the masculine without the feminine cannot. We might postulate ‘pure’ femininity, but doing so we never seriously assert a whole; male and female are halves of a polarity. However, to assert good and evil as the halves of a polarity is to mislead. Good is not made whole by the presence of evil; evil is the result of turning one’s back on the good, and so exists – comes into ‘semi-being’ – within the good. Put differently, the Satanic comes into semi-being within and subsequent to the Godly, but the Godly has no need of the Satanic anymore than light requires a shadow. Similarly, while a lie may be a manipulation of the truth, the truth can never be a manipulation of a lie. And while one could make a semantic argument to that effect, something important about truth would be missing. The same applies to war and peace; peace is still peace in the absence of war. War does not complete some whole whose opposite is peace. (Note please that this has little to do with appreciation, with taking peace for granted.)
In other words, two halves of a polarity are both required by that polarity. The elements (not halves) of a duality, however, are not co-equal. As you might imagine, conflating duality and polarity leads to all sorts of confusion and distortion, and I think over time to the sort of lazy moral relativity on which much of humanity appears to be adrift today. It must be clear to most that we increasingly see good equated with evil, war with peace, exactly as anticipated by George Orwell in 1984: a case of dualities confused for polarities. But unbalance and dis-ease also arise when confusing a polarity for a duality, which is what we are exploring in this article. Either way, there’s always a strong whiff of crass, cartoonish ‘thinking’ underlying all this, the sort of egoic, reflexive ‘thinking’ that breeds brute tribalism in pursuit of shortsighted self interest.
So I’m here to ask if there could be value in confusion. Have we somehow denigrated what moonlight has to offer in favour of the bright clarity sunlight affords, having favoured, in a grossly unbalanced way, one half of a polarity for far too long?
Well, we can start with the basics and define confusion. Etymologically, “to confuse” is to mix (“fuse”) things together (“con”) in a nonsensical or meaningless way. Over the last couple of centuries or so, confusion has come to mean a state of mind in which very little is clear or makes sense. Confusion is unpleasant and unwanted; it discombobulates.
The obvious question is, why does confusion discombobulate us so? Perhaps because we, governed by ego, need predictable outcomes to be able to navigate our lives safely, to survive. (I touched on this in my previous post.) We need a reliably predictable environment to function properly, generationally, culturally. That which is entirely unnavigable because unpredictable and ever changing cannot be handled or controlled, at least not as we understand navigation, constancy, direction and fixed location. We can respond to the realm of confusion, perhaps even adroitly, but we cannot meaningfully control or manipulate it, pretty much by definition. It represents a state of being or a domain entirely unsuited to egoic talents and predilections.
Putting it symbolically, moonlight obscures while sunlight is said to be “the best of disinfectants”; the sun radiates a light that reveals, that allows us to see clearly. The clarity of pure reason is a Beauty, a True Good, capable of delivering that most cherished of things: certainty. There would be no civilisation and therefore no culture without certainty. Much of the last three centuries has been the manifestation of this now deeply engrained reflex on the triumph of reason and science over superstition, fantasy, wishful thinking, etc. It is as if we have been consumed by the task of banishing the moon from its business. It is as if we have been subsuming the feminine, kicking and screaming, into the masculine in pursuit of ‘balance’ and ‘equality’, blind to the fact the ‘balance’ won is the result of loading the scales with sunlight on both sides.
I consider myself very much a sun person: all reason, logic, clarity, analysis. Over the years, I have had countless battles with my daughter, who inhabits an ever-shifting world of creativity and imagination. She refuses, on ‘principle’ – or is it on instinct? –, to fit neatly into my very clearly expressed conceptions of how to be. So I am a sun-wearied, though hardened loser of every such battle and can share this: What I briefly laid out above is not really the right line of inquiry. In fact, no line of inquiry can be correct in analysing the potential values of moonlight and confusion. We must come at what we call confusion, or better, simply be in confusion, with an entirely different attitude. Only the right attitude or state of being can sustain us there for long enough for it to be fruitful, instructive.
This is my supposition: confusion so discombobulates because we have lost faith in, lost connection with, unmoored in some important way, the Feminine. A tired old trope I know, but it bears repeating. We are nowhere near whole, or hale. We are sick, likely every civilised one of us.
The shriller we become, the clearer it is we are on the wrong footing.
Nothing heals like sickness (or: Constraint liberates)
I was very ill from just before Christmas to early March. Because I have lost faith in western medicine, Big Pharma, hospitals, doctors and the ‘establishment’ generally, though not particularly – this is not a judgement of each human involved – I decided to let the sickness run its course unattended. Importantly, I was never afraid, remained calm even when I was struggling for breath, even when I looked in the mirror and saw a skin-skeleton staring back at me; I lost roughly 10% of my bodyweight in a little over two weeks.
I intuitively knew to listen to my body by not interfering, by letting things proceed as they needed to. And “listen” isn’t quite right, either; listening is somewhat intrusive, demands structured communication. It was more that I took time to merely abide, or be, or commune openly with what was. No filters, no analysis, just being in the situation as it unfolded through the endless now. This was not of course 100% of the time and dreamless sleep does not count, but as often as I was able, I deliberately allowed myself to sink into that state of rich silence interspersed with wild emotions that coursed through and poured out of me. I was tossed about on emotional turbulence I just let happen, and finally found it liberating and restorative, bedridden and useless as I was at a very difficult time for my wife, who was also tending her sick mother.
(It ought to be noted that this is no prescription for treating any disease. This is an observation of a particular occurrence in my life and how I correlate it with the age-old problem of opposites, polarities and dualities.)
Piece by piece, element by element, it was entirely confusing. There is nothing to say about the parts that needs to be heard. But submission to the process, sinking willingly into that confusion, healed me and produced treasures I can only fumble to convey.
Reduced to riddles (but not reductio ad absurdum)
Are the sun and moon, masculine and feminine, even opposites? Of course they can be presented as such, but my sense is that such presentations deceive and mislead. To cast them as opposites is to crassly simplify an exquisitely subtle relationship, or partnership, that could not be more fundamental or important, and perhaps irreducibly mysterious. If I have earned an increase in wisdom from my illness, it is because I left my intellect, reason and rationality at the door. Consequently, it is almost contradictory of me to retrieve the relevant memories and display them here in an orderly fashion, neatened by logic, made clear by the rules of grammar, lexis and syntax. I can hardly help but wound that which I am attempting to honour.
And that is perhaps the central point: we wound the mysterious by explaining it, strip it of its value, just as sunlight slowly peels paint from a wooden door. Explication is perhaps the gravest danger of the utopian urge. This intuitive truth is anathema to the rational mind. I note Putin was judged “irrational” in the western press recently. “Irrational”, that most irredeemable of sins. Worse even than sin by virtue of being devoid of logic, good sense, predictability, reliability. It reminds me of the impotence of childhood or perhaps what a dog might experience trying to warn its humans that the house they are about to move into is haunted. And I think this is a valuable image even if its value can only ever be found in fiction. When we shine sunlight onto what we saw under the moon, we discover we fooled ourselves, that our fears or hopes had been ill founded. But, I assert, there was value there that sunlight simply cannot reveal. Poo-pooing that value leads inexorably to dystopia, the fruit of the utopian urge. And in fact, the concept of “value” is deceptive here. Language is like a bull in a china shop when confusion must out.
“Tread softly”, wrote Yeats, “because you tread on my dreams.”
If we read Kant, we expose ourselves to an intellect that ‘neutrally’ worshipped pure reason, or rather the process of critical analysis as a means of distinguishing fact from fiction by referencing what our senses can confirm in consensus, as opposed to what we might experience solipsistically in dreams and fantasies. The former is real and thus matters; the latter is not, is a trifle, a passing fancy best forgotten. Fact and fiction are set immutably opposite each other with a view to lauding one and discarding the other.
But how opposed are fact and fiction: consensus sense-based ‘reality’ and individually experienced dreams?
Our egos fear madness as they fear death; both spell our end. This means we are predisposed, reflexively, to denigrate what fantasy and dream might convey, for they lead to insanity … or at least are pathways down and away from the clear light of reason and rationality. Freud and Jung – and of course countless shamans, mystics and artists throughout the ages – have trod this territory in different ways, but each brought back insights of great value to the rest of us. The languages of tarot, astrology, and symbology generally endure somehow. And if this is because humans seem ‘lamentably’ prone to irrationality, perhaps it is our fearful fixation on the reliably predictable that limits our cultural imagination in this vital domain.
Today I want to say, “What’s wrong with fear?” I have come to see our relationship with fear, with the constraints of our biology, our vulnerability to disease and injury, as the issue, rather than the objects of that relationship. This strikes me as a consequence of, or synonymous with, lauding the masculine over the feminine, the clear over the confusing.
Romance is an art lovers co-create as they fall in love. Romance has an experiential truth to it, is a real compulsion that defies reason with dizzying nimbleness. If, that is, you are susceptible to its allure, or have ever found yourself victim to cupid’s arrow, that biochemical soup science loves to reduce romance to. From my point of view as a man, I am granted access through my lover’s eyes into a state of being – for me the Feminine – that drowns the everyday me in something alien and bewitching: confusion as enchantment. After many such drownings, and recently from my illness and other experiences forced upon me, I now flatter myself that I have acquired a workable but intimate appreciation of that bewitching domain, the Feminine, where before it was by turns deliciously and infuriatingly incomprehensible.
But how to express this ‘clearly’ without doing it an injustice? I’m just going to say that it’s implicit in the parts of this article that cannot be readily grasped. Perhaps that’s the most polite and honourable course.
“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Art speaks to us beyond how science can. Indeed, even if software can now produce art, it is the meanings we make when exposed to that art that count, not the software-created art independent of all interpretation thereof. Fact meets fiction in an endlessly creative embrace. Fiction is a fact. Interpretation is a fact. Meaning making is a fact. But to explain meaning is either to strip it of meaning, or add further meaning to it, requiring further explication. And of course I’m playing with words, pushing them slightly beyond their common usage to make a point. As my muse demands.
I want to say that art is making meaning into art above and beyond that fusion of skill and inspiration that creates it. It emerges from a deep communion between fact and fiction, between the feminine and the masculine, between the sun and the moon, the individual and the collective, in a manner that cannot be taught explicitly, that cannot be reduced to a formula of any kind. It simply escapes capture, just as the soul and the divine must, just as what we discover in the light of the moon must. Not because these domains are all fantasy or solipsistic apprehensions, but because our manner of analysis must remain blind to them for structural reasons, among other things.
Because, out of balance, afraid of what sickness might teach, dizzied too quickly by confusion’s wisdom, we have turned progress into a cancer that disinfects all before it in a compulsive spasm of smothering, as we become the harrowing shadow of what we wrongly insist we are.
That is my inconclusion.
