[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]W[/dropcap]e human beings speak and speak and speak…incessantly, yet we fail to achieve dialog or collectively gain insight into the path to proceed through the perils of our age.
We are starving for true communion amid a drowning tide of ersatz communication. While we insist we are aware of the reasons we make our utterances, display emotion, and apprehend the motives that give agency to our actions, the fact is, we are baffled. Moreover, the words and actions of billions of others draw us into and leaves us lost a in howling wilderness of further bafflement.
Classical Greek poets noted (although they too remained perplexed by the inherent mysteries in play) we exist in the thrall of timeless forces: love i.e., the domain of Aphrodite, and hatred, borne of Styx, the titanic force known as hatred (stygos).
The late James Hillman posited, what is lacking in our attempts at discourse in political, in artistic, and in our private realms:
“You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that ‘normalcy’ is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.”
– James Hillman
Hillman, being a archetypal psychologist, proffered: There is a god/goddess hidden in our every utterance and action i.e., a dynamic, psychical force that engenders a distinct phenomena in each situation.
Within aggregations of words, there are embedded images, images alluding to hidden landscapes of the soul. When we overlook or dismiss these worlds within worlds, we speak and speak and speak — yet say nothing. Worse, because our hearts have been shut out of the conversation – because revealing the heart’s yearnings and passions would prove far too unsettling for all concerned – we are driven by avarice and empty appetite. We shackle Beauty in chains of commodification; all things are rendered down to consumer experience.
Because we have been transformed into hungry ghosts, our emptiness cannot be sated. We are consuming the planet as if we were crankheads on a meth binge. One would think the Arctic is melting and the world’s oceans are rising due to a deluge of the tears of lament cried by inconsolable angels.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
