But animals which live in pure nature never overdo anything, neither sex nor food nor anything else, because their patterns of behavior always impose the right measure and the moment to stop. The moment to start and the moment to stop is all built into their behavioral system, which is why Jung always said that animals were much more pious and religious than man because they really obey their inner order and really follow the meaning of what they are meant to be, never going beyond that.
Marie-Louise Von Franz — Alchemical Active Imagination
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You know who weren’t cops? All the radicals and queers and artists and dreamers that were there while I grew up, my mom and dad’s old friends from New York and the wider bohemian world, the actors and the drag queens and the dilettantes and the ex junkies and the current junkies, the kind of queer people who wouldn’t get caught dead getting married, the people who actually made the “old New York” of the myth into what it was. They were smart and they were funny and they were tougher than I can imagine and they were possessed of an existential commitment to the idea that life is complicated and so we shouldn’t be quick to judge. They were tolerant, in the true sense, even while they were tireless advocates for actual justice. They knew that genuinely progressive, left-wing people had to embody a rejection of the old moralisms. They weren’t religious but they embraced Christian forgiveness more than any people I’ve ever known. They were the kind to say to newcomers at AA meetings, “I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, you’re welcome here.” Most of them are dead now, from AIDs or cancer or drugs or just living life. I miss them so fucking much. I miss when we were the cool ones, the implacable ones, the ones too principled to judge.
Freddie de Boer — Planet of Cops
I came across those two quotes above within about 20 minutes of each other tonight and felt them go together well in my mind. I love how the space in-between them feels. Hopeful for what we can regain. Getting down on the screen why that is is is is is another story. I'm dosed up on antibiotics at the moment so I like my chances even less than usual. Antibiotics are great aren't they, except for how they're shit. My friend and I took the same antibiotic regimen in the hopes of trouncing our CFSses and we both felt utterly psychotic on the same sort. These epitomies of our culture aren't making me feel psychotic, just shit. Dark. They're sledgehammers. Why does everything have to be sledgehammers.
These antibiotics are like the woman who swallowed the fly: I swallow a spider probiotic to counter the fly, and then I swallow some bird creatine to counter the extra lactic acid produced by the probiotics. Perhaps I'll die. Probably not just yet, though you never know.
Sometimes I don't much mind the thought of dying. Which is unacceptable thought #8675309. Automatically morbid. But it's not a terrible morbid thought at all when I'm having it. It feels clear and clean and brave and curious. Morbidly curious. An acceptance. It actually feels more lifeloving to sit in acceptance of the reality of your own inescapable end than to be so cruelly cut off from it in this weird time of death-denial with a deathcult centre.
That Freddie de Boer quote made me think of Blondie straightaway. I was eight when Debbie Harry was in that op-shop chiffon dress and they were okay I s'pose but I liked ABBA better. Blondie is a band for adults, I think, which is why my appreciation of them has grown over the decades.
I can remember the feeling of New York in the late 1970s even as a kid. Or I like to think I did anyway but maybe that's just collaged-in music documentary watching in the 80s, 90s and today. I feel like I could feel the sense of an organic something in that time and place, and everyone else could too.
When was the last organic something we had culturally? I don't believe there's been one for a little while.
Freddie's right though about the changes. That sense of true openness, I miss it too, so much. Not this polypropylene replacement. Acceptance. Vertical power critiques, including but not divided by the horizontal. So much siphoned out of us since then. My God. When does it end?
Sometimes I like to imagine the human collective is being drained of our dregs, that this Great Motherfuckery is purposive. I want it to be. I really want it to be. Dripping and fraught with meaning. The earth gawping in terror as it's thrust screaming out of the Great Mother into the terrorful glare of the new exploration.