(Double Posted here)
My mother said my writing was so dark. Scary, violent, haunting. It is not all that I write, I write poetry for the people I love, I humm snips of songs to myself, write words that are funny and touching and witty and beautiful. But that is not the bulk of what I write, or what I seem to push to get published. I pushed more of the written dark matter. Why did I focus on this aspect of me, why did I exhale coal dust and ash onto every page I could find? Because darkness, real darkness and not just gore, is some of the hardest stuff to find. Or so I feel.
I have light inside me like I everyone. At the core of me I have something green and vital that grows and binds me to this earth and the people around me. I flirt with darkness as it is called because I believe that so many problems in this world could only be solved, not through an appeal to love and peace, but a mutual respect for our destructive capacity. If you can not learn to love your neighbor, and I do love my neighbor, learn to respect the weapons and will of your neighbor, and I do respect and fear my neighbor. It makes me sad how, on an individual level, so much helplessness is treated as ideal as something right and good and beautiful. Violence is treated as abhorrent, as something to be avoided and taken elsewhere out of sight if it had to happen at all, which people felt were we only enlightened enough it could be undone entirely. Violence can be an evil awful bloody pointless thing, but at it's highest violence is love.
To love individuals and ideals is to be willing to die to save them, and also to hate what threatens that which you love. To hate that which threatens what you love is to die in order to destroy it. That is why slaughtering an animal, bashing its head until it stops kicking and using a knife and your hands to rip its skin off so your family can eat is a beautiful thing. In a different way shoving a pen through the eye, into the brain of a man who is threatening your friend can be an act of love an act of beauty. I think we are trained to recoil from this thought of seeing killing and death as, not just unfortunately necessary but potentially beautiful. Potentially life and love affirming. Through killing, through violence and death we can indicate our love as surely as we can through writing a sonnet or spilling our sweat to produce a gift worthy of our beloved. And I think we are trained to think violence is horrible and horrific because there are people who think peace comes about because of helplessness. I do not believe it does.
Death matters only because life matters, indifference to death could only comes about through indifference to life. I am not saying that we, as human beings, need pain or suffering or death... but we need the capacity for these things. If we do not feel pain in paradise it is not because we can not, but because we do not. To not be capable of pain or violence for me is horrifying, because then joy and peace are not a hard won jewel, treasured and adored, but an inevitability that is no more meaningful then the wind then the grinding away of cliffs. We are human beings, beautiful and tragic. We are the healer of wounds, the eaters of flesh, the makers of weapons, those who will be born and who will die. Each aspect in its place, each aspect a necessary part of a complete whole.
When I was young I devoutly and passionately wanted to be cut away from my body. I wanted this with all the devotion of a monk or a stoic. I wanted to be pure soul, pure spirit, purely a brain in a box depending. In short I wanted to be pristine and untouchable beyond the worries and stink of all things mortal and finite. I didn't want my moods to be effected by the amount of sunlight soaked into my skin, I didn't want to deal with jealousy and pettiness that sprung up in and against my love. Now I want to be a whole human being, a whole man. I am not sure what it means to be whole and complete in that sense, but I do know to be a whole person is to entail everything I am. I am to be brain and balls, spirit and tissue, logic and hormones and everything else that I am.
I believe human beings are too quick to wish to remove a part of themselves, to cut away their fear or doubt or thought or body. Too often we see our psyche as shot through with cancerous growths, full of things that we'd be best to cut out as soon as we can before even beginning to go about consider the consequences. I am an optimist insofar as I believe that everything that is within us is there for a reason. Perhaps the way these factors have grown has been perverted (instead of getting angry I feel rage, instead of caution I feel paralyzing terror), perhaps we have desires or aspects of ourselves that will never be used in our particular world; but that doesn't change that in some sense what is in us should not be exorcised before we firmly and truly think about what we are doing and what will happen. I have ground down portions of myself until they were little more then nubs, but when I did this I did it consciously, feeling that I fully had considered what I was doing.
We so often treat violence and death as though it were a disease, as though it were ignorance or a chemical imbalance. I do believe that there are criseses of neurotransmitters. The dopamine is out of balance and pills can help. Certainly, for chemical problems we should use applicable chemical remedies. What runs us into trouble is when we treat criseses of soul as though they were crises of neurotransmitters; as though we could simply sidestep essential human dilemmas by ingesting pharmaceutical or believing that entire currents within us are simply sinful and have no redeeming aspect. I can't tell you what you should change about yourself what is right or wrong or harmful without being helpful or what you should cut out or grind out or numb or heighten through drugs or words or music... the only thing one can do is to think about it and keep thinking about it.
Perhaps we could live without violence. Perhaps when we fight monsters we become them, perhaps when we defeat part of an evil empire we become it, perhaps when the axe strikes the tree both the axe and the tree bleed. But if I never bite or claw or strike it is a choice, not an inevitability.
Why I see violence or the capacity for violence as necessary, why I am scared by people who culture helplessness as divinity is that it seems to me that utopiasts and peaceniks would deny so much of what it means to be human, that they would leave us bare and unprepared when they discover that the rules of this world are not what they thought they were. I was not and am not sure exactly what being a complete human being means, for me or for anybody. But this I know. Being a human being doesn't mean renouncing my teeth because they are sharp, because they can draw blood. It means learning not to bite my tongue.