Let it Breathe, Part II

Let it be…Beatles…feminine/passive…Catholic/earnest…faith/submission…And when the broken-hearted people
Living in the world agree There will be an answer, let it be For though they may be parted  There is still a chance that they will see There will be an answer, let it be
And when the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines on me Shine on until tomorrow, let it be I wake up to the sound of music Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it bleed…Stones…masculine/aggressive…nihilistic/mocking…sex/violence…I was dreaming of a steel guitar engagement
When you drunk my health in scented jasmine teaBut you knifed me in my dirty filthy basementWith that jaded, faded, junky nurse oh what pleasant company, ha!...Take my arm, take my legOh baby don't you take my headHoo
Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on
In the 1960s, traditional classroom debates spilled over into the popular culture. You didn’t need to have your head buried in Augustine/Locke or Hobbes/Nietzsche to take part in conversations on the nature of human existence. All you had to do was have the right record albums in your collection in order to turn your turntable into a roundtable. Listening to Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards alone could stimulate bull sessions about the clash between Eros and Thanatos…the Greek construction of life force vs. death force. 
Without benefit of any electric guitar engagements, Norman O. Brown was a major participant in that conversation for me and many others throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. On the one hand, Brown sounds utterly Beatleistic with his advice that we “Admit the void; accept loss forever…Wisdom is mourning; blessed are they that mourn.” On the other hand, he is positively Rolling Stonian when he writes:

Killing is always inside the family (Oedipal). In the wisdom of primitive war, enemy blood is kindred blood; blood becomes kindred blood when shed. Whatever is killed becomes the father. Head hunting. An enemy must be killed for a boy to grow up; a head must fall.”

Unrestrained by the need to craft catchy, 3-minute songs, Brown was free to explore into the way beyond…and so he did. In his works, like Love’s Body, Brown took the pop Let it Be-Let it Bleed dialectic to challenging, rarified heights. Let it Breathe, Part 1  touched on just one aspect of this: What mythology, psychoanalyses and poetry reveal is that men--men broken hearted at separation from the mother--often struggle enormously at letting that separation just be. They strike out and back--out to prove their independence, back to prove their manhood. They live in a constant state of tension, torn between longing to be back at mother’s breast and the impulse to punish mom for what they perceive as her rejection. 
This tension then manifests itself in human social structure. This expanding man who rules a society is hardly ever at peace with himself--his identity or status. His insecurity and uncertainty about who he is puts him in constant need of proving himself and acquiring affirmation from others. Imagined feats of manhood followed by public adoration are the two beats of his life. He dances to those beats until he dies. Love’s Bodyagain:

Political society articulates itself and produces a representative; and then is ready for history; tragedy; even as the chorus, the dance group, articulates itself and produces a hero, the dying god. The chorus has a leader to the dance…the young men of the war dance have a Leading Man. More and more they differentiate him from themselves, make him their vicar…More and more they become spectators of his action. Theatrically speaking, they become an audience; religiously speaking, they become worshippers; he becomes a god. Gradually they lose a sense that the god is themselves. …The chorus identifies with the hero... in his actions they take vicarious pleasure. The hero is 'created to perform deeds which the community would like to perform but which are forbidden to it'…Vicarious satisfaction: the deed is both theirs and not theirs. On this self-contradiction, this hypocrisy, this illusion, representative institutions are based.

Think this is so much academic mumbo jumbo…so much esoteric bullshit? Think again. Think on the financial and emotional rapture that greets each periodic retelling of our national myth about a deeply troubled rich man who dresses up as a bat and goes about in darkness dispensing vigilante justice to the silent acquiescence of a self-emasculated citizenry. In the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Klavan wrote that the Batman film The Dark Knight was “a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. … Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency....”
Now think on the electoral and media fascination with a deeply troubled rich man who arouses crowds to a worshipful frenzy by publicly expressing politically incorrect thoughts and words they don’t dare; who boasts he could sexually assault women or shoot men in plain sight without suffering consequences; who says he can give classified information to the enemy simply because of who he is, the sole arbiter of what is right and wrong. He can do whatever he wants because he is not just the expanding man; he is the man in full…full of himself as we wish we could be. 
While the Beatles and the Stones were debating Let it Be vs. Let it Bleed, Bob Dylan, as usual, was doing them one better. He declared, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” In that one, pithy phrase he pretty much summed up much of what Brown was getting at it in his multi-layered opus Love’s Body. What it all means for us in practical terms is that when we blame the chaos, confusion...the despair and desperation of our world on such shiny, transitory things as media bias, corporate greed, political chicanery, institutional racism, systemic misogyny we are blaming the symptoms not the causes of our great, deep discontent. These sociopathies predate our current news cycle by eons and are embedded in our collective psyche. Through them we are lashing out at our inability to accept and embrace the reality of our existence…that we are here essentially to both be and bleed. Until we come to terms with that reality, we are doomed to act crazy.