Brexochasm
Momus here sings of how, despite current events being gloomy and apocalyptic, one can still enjoy one’s life. The apparent contradiction between those things: at the worst of time, you can be living happier than you ever have. I do feel there is an imposed sense of guilt in our culture, you’re not allowed to enjoy yourself if the world is in a “bad place”. Also, enjoyment in these circumstances is seen as escapist and selfish. In my opinion, it is the path to salvation for humanity (big words!). After all, as Terence McKenna says, our problem seems to be one of consciousness: environmentalism, wars, it all seem to stem from a lack of consciousness, consciousness that would find solutions to those problems. There is clearly a solution to the “war problem” which doesn’t involve war, but we’re not conscious of it. So we need consciousness! One could reduce all the world’s problems, all the complexity of them, to this simple formula if one wanted and, since it is a reduction that takes it all back into the Self, into the inner world (of consciousness) it appears to escape the traps of totalitarianism. That is to say, there is a “single, unifying way of solving the world”, but it doesn’t involve a unification of nations, peoples, etc, but instead a unification of the individual psyche, of the subjective.
In this weird case, subjective affairs become just as important as objective affairs. Living your own life, reading books, chatting with friends, is not a “passtime” while the ice caps melt: it is precisely the way to increase consciousness, which is what is needed to deal with the melting ice caps. In most cases, the solutions to the problems are “known”: consume less resources, live simpler lives, stop making so much plastic, etc. It’s just a question of “enacting” those lives, but without forcing others to do so, without even “forcing” yourself to do so: there seems to be a bigger need to think than to act, as Zizek says. No one “action” is the “miracle pill” which will untangle the mess — all action is Samsara, and all action is just as doomed as the rest. The question is more symbolic in my opinion.
But since we’re on the topic, I also want to talk about moderation. It is also a question of moderation. And I don’t mean “eat less, consume less”, etc. I mean “moral moderation”: taking a little step is enough, we can be satisfied with that. The attitude of our culture is: all or nothing. You either save the environment in one fell swoop, or there’s no point in recycling one single plastic cup. You either prevent all child slavery in the world at once, or you forget about ethical shopping. All or nothing. And of course, culture always takes the route of “nothing”, because it sees the all as impossible. And rightly so! The all is impossible in my opinion! What isn’t impossible is the “a bit”, the moderation. Nietzsche talks about this in his essay On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

he talks about “limiting our horizon”. We are obsessed with “absolute horizons”, the end of history, solving all the problems in one satisfying gesture, the return of Christ to save everyone, etc. That is still ingrained in our thinking, and for Nietzsche it was so ingrained, and so all-pervasive a mode of thinking, and it was toxic, life-denying. People weren’t giving any value to their day to day lives, the only thing of value was that distant horizon over there, aeons away. It’s like an extension of his Apollo vs. Dionysus thing. We are excessively Apollonian, and need some more chaos, some more Dionysus. I feel this might be because culture (the objective realm) is inherently Apollonian, and the subjective realm (Dionysus) doesn’t play any part in it, it must erupt into it. What he means by “limited horizon of meaning”, I think, is this: there is some trash on the street. I take it, and put it in the bin. Now, people will say “that is a useless action. That will not help our environmental problems. Our problems stem from a systemic form of industrial production. It is the factory owners, the CEOs, who must take decisions to stop pollution; not you, not individuals. What you just did is a speck in the ocean, it is meaningless”. See? For them it is “meaningless” because their horizon of meaning is vast, it extends out into the distance. However, what if i forget about environmentalism at that scale? Environmentalism also works at a smaller scale: my environment. I don’t like seeing trash on my street. By putting it into the bin, I have made my street cleaner. That is all. As I said before, these are symbolic actions, because it all extends back to suffering in the end — that trash I neatly put into the bin will eventually end up in some trash mountain in a desert somewhere. It will eventually end up on the “floor” (on the soil) anyway. So, they say, “forget it”. Don’t do it. Your actions don’t “change” anything. But! At a symbolic level, they do. And this is why the key is “increasing consciousness”: the symbolic act of “being neat about trash, being careful about it, don’t carelessly throwing plastic wrappers on the floor” is a certain attitude, a mode of consciousness. By performing that action I may not be changing anything in the outer world (the trash ends up being trash somewhere else), but it does something in the inner world (it reinforces a certain mode of consciousness, or “explores” a certain mode of consciousness). “Extended horizons of meaning” are, frighteningly, what Hannah Arendt describes as being the main engine behind totalitarianism: a movement, an action, that ignores the present moment completely. A mode of being that reduces everything to an abstraction that exists in the future, a golden age we’re working towards. But a golden age we don’t ever want to reach! We prefer to move towards it, the grinding death of ignoring the subjective in favour of the Apollonian culture-machine. So just for that reason, I feel there is a great “use” in performing actions that have a “limited horizon of meaning” (or, returning to Momus, “living your own life”, giving value to the subjective realm, to immediate experience, as McKenna says). Just for that, there is value in doing “useless” things. Useless things are what will save us, in my opinion.
Funnily enough, the whole thing about Apollo and Dionysus was an insight Philip K Dick had in his Exegesis, and he frames it this way: the world is the Roman Empire, permanently the Roman Empire. Christianity (also seen as Dionysus in his dreams and ruminations) had to hide underground, in small sects, rising up to the surface in hidden ways, escaping the Apollonian censorship, the guards of the prison. I read this like this: culture is the Roman Empire, by its very nature. There is nothing “bad” about Apollo, it’s not that Apollo is bad and Dionysus is good. It’s simply a lack of balance — and not even necessarily a lack of balance in the objective world! First an foremost it is a lack of balance within the psyche, as Jung noted. Of course, our psyches are all similar, and we all drink from culture, but even then the playing field for this drama is the psyche, even when it involves outer events. Why? Probably because we are subjective egos. That is to say, “the experience of life” is, at the end, a subjective one, an individual one. I don’t mean this in a solipsistic way: no, it is simply that *it seems* (and yes, this is a certain generalisation) that currently we live in a state of being where life is an “experience” had by “subjective consciousness”. I don’t know any of us has “two egos” in the same machine, two subjectivities side by side. Yes, there are psychological disorders that are described in this way, but are precisely disorders because they tend to be unhealthy, they tend to be a sign that something isn’t working. They cause suffering to the people afflicted with these conditions.
When things appear to be healthy in the psyche, one is felt to be “a subjective experience of the world”. So in a strange way, *that* is a big component of “the world”, and one we don’t usually consider: that “the world” is a subjective experience. Yes, it is had by many people. But it being subjective doesn’t mean that it’s an illusion. It simply means that you can’t strip away “the world” from “subjectivity”. Ah, but our culture pretends to, doesn’t it! Our culture pretends that “the world” is something out there that exists beyond our subjectivity, and that we get a glimpse of it through our visor-machines. That may be so! But it doesn’t change the fact that our experience of life is a subjective one, no matter how tight we huddle together as group, no matter how strongly we identify as a collective. We are “alone” in a fundamental way, alone in our subjectivity. And there’s nothing bad (or good) about that, it simply “seems” to be the way things are for us, at this point in time (and space).
So, once again: that is why, for Jung, the battle arena where these cosmic dramas are played out is the psyche. Or, at least, it is the psyche just as much as the world is. We already accept that the world is that; but we don’t accept that the psyche plays just an important role in “our lives” as the world does, which is ironic, considering “our lives” are “our psyches”.
So let’s return to Philip K Dick. Dionysus is hiding from Apollo, and can only come out in hidden ways. Dick tends to portray this as a prelude to an overthrow, a certain coup, by which Dionysus will “trick” the censorship of the ego and establish a new reign, a reign of peace and beauty. Now, I don’t want to “strawman” Dick: I love the Exegesis, and I don’t think his thought is so simple as I have described it. He contemplates the nuances of what that would imply, the moral nuances — that evil might not be simply evil, that it may not be a question of overthrowing the evil rule, etc. However, I still want to comment on this “strawman” version of his theory, because regardless of whether it’s representative of him or not, it seems to be to be representative of a certain strand of dualistic thinking (that I have, too) that I want to investigate.
Dionysus will overthrow the evil king. At one level, I do think this is the case, because I do believe in evil. I do think that, as metaphorical as it may be, “good” will beat “evil”. But, at the same time, I agree with Jung: there is a balance stricken in this defeat. And this is a paradox! Good and evil will balance with each other, and in this process, good will win and evil will be defeated — despite them reaching a balance that seems to deny the possibility of victory and defeat! I do believe that that is the case. It is paradoxical precisely because it is internal, it is a process of the inner world, where time and space don’t exist in the same way that they do in the material world, and therefore, the whole concept of causality and “logic”, also work in different ways.
So, what I’m trying to get at is this: the of Dionysus as an underground character that can only come out into the light in hidden ways, seems to be to describe things in a mythological way, in a dream way. Dionysus is underground. It’s not that he’s “trapped” underground: it’s that he is lunar. Apollo is the reigning culture. Not because he has usurped power, but because he is solar, he is “what is seen”, he is the surface, what isn’t hidden. So Dick’s reading of an overthrow is correct in one sense, but too literal in another in my opinion (again, I think he covers this at length in the Exegesis, I’m just using him as an intellectual sparring buddy at the moment. Also, I can’t remember the Exegesis that well, so sadly all that remains is my naive take on his ideas! Hopefully, I think my aims are aligned with his, so let me arrogantly assume that I’m fighting on his side, despite “battling” his ideas in this text. We must be the ruthless critics of ourselves, etc).
Yes, too literal. Maybe Dionysus never comes out from hiding, because “hiding” is his very nature! He speaks through subjective insight, synchronicity beheld in shadowy places (the trash, the useless, the places culture ignores) not because of a limitation imposed by Apollo, but because that is his language: symbol is the language of the unconscious. So maybe he “victory”, the palm tree garden we are aiming for, is indeed a state of affairs where Dionysus has more of an “effect” on culture, on Apollo; where Dionysus enlivens our souls…but always from within, always from the subjective realm. This would have clear effects on the objective realm, of course! Environmental issues, political issues, war, poverty, hunger, etc. It all seems to be a reflection of his inner imbalance. So the striking of a balance is a victory, one could even say it is a victory for Dionysus and not Apollo, in the sense that Dionysus is our subjective experience (life! our own life) and Apollo is the structures of culture (dead, not us). Yes, I can see that: a victory for Dionysus, not Apollo. Or maybe I should forget about those two names, maybe here we should say a victory for good, and not for evil! But without assigning either of those two words to the two Greek gods / archetypes. After all, ironically, I guess Dionysus would be Pan, and thus Satan! In a Jungian way, it seems to be precisely the satanic, “pagan” influence which subverts culture and fights in favour of the individual, of subjective life drowned by objective structure, objective “light”. More “darkness” is needed, more unconscious. But more “consciousness”. More consciousness which emerges from the unconscious. But yeah, even in this “victory” scenario, it is still inherently a sort of yin yang “balance” thing, in my opinion. The keeping of the balance is the difficult thing, because it isn’t a one-time job. You don’t just reach salvation and then forget about it. And yet, salvation as a temporal / spatial circumstance does seem to exist as a possibility I think. The nondual balance between salvation within the timeline, and salvation that transcends the timeline, is what the ego has trouble with, what we can’t quite put into words and yet must.
So yeah. Maybe Dionysus never comes out from hiding, and that is good news. The good news is that we, the subjective, have found him/her, have encountered Dionysus in the dream / the myth. The “image” of Dionysus hiding isn’t “bad news”, as in “oh no, we have discovered that Dionysus is hiding, we saw it in a vision!”. No, the vision is good news in my opinion because it is a “vision” of the “hidden”. Only us, only the subjective, can see the hidden. Culture will never see it because it is not a subject! Culture cannot see Dionysus in hiding, but we can. And so, seeing this is the best news we could have. It is an approach, a “poking our feet into the water of the unconscious”. The start of a relationship between the ego and the Self. Of a coming to awareness of the ego’s position within the Self. The positioning the ego within a mandala in the psyche. That is the dream, the subjective’s secret plan of attack. And the reason why I think the subjective is the hiding sect in the catacombs of Rome: the outward world is a black iron prison, as Dick says, but it doesn’t know that, hiding within it, are gods that engulf it. It is surrounded by the subjective, despite giving the appearance of a great beast that overpowers the individual. And so, art, subjective life, the uselessness of the inner world is exactly what we need in times of crisis and outwards struggle. A reduced horizon of meaning, an inward-looking into the psyche, into the Self.
