Wednesday 04 July 2007
Pillage and the Insistence on Unconditional Surrender
Men receive the warrior gift, that high ecstasy of service, from impersonal warrior mansions high in the genetic heavens, but there are things that life requires of us besides warriorhood. The ability to fight as well as to dance, which is evidence of wholehearted intent to be in the world, is not so savoury when the man can only imagine another person or another country as an enemy, and cannot imagine any way of relating but to fight.
The warrior mode, moreover, has a poisoned or negative side. The warrior's twisted or poisoned side amounts to brutality, pillage, insistence on unconditional surrender, mindless killing, wife-beating, rape, betrayal of all the King's human values.
Men invigorated by warrior energy need the ability to modulate out of the warrior mode. The story cannot end here, as the young man needs to be released from aggression or the passage through, that has not yet appeared.
Ideas: Robert Bly.
Personal notes:
With the continuation of the mindless killing in Iraq, Indigo Boy is once again compelled to create a work about the complete idiot behind the farce. Bush is still a boy, and in dire need of warrior-training. How much longer will this brutality, mindless killing and fighting an enemy that does not exist, continue? Bush forgot how to dance, or maybe he could not dance in the first place. He can so obviously only imagine Iraq as the enemy, and slaughter thousands of innocent people in the name of "the war on global terrorism".
Women, children, and countless peace-loving civilians get killed in this senseless war, not to mention the young American "warriors", who are simply too young to understand the implications of their killing much later in their lives. They will most probably bescarred for life, because of a war that does not exist. Sad, sad day...I am interested in masculinity and gender, but every once in a while I get so upset about something I read in a newspaper about the "war" in Iraq that I just have to comment visually. The blindfold (American flag) on the statue of Liberty in "Pillage and the Insistence on Unconditional Surrender", says it all. No literal explanation of the work needed once again.
As Bly states: "Men invigorated by warrior energy need the ability to modulate out of the warrior mode, Bush cannot seem to do this, and it is so very sad that he is as an older man a perfect example of a man trapped in his own delusion; trapped in pure warrior-mode, without understanding the embrace of the "dance". Iraq, once a friend in earlier times, who even bought weapons from the United States (from the days of George Bush Snr.) Do you also smell a rat?
I believe my sojourn to this amazing country, and currently living amongst Arabic (Muslim) men, witnessing a very gentle masculine nature amongst the men, also inspired this work. There is another side to every story!
Read some comments I found on the Internet about the "war" in Iraq:
Indigo Boy, Wednesday 4 July, Casablanca, Morocco.
Some last images from Morocco (Agadir & Casablanca) >>
www.chrisdiedericks.co.za/indigoboy/
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2006/7