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imustbeamermaidrango · 4 years

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The Optimism of Satan

by Mitch Horowitz

See article at: https://medium.com/s/radical-spirits/the-optimism-of-satan-eea5a1a24550

A friend of mine once had the opportunity to ask the Dalai Lama a single question.

“Who was your greatest teacher?” he asked.

The exiled leader replied, “Mao Zedong.”

I once felt provoked in my own sphere by a similarly unlikely teacher — Donald Trump.

Years ago, Trump the Developer asked an interviewer: “What good is something if you can’t put your name on it?” His comment is indelibly stamped on my memory, though I confess I cannot find a source for it. Did I imagine it? The sentiment, while coarse and easily rebutted, came to haunt me.

Did Trump, the showy conman obsessed with naming rights, capture a nagging truth of human nature — a side none of us can deny or push away, other than by an act of self-regarding hypocrisy? And did I, hopefully in a more integral way, share a kernel of his outlook? Was the voice even his — or something within me?

Soon after hearing Trump’s remark, I received what struck me as a bit of ridiculous advice from the editor of an academic spiritual journal. I told him in candor that I wanted to find greater exposure for my byline. “You don’t have to put your name on everything you write,” he replied. Such a principle could ring true only in the world of abstraction.

Trump’s statement about self-exaltation, however ugly, captured half a truth. The whole truth is that our lives, as vessels for various influences — some physical, some perhaps beyond — are bound up with the world and circumstances in which we find ourselves; and within that world we must, at the stake of personal happiness, create, expand, and aspire. Whatever higher influences we feel or great thoughts we think, or are experienced by us through the influence of others, are like heat dissipated in the vacuum of space unless those thoughts are directed into a structure or receptacle. Our purpose is to be generative. Questions of attachment and non-attachment, identification and non-identification, are incidental to that larger fact.

I came to feel strongly about this several years ago when I found that my spiritual search, a path of radical ecumenism with a dedication to esoteric interests, was failing to satisfy me. I began to suspect that I was not acknowledging what I was really looking for, either in spirituality — by which I mean a search for the extra-physical — or therapy. I came face-to-face with an instinct that few people acknowledge, and would deny if they heard it spoken. But they should linger on it. Because what I discovered captures what I believe is a basic if discomforting human truth: The ethical or spiritual search, not as idealized but as actually lived, is a search for power. That is, for the ability to possess personal agency. We pray, “Thy will be done.” We mean “my will be done” — hoping that the two comport. This is why, at least in my observations after thirty years as a publisher, seeker, and historian of alternative spirituality, many seekers in both traditional and alternative faiths are ill at ease, fitful in their progress, and apt to slide from faith to faith, or to harbor multiple, sometimes conflicting, practices at once.

Power is supposed to be the craving of the corrupt. Is it? The novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, surveying the modern occult scene, wrote in 1967: “We are all black magicians in our dreams, in our fantasies, perversions, and phobias.” And to this I would add, in pursuit of our highest ideals. As Singer detected, we are not very different from the classical magician when we strive, morally and materially, to carry forth our plans in the world — to ensure the betterment of ourselves and our loved ones; to heal sickness; to create, sustain, and, above all, to generate things which bear our markings, ideals, and likenesses. All of this is the expenditure of power, the striving to actualize our drives and images.

I do not view the search for individual power, including through supernatural means (a topic I will clarify and expand on), as necessarily maleficent. Historically and psychologically, it is a fundamental human trait to evaluate, adopt, or avoid an idea based upon whether it builds or depletes our sense of personal agency. “A living thing,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power…” The difficulty is in making our choices wisely, and ethically.

I know how far I’m extending my chin by quoting Nietzsche. I sound like a dorm-room libertine. A critic once accused me of harboring an adolescent wish to power. To that, I plead guilty — but with a catch. I do believe in universal reciprocity, an indelible oneness of existence, and I operate from a ground rule of nonviolence. By that, I do not mean abstention from self-defense but rather an unwillingness to violate the sanctity of another’s search, to knowingly do anything that would deprive another of his or her own pursuit of highest potential. And since the political question is never far away, I’ll note that my policy preferences run to a mildly redistributive social democratic state with single-payer healthcare, labor unions, and consumer protections with teeth.

As alluded, sensitive people often deny or overlook their power-seeking impulse, associating it with the tragic fate of Faust or Lady Macbeth. It can be argued, however, that all of our neuroses and feelings of chronic despair, aside from those with identifiably biological causes, grow from the frustrated expression of personal power. We may spend a lifetime (and countless therapy sessions) ascribing our problems to other, more secondary phenomena — without realizing that, as naturally as a bird is drawn to the dips and flows of air currents, we are in the perpetual act of trying to forge, create, and sustain, much like the ancient alchemist or wizard.

The ultimate frustration of life is that, while we seem to be granted godlike powers — giving birth, creating beauty, spanning space and time, devising machines of incredible might — we are bound to physical forms that quickly decay. “Ye are gods,” wrote the psalmist, adding “but yet shall die as princes.” Immortality and the reversal of bodily decline is the one magic no one has ever mastered. The wish to surpass the boundaries of our physicality is behind some of our most haunting myths and parables, from the Trojan prince Tithonus, to whom the gods granted immortality but trapped in a shell of misery and decay for failing to request eternal youth, to the doomed scientist Victor Frankenstein, who sought the ultimate alchemy of creating life only to bring destruction on everyone around him.

We live in a sphere of limitations. But we cannot desist from pushing against its limits. It is our heritage.

Many of us grew up learning the story of humanity’s fall from grace in the biblical parable of the garden of paradise, where the serpent — long associated with the Great Adversary (a guest who’ll soon be arriving) — seduces Eve, and then she Adam, into eating forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But take a fresh reading, or a first reading, of the sparsely detailed chapter three of Genesis. When revisiting this familiar story in virtually any translation, you’ll see not only that the serpent’s argument is based in truth — the couple does not perish for eating the apple, and their eyes are, in fact, opened to good and evil (indeed, some scholars contend that the garden’s two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, are the same)— but also that Eve, contrary to a shibboleth about feminine nature, does not seduce Adam, who requires little coaxing. The serpent even suggests, as augmented in other texts, that Yahweh displays cruel hypocrisy by forbidding intellectual illumination, even as its availability sits in the garden’s midst.

We’re taught, too, that the denouement of Eve’s misstep was her son Cain slaying his brother Abel. But Cain’s tragic act of fratricide may reflect, in discomforting realism, the unavoidable consequence of creativity: friction. Competing ideologies and the wish to measure and evaluate may be the inevitable cost of awareness. But without the rebel, the malcontent, the usurper — the snake in the garden — how could humanity claim sentience?

Lord Byron used his 1821 drama, Cain, one of the dramatist’s most alluring and under-appreciated works, to take the marked brother’s side. And to introduce the most jarring literary re-conception of Lucifer next to Milton’s. Byron’s antihero, who befriends the rebellious Cain, is persuasive and penetrating in his denial that he was the serpent in the garden, yet he points out that the serpent greeted Eve as a sexual and political emancipator — an outlook embraced by many proto-feminists and political radicals of that century and the next. Byron’s dark lord is a fiery optimist on the side of the malcontents: “I know the thoughts/Of dust, and feel for it, and with you.”

I began to question whether the forces of creation with which I most identified — whether parabolic or metaphysical — were these same forces of Promethean defiance. Forces of aspiration who rallied to the cry of the demon Moloch in Paradise Lost: “Hard liberty before the easy yoke.”

Now, one could ask: why think of any of this other than in material terms? Why not put away my Bhagavad Gita in favor of Atlas Shrugged? Because, as noted, I believe that truth is not contained within flesh and bone alone. I think we participate in an existence that goes beyond the five senses. And I believe that our ancient ancestors were correct in deifying certain energies and understanding oneself in relation to them; they gave them names like Thoth, Hermes, Minerva, and Set. Hence, I began to take a long and considered look at such an energy, to which I have been alluding, but which I have not yet named: Satan. This term has its own complicated past, it has gotten me cast out of a garden or two myself, but I employ it both to acknowledge its colloquial primacy and as a bow to bluntness.

There exists a rich and underappreciated counter narrative of humanity’s encounter with what is called “Satanic” in Western life particularly, but not only, in the literature of the Romantics. This countercurrent of spiritual, political, and cultural history — and present — has been insufficiently understood, historically confused, and blurred by entertainment, conspiracy theorists, sensationalism, and fraud (such as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s).

My wish then, is to encourage a second look where we’re not supposed to be looking — that is, to take a more unadorned, elucidating, and even hopeful perspective on the Satanic. Milton has Satan say: “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Again, Satan is an optimist. Me too. No cards under the table: my journey — and perhaps yours — includes constructively wondering whether my own search for a personal, spiritual, and ethical philosophy (I have one — and it’s vital to me) lies east of Eden, or within what is popularly but incompletely called the “dark side.” That’s what I’ve been describing.

Darkness is not a void; it’s a womb. And in the territory of truth and consensual experiment, there exist no boundaries of exploration.

#Mitch Horowitz #satan #satanism #snake #adam and eve #cain and abel #power #ethics #reciprocity

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kanerosalind1995 · 4 years

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Win Ex Boyfriend Back New Girlfriend

#I Need My Ex Back 2019 Astounding Ideas #How Likely Am I To Get My Ex Back

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helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog · 6 years

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'Alex Strangelove' Director on the Wish Fulfillment of His LGBT High School Sex Comedy (Exclusive)

Alex Strangelove is a story of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy meets boy, boy might be falling for boy, too, and, oh yeah, boy might actually be gay, but it is all very confusing. In the Netflix comedy, Alex (Daniel Doheny) is a high school senior obsessed with cephalopods, among other wildlife, and with losing his virginity to his girlfriend, Claire (Madeline Weinstein). Until he meets a cute boy, Elliott (Antonio Marziale), at a theater party and everything gets complicated. Director Craig Johnson (The Skeleton Twins) was inspired by his own coming out story, right down to the love of wild animals -- though these days a far more domestic critter is occupying his time.

"We just got a dog this weekend, so we're, like, little nervous daddies, running around, making sure that we don't screw it up," Johnson says of the Corgi mix, Winston, he and husband Adam Roberts adopted. "He's not entirely housebroken, so we are going to roll up our sleeves and get to it. Keep me in your thoughts and prayers, as they say." With Alex Strangelove now streaming on Netflix, ET phoned Johnson to discuss turning his most "embarrassing" life experiences into a teen sex comedy and comparisons to Love, Simon.

ET: This is being called your most personal film yet. What from your life inspired this story?

Craig Johnson: I look at this film as the sexual confusion of my teens and my 20s crammed into one kid's senior year of high school. [Laughs] I had a long, circuitous journey of coming out incrementally over the years, in my 20s, and there was all kind of struggle that led to, you know, encounters, dating women when I was, in the back of my head, questioning whether or not this was even what I wanted, which led to, in retrospect, some funny and embarrassing moments. At the time, they were just purely confusing and embarrassing.

But when I eventually came out as gay, I thought about my journey and thought, Wow. You know what? In this day and age where it's a possibility for kids to come out of the closet in high school -- that really wasn't the case when I was in high school in the '90s, but now that it is a possibility, I love the drama of that. Because you can do it now! So, in 2018, what does that mean? And I think it's actually, perhaps, even more confusing, because everything's on the table. Now, you can make multiple choices. Are you bi? Are you gay? Are you poly? Are you genderqueer? And it seemed like a real dramatic premise for a high school sex comedy.

Was anything that happens in the movie lifted directly from your life? Or was it capturing the spirit of that time in your life?

Oh, boy. OK! Well, here's the embarrassment. While the encounters are not necessarily directly autobiographical, there's a moment where Alex is trying to consummate with a drunk sorority girl and at one point, she goes, "Sweetie, are you getting shy?" That may or may not have been said to me in a moment of consummation with a female. We'll put it like that.

Yeah, that is something you would hold on to. Hopefully now that it's on film, you can release it.

That's what I'm hoping! Talking about this film is cheaper than therapy.

I was also told that you call Alex your "surrogate." How close is he to who you were then?

Oh, incredibly similar. I was kind of a nature freak, obsessed with weird animals. I was always a people pleaser as a high school kid -- I always wanted everybody to like me. I got good grades. I was probably overcompensating, which I think is very common for queer, closeted teenagers. I was trying to overcompensate because I knew I had this thing that could render me unlikable, and so that is all part of Daniel Doheny's performance. Weirdly, when we cast Daniel, he's from Vancouver, BC, and I grew up in Bellingham, Washington, which is, like, 45 miles south. When I met him, he just reminded me of me when I was a teenager.

Winston aside, are you still into exotic animals?

Very much so, yeah, and as soon as you declare a favorite animal-- Like for me, everyone knows that I love octopuses, so our shelves are littered with little octopus sculptures and little octopus gifts that people have gotten us. I still am a total weird animal freak, and maybe even have an action-adventure, sci-fi movie about weird animals in my system down the road.

Photo by Walter Thomson/Netflix

To a degree, whenever we gay men write about coming out, as we are wont to do, there is an element of wish fulfillment to it. How we wish our experience could have been. Was that the case for you?

One hundred percent. I never had an Elliott character in my life when I was a teenager. Eventually, later on in college, I did run into quote-unquote Elliott and that is the wish fulfillment. I think about how I would have maybe come to some conclusions a lot sooner had I met an Elliott, someone who was brave enough to live out and openly, who could sort of nudge me a little bit without pushing me or outing me. But Elliotts were harder to come by in the '90s, so I think wish fulfillment is a very apt term for the Elliott-Alex relationship.

You talk about high school in the '90s, but I was in high school in the later aughts, and even then, there still weren't many openly gay kids. It's still so cool, but so surprising, when I see these gay teenagers just out and living their life. It's beautiful but it's also, like, "How is this possible?!"

Oh, I know! And yet I still think that even now that it's an option to come out, the struggle becomes an internal one. For Alex, it really is a struggle of, What am I into? He's got this wonderful girlfriend, who is his best friend, who he loves more than life itself. He truly does love Claire and is so emotionally invested in her. On paper, they are the perfect couple, but for this one thing that is really part of the heartbreaking journey for him. And I think that's the case for many closeted teenagers who have really close relationships with girls -- which is almost every closeted teenager, I think -- and that was really important to me, that that relationship between a kid struggling with his sexuality and his girlfriend, that's a relationship that I really hadn't seen depicted in film before in the way that I remember it and lived it.

I feel like it's only been in the last five or six years that this younger generation has just really embraced more of an open view towards sexuality. I conceived of the idea 10 years ago, and I would update the script to reflect that. Alex, his struggle is not that he's going to come out and then he's going to get beat up or get disowned by his parents. We're sort of beyond that story -- I mean, not in all regions, certainly -- but for this story, I wanted to talk about a kid where his struggle is not what's going to happen to him if he comes out. It was more internal. We would bring the script around to traditional studios, all of whom really loved the story, but they all wanted, like, a teacher character or a parent character to be more prominent so we could cast Meryl Streep and get the movie funded. But Netflix believed in it being a story about the kids and Netflix said, "Hey, we love this. Cast whoever you want."

Why was it important for you to tie the ending of the movie into YouTube coming out videos and the "It Gets Better" movement?

You know, we talked a lot about that. It was always in the script, and I just liked the idea of giving the movie, situating it with a little bit of social context of where we are today. I knew that a lot of young people would be watching the movie and I think for what the movie is, I like the idea of giving that real-world context to a story, to show that Alex's story is one of many thousands of stories of kids in this country today dealing with this and telling their stories. I thought that it could be meaningful to young people, but to anybody who's maybe questioning their sexuality at any age.

You describe this as a teen sex comedy, but a lot of the comedy of sexuality revolves around straight sex. Do you think it is possible to get a teen sex comedy where the sexual comedy is with gay sex made?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You'd have to think about what sort of then is the storyline and the conflict. For me, it's always about, What is the drama of the story? And the comedy always comes from the drama. In this case, when you have a kid struggling with his sexuality and really wanting to make things work with his girlfriend, the comedy then naturally fell into trying to make straight sex work. But, oh yeah, [in] the next wave of this, I'm sure. I'd love to see a high school comedy where you're dealing with gay kids and there are all kinds of gay sex hijinks. Maybe I'll write a sequel.

There have been a lot of comparisons between Alex Strangelove and Love, Simon. With Love, Simon, there was this response from people asking, "Do we even need this movie anymore?" That maybe it wasn't queer enough for 2018, with criticism over centering the film on a more masculine, white male. Is that anything you grappled with in making this?

You know, I didn't. Partially because, for better or for worse, I am a white male. [Laughs] And I was telling an autobiographical story, so that's just where this movie landed for me. First of all, let me say that I think that criticism is legitimate. We should always be striving for diversity in these movies. That said, I would argue that a lot of the audience for Love, Simon wasn't necessarily, you know, queer kids. I'd like to think that queer kids would enjoy it, but let's invite 13-year-old girls to the party and our straight allies to the party, who can maybe for the first time encounter a coming out story that maybe helps them think about their closeted friend in the seventh grade. I think the audience for Love, Simon was diverse and the 13-year-old girls weren't necessarily thinking about that masculine kid in the lead role in the way that I am as an out adult, you know? Which I wasn't, personally, because I enjoyed Nick Robinson's performance in that.

With Alex Strangelove, I'd like to think that we might even be inviting straight guys to the party, because there are all the tropes of the raunchy sex comedy -- sex scenes gone wrong and drug trip outs and party hijinks and all this stuff. I'd like to think there's a straight kid out there who sees the movie and goes, "Yeah, I really liked it. Yeah, there was some gay stuff in it, but I really liked it!"