Who, in their right mind could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine? ”
-Lucifer, played by Al Pacino, from the film “The Devil’s Advocate”
Whether or not you believe in the concept of heaven, hell, God or the Devil, Al Pacino’s Lucifer was right. Today’s snapshot of the planet looks a lot like a product of the Faust legend. The story of Faust, upon which “The Devil’s Advocate” is based, is a 500-year-old cautionary tale of the consequences of a handshake with the devil — exchanging one’s soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faust was a bored scholar, striving to reach the very limits of knowledge. His quest was a journey of desire to know all and experience everything. At the ultimate moment of full knowledge of the world and all its secrets and pleasures, Faust pays the ultimate price — his soul is dragged into hell by the devil.
The 20th century represented a milestone in technological advancements as well as how many ways we kill ourselves, intentionally or not. We’ve had two world wars. We’ve seen conflicts waged to end empires, and revolutions fought to escape the crush of the industrial wheel. We’ve seen new empires rising with the same agenda as the old. We’ve witnessed genocide and the poisoning of our air, water and earth. We’ve also had light bulbs, the telephone, air travel, radio, television, the microchip, computers, space shuttles, microwave technology, high-speed rail and the internet. Each one of these inventions revolutionized not just industry and technology, but the way we live. Yet, life on the planet is losing the battle for survival as we move further into the 21st century.
The last big invention in the world — a concept that would have world-changing implications — was the internet. That was nearly 20 years ago. The same technology that gives us all global access to information and facilitates national and regional revolutions is also the same medium for Nintendo and Wii, which make and sell games for young people based mostly on violence. Twenty-first century children now have a choice of battles against demonic forces, zombies, super-criminals, some kind of post-apocalyptic survival, dancing tiger cubs or fairy Barbie. What message are we conveying to the future?
This century carries with it as baggage from the previous century an arsenal that can kill millions in a stroke of a pen or push of a finger. As we attempt to move away from world wars, we seem to be a little lost as to what to do with this moment in time. Particularly now that we are striving to recycle the same ingredients for bombs as an energy resource in peace. Where are we going?
I was born after World War II, making me part of the Boom Generation born around or after the second hydrogen bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. That makes me a child of the bomb, born in the nuclear age. My first memories as a child were those of watching television coverage of the Cuban missile crisis. The only thing I could understand with my six-year-old mind was that we were in some kind of danger, the scale of which I could not imagine as a child. Yet I know my next memories were those of always searching for safety.
There is cellular and psychic distress on the body from war. My mother had it. I was born prematurely, incubated and weak. I remember her screams at night, waking from nightmares reliving Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. I remember the sound of my father’s voice, trying to soothe her back to sleep. These memories echo through me like a charged wire. Sometimes when I remember, my throat tightens.
The individual damage created by wars over a prolonged period of time has to leave a generational mark, a kind of psychic wound. That wound — the sense of peril and an overall loss of safety that makes us yearn for the mega-dad, the superhero who makes bullies go away by force — stays inside like an internal scar. We grow up and become what our parents and grandparents were, carrying over and perpetuating cycles of generations past. Violence, war and weaponry have become part of our culture as much as our inventions have brand names that we use as nouns: Kleenex, Tampax, Sony, Playstation, Shock & Awe, and Glock. It’s limiting our view and our imagination of what we can be truly capable of.
In Goethe’s rendition, the most famous of all the Faust legends, Faust is saved from God’s wrath by his constant striving for happiness and accomplishment — with the help of the heroine Gretchen’s pleadings with God on Faust’s behalf. Faust was saved from utter damnation by his striving for good and acknowledging the power and forgiveness of the Eternal Feminine.
This planet is a she. That means she is a womb. We may be children and grandchildren of the bomb, but we are also all children of this womb. We teeter on the edge of a great fence of invention that can take us either to heaven or hell on Earth. And unfortunately right now, bombs are louder than whispers. There are so many voices much softer, gentler and insistent that there’s another way to go; they’ve been saying this throughout time, including the 20th century and into the 21st. Will the planet, our mother, forgive us for our errant striving? Only if we learn from our mistakes. I’m not sure if any woman, much less the Great One on which we live, can take much more. There is no fault in imagination. The challenge is imagining ideas that rock the traditions based on violence and greed that now wound us to the core. If we are to dream, we can and we must free ourselves from our own self-imposed hell.
Yours & truly,
Fe Bongolan
San Francisco
It is most unfortunate when ones sense of self is delusional enough to actually think there is not a far greater price to pay for their atrocities.
Eris67:
I second that. We have isolated ourselves enough to think that what we do and how we behave has no consequence. We are separated from our responsibility, and demeaned when we try to remind each other of it. This is, as mentioned in comments below, truly about growing up.
Fe,
Just yesterday as I was cleaning out my fridge, embarrassed at the amount of food I was wasting, a memory of a commercial for starving children came to my mind, the one where flies are collecting on the childs eyes as she lays in her mothers arms, and I thought, how is it that the leaders of this world can starve their own people? How long can tyrants rule without recourse for their actions? It is most unfortunate when ones sense of self is delusional enough to actually think there is not a far greater price to pay for their atrocities….as my mother once said..oh what a tangled web we weave,
When at first we practice to deceive…
Peace and love,
Patricia
Fe,
Thank you for capturing so much in so few words. Your description of a search for safety in response to the Cuban missle crisis definitely resonated with me.
I won’t delve into your philosophies,.. although I think you’re righteous, Fe. But I will speak of treating the body as a machine. When we intake anything,.. we are intaking that whole. This has nothing to do with good or bad, it just is. The body is a machine that runs off of nutrients/matter. It has the capacity/metabolic processes to regulate itself…..
..I wish I could speak in clearer vokabeln??!! (It perplexes me sometimes.. I need to sit down with some really long ink…)
..the whole radiation fiasco, it’s gonna pass.. we’ll see the wake of the flood… our machines will process this garbage. We’ll get torn up for sure, but our way down the line grandkids won’t.
..welcome to reality, all.. treat your body, as you would treat your body.
..half-ass grin,
Jere
Dear Fe,
Your wisdom is right on target. Imagine pointing out the (r)evolution from ‘bomb’ to ‘womb’ by pointing out how to get there through honoring our duty to our Mother and ourselves by striving to recognize .
Thank you
The Lord Of The Rings expresses archetypes that makeup the mix of mankind. The mountain of doom is the mirror within. So many of us here today are staring down at the fire as we move into collective awakening. Its about us as individuals coming together to mature a race. The love potential in each is the hero to the whole. The truth is ‘We are doing it’. Just look around…….it’s a process in time. The crush within is the breaking free and unleashing of the power that we have dared to dream into this reality.
More tears here. You have struck a cord.
Today is, apparently, World Water Day; now if we can remember and carry forward into Every Day respect and love for ourSelves, our Resources, our Mother.
Thank you Fe.
What a beautiful, beautiful article Fe. The Faustian analogy is perfect – what price the soul? The world has been continuously at war (someone under attack by some “ism”) for the more than a century now. Death, displacement, the destruction of families, the greed of governments (it was US-government issued heroin brought into our country by visiting troops that began the heroin trade in Australia! And why did the soldiers have it? So they could dull the pain of war and get back out there and fight! For what? To fulfil the inadequacies of ambition men…talk about an ego trip…).
What was it all about? An unfulfilled hunger? A need to feel important? The need to be loved? The narcissist’s cry? Not for Mummy’s love, but for Daddy’s. The Freudian reality – “I hate you mummy because you took away my daddy – why does my daddy love you, and not me?”
The answer lies in our men. Not until they feel whole and full and are free to love themselves and their sons will this madness end. And it’ll be the women who will lead the way, who clear a space for male anger which finds its expression on the female body. The women must say “stop hurting us – your fight is not with us, and our fight is not with you”. What is a man? A man is that creature without whom there could be no more men. They are our co-creators. Give them their due – they’re not babies, they’re men. Stand with them. Emancipated women, emancipate your men. And vice-versa.
Change the rules, find a way.
It’s time to leave the nursery. We’re not babies anymore. Time to grow up.
Thanks for your words, Fe.
Jan and Burning River:
I sob when I read your words. Mothers do remember. The Earth does not forget.
” I’m not sure if any woman, much less the Great One on which we live, can take much more.”
True, you are a child of the Bomb, Fe–but even more, you are a child of our Earth Mother. Your incredible passion, and eloquence, Fe, have spoken for Her tonight—may it echo within us and reverberate through us as we wake up and remember our dreams and shake off the fear that might have stopped or slowed some of us from creating those dreams’ fulfillment.
I sobbed when I finished reading your blog.
Without our dreams’ and imagination’s manifestation, the Great One, our beautiful green Earth Mother, whose axis has been rearranged in the past month by an earthquake that might be linked to man-made jolts to her body, might decide She has had it.
Thanks, also, a million thanks, for the Manifesto link. It is definitely up to Us.
And, oh, the Iroquois Nation had a plan for getting along with their neighbors that included the women leaders/grandmothers in all the councils for making decision. Their way was highly successful and was a model for our Constitution–all except including the Grandmothers in the decision making processes. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
Hard to admit this Fe but I am your senior by more than a few years. I watched Kennedy deliver his Cuban Missile Crisis speech on live tv and went to bed that night terrified of the possibility of war. My Mother thought the wars she had witnessed were a personal affront to her efforts to raise a family but the invention of thermonuclear devices used as tools of war pressed into her psyche and weighed heavily upon her outlook for her eight children. I believe once she saw the devastation of nuclear weapons on Japan in World War II, she could not feel much happiness or optimism. Your words ring true. We continue to dishonor our Mother Earth to our peril and yet not many seem to remember last week’s headlines let alone what happened ten years ago or sixty years ago. Now I hear in memory my Mother-in-Law’s admonition that “we never seem to learn”. You and I share these memories because important women in our lives knew it was crictial that we understand. I pray the spirits of our Mothers are honored by demanding the leaders of the world turn their weapons into ploughshares. The Mothers remember. The leaders find it convenient to forget.