ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A LITERARY EDUCATION or THE NIGHT OF THE SNAKE

In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell recounts a curious pehenomenon of animal behavior. Newly hatched chickens, bits of eggshells still clinging to their tails, will dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead; yet they remain unaffected by other birds. Furthermore, a wooden model of a hawk, drawn forward along a wire above their coop, will send them scurrying (if the model is pulled backward, however, there is no response). “Whence,” Campbell asks, “this abrupt seizure by an image to which there is no counterpart in the chicken’s world? Living gulls and ducks, herons and pigeons, leave it cold; but the work of art strikes some very deep chord!”
Wilfred L. Guerin, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature

Serpent (snake, worm): Symbol of energy and pure force (cf. libido); evil, corruption, sensuality; destruction; mystery; wisdom; the unconscious.

Look. Listen. I know it is untimely for another diatribe on politics, and, in particular, woefully late for a post-mortem of the US vice-presidential debate, already so thankfully distant in that rear view mirror of the mind. I know also that some of you may have gained the impression from our last conversation that I had turned over a new leaf—a kind of optimism and generosity seemed to infuse my writing (I think) like a fragrant dream on a midsummer day. Well that too is behind me and although I am at this moment listening to Bob Dylan live at Budokan at extreme volume, that is as far as my magnanimity extends. But it is not my fault. No. I tried. Even as the debate whimpered up from the South on Thursday evening, I tried to avert my eyes and ears and lay low for a change. There seemed nothing worth seeing. So. Turn a page. Think laterally. I walked out on the Canadian election debate, and didn’t even bother cranking up the US one. I skipped the morning paper these past two days. Alas, it has all been for nought, for a scant 48 (mostly drunken) hours later, I am drawn back to these people with a craven, degenerate fascination that I wish upon no one. Yes. It truly is a cross, and one, that on nights like these, with Palin reruns bleating away on my monitor, seems, despite its hollowness to the core, awfully heavy to bear.

But enough of this. I was not raised to be a milk sop and pity is something I can do without. So to the matter at hand: the buffoons, shady real estate dealers, Washington hair stylists, and the train wreck of Election ’08, that has so rapidly and badly listed into a kind of anti-gravitas previously reserved for beauty pageants and Las Vegas magic shows. These people are beyond stealing my thunder; no, they have absolutely sucked the electricity from the air and created a monumental vacuum that is astounding in its crystalline consistency and utter transparency. Now. Jean Baudrillard—if I had a religion, he would be its messiah—spoke often and eloquently of the transparency of evil, but please don’t tar his memory with my brush. I borrow his term only: the musings that follow will be mine and mine alone, so apologies.

There is a transparency of the evil today in that we see it each and every minute but look straight through it. We look through it, just as much as we look through the screens of our TVs and computers and into that kind of vacuous banality of the Sarah Palins of the world. It has become almost farcical in its blatancy and ubiquity, so much so that we laugh or shrug, but this is a crucial misjudgment, for it is still there, no less dangerous and that much less distant. No. There are no more Richard Nixons. Gone are the days of Nero, Hitler or Stalin. We have inherited an evil that apes, grins, and seems hopelessly deficient of presence. And this has made us a continent of fools, adrift and defeated, disarmed as it were, for satire and irony have lost any and all potency, and we too grin and ape and shrug, our resistance bereft of potency. It is all too clear to be seen anymore; the rules of the game have eased and become shiftless, and almost all that we should aggressively target and violently dismantle is shrouded in near invisibility. Now, it may be so easy to skewer someone like Sarah Palin, with her folksy charm, asinine eighth grade smirk and giggle, and her absolutely indigestible gimcrack politics, but that is the danger. Make no mistake, people like her and her minders are dangerous, and when the evil is diluted with such triviality and rank inanity, a trend that began with George W. Bush, the question becomes not how to fight tooth and nail against the dark forces that will damn us all, but instead, how to gently maneuver the village idiot away from the well. But it is exactly this kind of lulling transparency that makes our current situation as dire and frightening as at any other time in history, because for evil to triumph it is no longer necessary to beat people into submission or even craftily deceive them, but instead, the tedium of boredom and simple stupefaction will do.

Now I need to confess, while I was playing Jonah on Thursday—or maybe Peter, waiting for the cock to crow, stifling the red, angry demons in my ears—fleeing my fate as it were, something happened when I stumbled out from the local bar. For a variety of reasons, some no doubt questionable, I ended up in a basement apartment off Commercial Drive, smoking high grade weed with a friendly enough skateboarder. One thing led to another, and by the time we had Zappa (WakaJawaka) playing loud enough that conversation was rendered both unnecessary and moot, clearly the next logical step was to coax a 7 foot Boa constrictor out from under its heat lamp. Yes. I was assured that it had feasted heartily days before and so would be sedate and reasonable—or as reasonable as Boa constrictors get. My new found friend, let’s call him Adam—he was after all, hanging out with a serpent—prodded the Boa with a staff, or maybe it was a didgeridoo; in any case, the thing came uncoiling up the stick, tongue-a-flicker, its eyes beady and full of a kind of latent hostility that would have been disconcerting under other circumstances, but seemed vaguely natural and right on this particular night. After all, when the mood is fey and you are gripped by that dumb animal desire to dam the racing of your mind and the queasiness of your heart, a few stiff belts of Irish whisky and the motto whatever will be will be, are two things that I have found comforting, and if not entirely successful, at least worthwhile on some brute, honest level.

Ah. But where I am I going with this? What of Sarah Palin and transparency, whiskey and snakes? Well, well, I will tell you this: my understanding of and belief in the archetype, the primeval symbol, the root cipher was restored in this night. And these things, the archetypes, are important and fundamental to our understanding and ability to see many things with clarity, both good and evil. You know, I saw in that snake, coiled around my forearm, sliding across my bicep and contracting like mercilessness, something of the brutality of power and the real, vivid evil mythologized and sunk deep into our unconscious. This moment of recognition restored me to my senses in many ways. I was sober and clear-headed again. I felt the snake’s underbelly, rippled, satiated and striated with raw power. It was what I needed—the diamond of its head moving against my shoulder, dull but charged like a fist—to grasp what was eluding me, what was getting me down. I had to look into those blind, adamantine eyes, to understand that in the sideshow of politics, in the leering pantomime, I had lost touch with evil, with the image of evil, with the myth of evil. I had begun to look straight through it. And it all came to me, that I had been doing a little too much laughing, and moaning, and shrugging but now it was time to take stock and reinvest in words that I had once said but misplaced, something like this I think: there are some people that, when you get them down, you should just kick the shit out of… Dear reader, when all is said and done, that, I think, is the moral of this and most archetypal snake stories and one still worth remembering.