“The Wounded Angel” by Hugo Simberg
One evening, recently, I sat in conversation with Anita. I wanted to share some thoughts that were rumbling around as a result of an essay I had read a few hours before. The author, Conrad Amenta, lives in San Francisco and his essay is a response to some astounding advances in technology emerging from Silicone Valley. The central picture guiding much of the work in high tech today is that of a technological skin and central nervous system that would overlay the empirical earth. The term used within the industry is the “Internet of things” or IoT. Or, we could imagine, along with Cisco, HP, Apple, and Google:
initiatives and advances, such as Cisco’s Planetary Skin, HP’s central nervous system for the earth (CeNSE), and smart dust. … As cows, water pipes, people, and even shoes, trees, and animals become connected to IoT, the world has the potential to become a better place. Cisco’s is a Gaia-style personification of the Earth, the planet with a skin and a nervous system, the dust in the air comprised of billions of eyes and ears.[2]
Amenta’s perspective on all these developments is an anxious or even cynical one, as he says, conjuring up a dystopian future in which individual freedoms and privacy are lost along with power and control concentrating in the hands of the privileged few. At the same time, “the IoT’s promise is that it will do no less than erase the distinction between the individual and the collective, transcending the moments that fracture us to some higher order of awareness.”
Part of my work these days is to pay close attention to the rhetoric that appears in the media or any other cultural production, with an eye for discerning hints of implicit soul movements “within” that rhetoric.[3] In this way I can receive hints of an emerging, yet unknown future. Sometimes I receive such hints through the text of my own dreams, as we will see.[4]
I am not disparaging Amenta’s essay in any way when I say that his point of view is simply a re-statement of the many alarm calls reaching a crescendo today as our technological advances gather steam well beyond our capacity to keep up with its social, political, or any other kind of consequences. His rhetoric speaks a loss of freedom, or privacy, in the face of ever-increasing power and control in the hands of the few, and is spoken in a mood of anxiety and cynicism, as he says.
This mood settled on me as I opened up my conversation with Anita, later that evening. I became depressed. Although the essay’s rhetoric is familiar to me, and probably everybody else by now, something else was edging closer to consciousness from within that rhetoric, and my depression. Suddenly I could speak it. I realized that, within the author’s real concerns about where we were heading in our technological civilization, his rhetoric lay solely within the realm of power and control (or loss of the same). Something was missing and I knew what it was. The clue to what is missing in almost any discussion of our imagined future today, utopian or dystopian, lies in the technological vision of a “Gaia-style personification of the Earth, the planet with a skin and a nervous system, the dust in the air comprised of billions of eyes and ears.”
This word “Gaia” is used a lot today in an aspirational tone. We seek to recover something precious that is now felt to be lost to us—a world that we imagine to be every different to the one we are experiencing today. “Gaia” is a word that can function as a symbol, opening to a world in which a living presence reigns over our being and all that we do. This presence was pictured as a goddess, and, since our modern culture has nothing to do with such pictures any more, I will remind us, in the words of a master muse-poet of the 20th century, what the goddess fundamentally represents for a culture in which She holds sway—“the single poetic theme of Life and Death (and) the question of what survives of the beloved.”[5] In other words, when the goddess was spiritus rector, reigning over the way things appeared, all our cultural productions were expressions of what really mattered to us, and Her: Life, Death, and … Love!
What is missing in our modern rhetoric and in any discussion of the future today is any mention of love! Love has been erased from our governing narratives. Our cultural productions no longer express and reflect any hint of the reality and necessity of love. I looked for any sign of love or lack of love having anything to do with Amenta’s arguments, for example. I found none! This is typical in our current discourses and this is what I said to Anita in our conversation. Love does not count any more. Love is absent. Our culture is now built on an absence of love. We concluded our discussion of Amenta’s essay with my saying that it only takes one generation to sever all connections with love. Future generations will grow up knowing nothing about the reality of love, its necessity, and its (now past) reigning power over our lives. Future generations will have no guidance regarding how to love as beings of love and how to die as mortals who have known love.
Where is love today? Is my question anything more than a nostalgic yearning for an imagined “mythic past”? In this deepening mood of gloom, alleviated only by our mutual certainty of the real love that lay between us, as devotion to the other, we went to bed.
In the early hours of the night, I was shocked awake. “A dream! A dream! I must get up and write it down now!” Startled half awake, as I lurched upright, Anita called out, “What? What are you saying?” I could not answer her. My dream filled me with its presence. I felt an immediate urgency to get up and to write it down. I must not forget this dream! As Anita turned back to sleep, I got up and turned to my task. I had gone to bed asking, “where is love today?” Then, my dream occurred, as if in answer:
Anita and I are going up to floor where my office is. I go to open the door but it is locked. I knock. The door gives way a little and somebody comes to the door. Anita sees who it is and turns away. The door slams shut again. Again I insist. Who is in this room that I rent? I ask Anita and she refuses to tell me. She looks alarmed. I try again and the door opens. A wounded tattered angel stumbles out into the corridor. He collapses into my arms and I lower him gently to the ground. Broken feathers and blood prick my skin. He seems mortally wounded and scarcely alive. It is Michael the archangel of Love who is nearly dead. An old woman follows him out and asks me, are you a target, meaning, have I chosen to be a target of the angel’s wrath? Apparently those who wish to be a target of the angel’s wrath have to submit a picture of themselves or their image. I say, does he want me to be a target? Of course I will volunteer as I gaze at this magnificent being who is in such dire straits. I volunteer to be a target. A small group walks along the corridor with Anita and me. We are volunteer targets of Michael’s wrath: the wrath of Love! [5a]
You see, although we may be producing a “Gaia-like” skin and a simulated central nervous system that will cover the world that once belonged to Gaia, there is one human quality that can never be reproduced or simulated. As Hubert Dreyfus puts it, machines cannot care—in the way I care (both in the dream and in waking life) about the angel Michael’s dire condition.[6] I felt love! This love led me, in the dream, to easily volunteer in the spirit of a sacrifice—to face the wrath of Love, without knowing what such a sacrifice might entail. Yet, it was not quite a blind idealistic sacrifice! I had been prepared for this dream moment by many previous dreams over the decades—dreams that pair wrath, fury, love, and voluntary sacrifice along with the utter necessity and finality of a death.[7] I had also been prepared by my personal history which includes memories of a disordered mother unleashing her fury on a little boy too young to understand just what he was up against, an inexplicable wrath he had to face and somehow withstand.
We are now clearly in the domain of trauma and my early task had been to hold together where my parents had each psychologically split.[8] One of my prolonged childhood doodles is a pencil drawing of a deep cleft in the earth with furious battles between armies on either side, while various individuals drop into the yawning abyss, lost forever. What saved me of course is the image. My imagination held in the face of traumatic, unassimilable, invasionary, and splitting energies, and produced a picture of the reality governing my life. This capacity to produce an image of non-human powers that can otherwise traumatize and split a human being is surely related to my “Michael” dream in which sacrificial volunteers are chosen on the basis of their capacity to produce an image or Self-portrait. Our image-making capacity must be intact in order to face the fury of angelic wrath.
As far as I know, no current theory of trauma, at least in the dominant narratives that seek “psychological causes”, mentions or suggests that the formal cause of trauma may be the profound suffering of Love itself—Love denied, consigned to oblivion by a culture obsessed with power and control, a culture that no longer cares, simply because the technological world we are inhabiting with all its marvels and advances, simply cannot care.
Care, existentially understood, is, as Dreyfus claims, a comprehensive concept going well beyond worry or concern.
Heidegger thus tries to ward off an understanding of care as worry or even simply pragmatic concern-the connotations of the term Sorge, which in German means care as in “the cares of the world.” In a conversation with Heidegger I pointed out that “care” in English has connotations of love and caring. He responded that that was fortunate since with the term “care” he wanted to name the very general fact that “Sein geht mich an,” roughly, that being gets to me.[9]
My dream suggests that, as far as divine Love is concerned, our fate is nearly sealed. We are poised to create and inhabit a world without care, without love. Care, as a unifying quality of human existence requires an attitude of opening up sufficiently so that “being gets to me”! But today the stakes are very high. Our culture has almost sealed us off from the angel’s influence and the angel of Love is suffering to the point of death or madness. To open ourselves up now, so that Being gets through to us once again, is to open ourselves up to the presence of the wrath of Love.[10] Those who can offer themselves that way to suffering, divine Love, can only do so with an intact imagination—the only organ that can hold the force of divine fury and, if not broken by it, can humanize it, through the only human power that matters here—the unifying power of care—that existential care that can let Being get through to us and initiate us into the reality of the divine ground of human love, once more.
[Also see Owen Barfield’s Eager Spring for a wonderful account of the real power of love in the face of our technological crisis!]
[1] Quoted in Robert Graves. The White Goddess, 444. It is a poem in which the goddess speaks.
[2] Conrad Amenta: The Cyberpunk Dystopia We Were Warned About Is Already Here. Found at: https://versions.killscreen.com/cyberpunk-dystopia-warned-already/
[3] This work rests on the intimate relationship between psyche and language, or (depth) psychology and literature.
[4] Those hints are always available as implicit but it can take years before the dream text becomes transparent for me.
[5] Robert Graves: The White Goddess. Ch1. “Poets and Gleemen”, 21.
[5a] See my book Angel Stories For Our Time that springs from this dream.
[6] Hubert Dreyfus, philosopher, appearing in Being in the World. A film by Tao Ruspoli, 2011.
[7] My books describe many such examples. See for example, UR-Image: Ch. “2011, Gary’s Death” or Manifesting Possible Futures: Ch. “The Coming Storm”. Available at Amazon.
[8] Early photographs show my mother and father each with “split” eyes, my mother gazing at me in a gestural “plea” to hold together what she could not.
[9] Hubert Dreyfus. Being–in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World, Division 1. Ch: “The Care Structure”, 239.
[10] We were once so open in the “time of Gaia”, or the goddess.
