In the Beginning was the Word

Chapter Ten

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Intro: The Schizoid Man | pg. 2 - Night Sounds
pg. 3 - Welcome to the Machine | pg. 4 - The Laboratory
pg. 5 - Agamemnon | pg. 6 - Prometheus
pg. 7 - Paranoia's Poison Door | pg. 8 - Projective Identification
pg. 9 - The Promethean Rebel | pg. 10 - Aries and the Emperor
pg. 11 - Mirrors | pg. 12 - In the Beginning was the Word
pg. 13 - Death Seed | pg. 14 - I Talk to the Wind
pg. 15 - Said the Straight Man to the Late Man | pg. 16 - Epitaph
pg. 17 - Apollo | pg. 18 - The Fate of All Mankind
pg. 19 - Malkuth

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An Observation by King Crimson | In the Beginning was the Word

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There is more to be deduced from the symbolism of the Victory (Chariot) tarot card and the music of 21st Century Schizoid Man : the role of the guitar and the horns in Mirrors . As mentioned earlier, the section which opens and closes Mirrors symbolises the divided psyche attempting to head off in two directions.

The effect of the guitar solo in Mirrors is that of actually cutting in between the two opposed poles. That is the guitar plays the role of the Thinking Function effecting and perpetuating the split in the psyche.

"A dream symbol of the patriarchy is the sword which cuts, separates, differentiates. The technology of the head, of the intellect, is reductive science."

- Cultural Economics: The Joyful Economy

Furthermore, Ian McDonald's horns play the role of the Feeling function in Mirrors . What happens after Robert Fripp's solo (after the Thinking function has been differentiated) requires an explanation of the role of envy in the paranoid-schizoid position.

"Envy is very connected with the pathology of the paranoid-schizoid position. Hatred attacks the bad object, but envy is directed at the ideal object, and interferes with the original splitting which enables the infant to have an ideal object, which is the basis of what in the depressive position becomes a more integrated good-and-bad object. Since it is the ideal object that is attacked in envy, it leads to a constant confusion between what is good and what is bad, and endless, often psychotic, confusional states."

- Biography of Melanie Klein

"By not always appearing at the moment we want it, the breast is not merely passive, there are times when the infant feels as if it is actively, malevolently working against him. Klein's theories begin with the baby's relation not to the mother as a whole, but to the breast-as-seen-as-mother. It is the very anatomy of power. "In a visceral rage too primitive for words, the infant feels that if the all-powerful breast wanted to, it could take away all his fears and discomforts, and thus rid him of his anxiety and fear of death. The selfish breast is keeping all the good things, all the milk, warmth and companionship, for itself. The child loves the breast; the child resents the breast. To sum up in Kleinian terms, the child envies the breast. And what he envies is its power... envies it even at the moment when that very power is being used to satisfy his wants! "Mother is wonderful and she is my life, but it is in her gift alone. I resent being dependent on her, and I am in a rage at feeling impotent and helpless without her. I love her breast but I hate her too. No matter that she loves me and does all she can for my happiness. It all depends on her decision, not mine. I do not care that she makes me happy. I resent her. I deny her power. I will show her: The infant bites the breast!"

- Nancy Friday

"One route to self-envy is when the envier, in attempting to defend themself from their envy, splits and projects the envy into parts of their own mind and it exists as split off hostile representatives of parents or their own envious self. As a consequence of this defensive manoeuvre the envier is inhabited by many envious others all threatening to attack from within. Berke writes graphically of the state when the envier turns on himself.

'In order to avoid such a psychic catastrophe, whereby a host of inner enviers assault each other, the afflicted person may utilize projective processes to deflect these enmities outward...

And here we see what is going on during Ian McDonald's metallic sounding Ornette Coleman-esque (multi-tracked) saxophone section in Mirrors .

...The net effect is like picking out a pack of piranhas and throwing them into the air. Because of the action of projective identification, when these vicious little enviers land on something, and they always do, the envious person (fleeing from his own envious selves) inevitably converts elements of external reality (benign people, places, or things) into malevolent entities (witches, evil influences, bad omens). But instead of solving the problem this manoeuvre compounds it, for the individual then feels threatened by malignity emanating from within himself and from without. Thus the envier becomes the envied and the hunter becomes the hunted.'

- Joseph H. Berke
The Tyranny of Malice (p. 67)

- Cronos and his children: Envy and Reparations

Ian McDonald's horns represent the Feeling function and with the onset of Robert Fripp's guitar solo the horns completely vanish. The Thinking function (though it is one of the opposed poles) sets itself up as king of the mountain (or king of the court) and then repels all comers who would dare to share its power. When the horns do return they do so with a sound that is unnatural, diabolic (bifurcated), distorted, bizarre. Once the Thinking function has attained primacy Feeling, or Eros, is perceived as an otherworldly "other", a daemon.

"Under Mars, the incarnated soul is to begin the process of development of the intellect to the point wherein one day it will become razor-like, dominant, controlling and powerful. The soul begins this stage with an undeveloped, uncontrolled mind..."

(the Night Sounds )

"...and unreleased and unawakened brain cells which completely hinder it from correct realisation."

- Mars

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An Observation by King Crimson

"Their already excessive "self-consciousness" grows stronger. They experience this as a feeling of observation, and within their fractured psyche, certain selves can be felt to be observing others: "The individual has now a persecuting observer in the very core of his being".

- "That Absence of Vertical Interest":
The Schizoid,
Reading, and Thomas
Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow

"This is the Conqueror, not by love, but by fire and the sword, -- a conqueror against whom the conquered may arise. Do you see behind him the towers of the conquered city? Perhaps the flame of uprising burns already there.

"And he is unaware that the city vanquished by means of fire and the sword is the city within his own consciousness, that the magic chariot is in himself and that the blood-thirsty sphynxes, also a state of consciousness within, watch his every movement. He has externalized all these phases of his mind and sees them only outside himself. This is his fundamental error. He entered the outer court of the Temple of knowledge, but thinks he has been in the Temple itself. He regarded the rituals of the first tests as initiation, and he mistook for the goddess, the priestess who guarded the threshold. Because of this misconception great perils await him."

- Symbolism of the Tarot by Ouspensky

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In the Beginning Was the Word

"For Lacan, the trouble doesn't really begin until, between 6 and 18 months, in the so-called "mirror stage," the infant misidentifies itself with its image in the (real or metaphorical) mirror. This constitutes a sort of "fall," emancipation from which only becomes possible through accession to "the Word": through language the "subject" may be enabled to "speak" through the gaps and cracks in the "ego's" apparatus of control. Similarly, for Fairbairn, the infant is whole and innocent until, due to environmental failure, it is confronted with a bad object which it then internalizes in an ill- fated effort to control it. All the rest of the splitting then follows."

- Fairbarn and the Origins of Object Relations

"The mirror stage causes the child to identify with the "ideal ego" reflected in the mirror. The ideal ego is a whole self, void of insufficiency, representative of completeness and feelings of unity like those experienced in the Real. Upon misidentification of himself with the mirror image, the imago comes to represent what was lost upon his discovery of "otherness." The child will forever strive to be the "other," the whole being reflected in the mirror. He has formed the illusion of an ego, an illusion of a unified consciousness which he will come to represent by the word "I."

- Development of Subjectivity and the Mirror Stage

"For Lacan, the ego is a dead image; it is associated with the death drive and with anal mastery and control. Like feces, it is a dead thing. In our narcissism, we worship it. But it is merely an icon, an idol, and our worship--our self-preoccupation--is a form of idolatry.

According to biblical definition, idolatry is the worship of graven images. In the Lacanian view, narcissism amounts to a type of idolatry--in this case the worship of the self-image. The more focused we are on the ego, the more the living subject is relegated to the background, to the unconscious, from whence it can only "speak" through gaps or cracks in the ego's totalitarian control apparatus--that is, through the lapses known as Freudian slips, or dreams, or symptoms. In this view, the living subject--like the living God--may never be known, but only lived or realized. For to know is to image or imagine--or to conceptualize and thus reduce to the confines of a concept."

- Fairbarn and the Origins of Object Relations

"The capacity of the child to abstract a self that is signified by the self-image seen in the mirror or mistaken in the face of the parent animates the child's induction into the symbolic order of signifiers and signifieds and the concomitant social structures of kinship, ritual, and gender associated with human societies. For Lacan, the abstraction of selfhood is a fictional gesture, a fruitful and productive misrecognition that makes the realm of the social possible, inhabited as it is by humans assuming self and other consciousness, along with all of the conventions and restraints that we associate with civilization."

- Communication Ethics and Radical Hospitality

"The urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner uneasiness inspired in man by the phenomena of the external world, and its religious counterpart is the strongly transcendental colouring of all ideas. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space . . . .

As portrayed on the album cover of In the Court of the Crimson King.

This same feeling of fear may also be assumed to be the root of artistic creation."

- C.G. Jung 1971/1921, p. 505

"The dominant masterpiece of the Mediterranean is the Oresteia, for it expresses what is to be the enduring structure of Western culture: the displacement of relationship by abstraction. Instructed by a male god of light, Apollo, the son kills the mother, displaces the rule of ancient Mediterranean custom, and moves out of the tribe into the polis in a celebration of patriarchy, law, and rationality. For the geometrizing mentality of the Greeks, the entire world becomes reorganized, not in the kinship systems enumerated by Hesiod, but in the new mentality of abstraction in which the chorus distances itself from the skene at the same time that culture separates itself from nature in the polis."

- The Four Cultural Ecologies of the West

"And here, for Lacan, is the root of suffering. In each of us there is an absence that we cannot, by definition, think about, because we cannot name it. At the moment of the creation of the ego, the self, an absence is created. It is an absence as big as everything, because it is caused by the removal of a sense of unity with everything. But that removal created 'me', gave birth to my sense of self, so 'I' can't get back to it, because to do so 'I' would cease to exist. And so what I want, I can't have. What I do is to try and fill this gap up with things, with all of the things that I might think I am hungry for, like food and toys and books and cars and houses and computers, and all the other goods, that seem so good, in anticipation, but, when attained, seem to do no good at all, because the absence is not filled."

- Lacan Lecture 2

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