In the Beginning was the Word ~ Death Seed

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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Death Seed

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As Science places no value on poetry, in an inordinately materialistic society the poet's work ("children") may be neglected or, very likely, misunderstood. But there is another way of reading this passage. The poet, like Dr. Frankenstein, may be so obsessed with his work that he neglects his own wife and children. This was the case with Percy Shelley, husband of Mary Shelley.

"Mary was surrounded by self-aware and creative monster-like men, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Not unlike the Creature, they viewed themselves victims of humanity's injustice. Preoccupied with their personal suffering they disregarded the feelings and rights of those nearest them, especially their children. Only months before the initial writing of Frankenstein, Byron had been accused publicly of abandoning his wife Annabella and their child Augusta Ada. Months after the Summer of 1816, Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet, took her own life at the Serpentine River, partially because of the dire circumstance she was in due to Percy's culpable negligence. Percy's children, Ianthe and Charles, became wards of the state whom he never attempted to communicate with or provide for, even though he fought for his personal rights of custody.

Despite their first relational failures, Shelley and Byron became negligent fathers whose children's deaths were partially due to their parental indifference. Clara Shelley died due to Percy's parental neglect. He insisted Mary and the infant travel by vetturino, a slow covered wagon hired by several travellers to the same destination. Despite Clara's ill health, the trip was undertaken in the hottest Italian weather. She died dehydrated, thin and weak, midway at Venice.

William died of worms (gasto-enteritis) in Rome. The doctor had advised that William be moved to a cooler climate but because of their social interactions the Shelleys remained in the torrid climate too long. Elana, a mystery child perhaps born by Clare or a maid servant, died after entering a Naples home for foundlings where Shelley had deposited her.

Notwithstanding the death of his children, the Promethean spirit lived on in Percy who finished his magnificent poem, Prometheus Unbound, at the height of his family's crisis."

- Frankenstein: Monsters at the Margin

"Nothing he's got he really needs"

"Concerning the cultural dimension, it is characterized by what one can call Prometheanism: a state of affairs where via massive secularization we have arrived at what Max Weber has called the disenchantment of the world. The cosmos loses its sacred character, human beings get cut off from the divine - while at the same time they substitute their lost security by viewing themselves as masters / conquerors of the environment and the cosmos.

This Titanic, promethean idea of mastery was, of course, enhanced by the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution which, for the first time linked systematically scientific exploration with the so called practical arts and crafts.

- Religion, Science and Environment: A Synthetic View

"blind man's greed"

"At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast: that is to say, its aim is destructive introjection; whereas envy not only seeks to rob in this way, but also to put badness... into the mother, and first of all into her breast, in order to spoil and destroy her."

- Melanie Klein,1957;181

We thus arrive at the present radical desacralisation of the environment and its reduction into a huge machine for the satisfaction of human-kind's unbounded wants and ambitions."

- Religion, Science and Environment: A Synthetic View

The second sign of the zodiac is Taurus.

"Taurus has financial and materialistic energy. The Bull is concerned with gains, profits, ...he can exhibit a terrible stubbornness and will be inclined to forsake everything to his powerful sense of greed."

- Taurus

"Taurus

...'greed' and 'gratification' should be your middle if not first names. If it appeals to insatiable appetites and addresses prurient interests, you will do whatever is necessary to possess it--animal, vegetable or mineral. Constantly you seek to reward your five senses. Money and possessions dominate thoughts and rule lifestyle. If there is a profit in it, you'd evict your penniless and widowed grandmother!"

- What's Wrong With Members of All Twelve Signs--But Not You!

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"Death seed"

"In 1946 Melanie Klein linked Fairbairn's phrase with her own, calling the earliest developmental stage the 'paranoid-schizoid position' in order to stress the co-existence of splitting and persecutory anxiety, one that stems from the operation of the death instinct. Klein argued...that there is sufficient ego at birth for the child to fear death, which it experiences as a fear of disintegration in the face of its own hatred: 'The terror of disintegration and total annihilation is the deepest fear stirred by the operation of the death instinct within."

- Essentials of Kleinian Theory

"Jules Verne's technician expresses thanatos and leads to self-destruction. Other nineteenth-century writers, such as Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and H. G. Wells in The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr. Moreau, have also created scientist-heroes alienated from feeling and relatedness and obsessed with the objectification and technical manipulation of bodies. They are fragmented and embattled men whose monsters are, in the end, themselves and whose deaths are a form of auto-vivisection. In each case techne is culturally constructed in such a way that it excludes eros."

- Prometheus ex Machina

"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita:

'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'

- Robert Oppenheimer, upon witnessing the explosion of the first A bomb

"Human beings live in order to destroy; and they destroy in order to live. This is a bitter truth, but it corresponds to the results of human behavior over the past 10,000 years."

- Advocatus Diaboli

"Eiseley describes human arrogance from the very moment of man's appearance on this earth: "It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned - escaped, it may be - spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master."

- Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Nature

"In our age, we are faced with an "atomization of consciousness:" the world, or rather our mental mirror of it, has exploded into smithereens, and the result is a ruination that belies the magnificence, the infinite interrelatedness, of the universe which is its object. In our effort to understand the world, we have divided and subdivided it ad infinitum into disjoint categories having little or no relationship with each other. As Yeats prophetically declared at the beginning of this century, in lines well-worn precisely because they are so succinct:

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

- Healing the Broken Mirror

At the end of the song, with the horses of mind and emotion running faster and faster in opposite directions, the psyche of the 21st Century Schizoid Man , unable to resolve the inner conflict, unable to attain harmony, collapses into anarchy.

Twenty First Century Schizoid Man , a monument to technological hubris, is meant to portray the differentiated Thinking Function at its worst; cold, impersonal harshly logical. But the songs on the first album represent a progression toward wholeness and having moved as far from the Self as he can bear, this moment, the schizoid man's point of greatest disconnection, is itself a re-birth. Like the sun poised to begin its ascent, the pendulum of the psyche is ready to swing back towards wholeness.

"Shevirat ha-Kelim, the Breaking of the Vessels: The seven lower Sefirot shatter. Even the highest Sefirot, which do not shatter, fall from a higher to a lower place.

The structures of the ego are insufficient for man to contain the energy and imagery of his unconscious mind. These structures must shatter, creating a chaotic, disjoint and dangerous but necessary state from which a new man and self can eventually emerge. Will and intellect have fallen in status. Reason can no longer resolve all difficulties in its path. The ego has been deflated.

The contemporary neo-Jungian psychologist, James Hillman, provides the key to our psychological interpretation of this symbol. According to Hillman, psychology universally understands psychopathology, and the consequent experience of "falling apart" as an ill to be cured, or at best a phase leading to the reorganization of the self or ego (Hillman, 1977). Hillman, however, argues that such "falling apart" lies at the core of our very being and has an intimate connection with our uniqueness and individuality. The psyche, according to Hillman, does not exist at all without its own inner sense of "deconstruction". He cites Freud to the effect that we can only "catch" the unconscious in pathological material, and argues that it is precisely through our major and minor life crises, through our confrontation with death, and in our uncanny sense of "crazy" differentness, that we glimpse the unconscious chaos which is the source of the psyche. Kabbalistically, it is only when the "vessels break" that the individual can become truly human."

- The Lurianic Kabbalah: An Archetypal Interpretaion
Sanford L. Drob, Ph.D.

"Reich felt that the mystic was "structurally close to the schizoid
character" and that "he usually comprehended orgonomic facts,
although only as in a mirror". He says, in a somewhat
different context, that "mystics reach a picture of reality in which
real processes are distorted, as if in a mirror, and are not in
harmony with what is objectively so." It's interesting that Reich
uses the analogy of a mirror in more than one place in his
writings, and that in "Shinto temples [there] stands a mirror
symbolizing the fact that to see reality one must see both
oneself and the illusory nature of the self, see the reality of the
separate entity and see that - from another viewpoint - it is not
reality but an illusion". Coleridge described the split more
succinctly and poetically when he wrote, "the mind half sees and
half creates."

- Orgonomy and Mysticism
Richard Schwartzman, D.O.

"I used to live in a roomful of mirrors.
All I could see was me
Well, I took my spirit and crashed the mirrors
Now the whole world is here for me to see ..."

- Jimi Hendrix

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