Eros and Strife ~ Peace: A Beginning

CHAPTER TWELVE -

~ In the Wake of Poseidon ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Eros and Strife | pg. 2 - Peace: A Beginning | pg. 3 - Pictures of a City
pg. 4 - Cadence and Cascade | pg. 5 - In the Wake of Poseidon I | pg. 6 - In the Wake of Poseidon II
pg. 7 - Cat Food | pg. 8 - The Devil's Triangle | pg. 9 - Garden of Worm
pg. 10 - Peace: An End

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Taurus | Marcuse

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"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! .... Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave- ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!"

-- Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"

"The only one God left that is truly universal, omnipresent, omnipotent, observed fully in thought and action, joining all human kind in daily acts of devotion : THE ECONOMY. That's the God we nourish with actual human blood."

- James Hillman, 1994

"...And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they'd made..."

- Simon and Garfunkel

"Since the earliest stages of human history, of course,
there have been bazaars, rialtos, and trading posts --
all markets. But The Market was never God, because
there were other centers of value and meaning, other
"gods." The Market operated within a plethora of other
institutions that restrained it. As Karl Polanyi has
demonstrated in his classic work The Great
Transformation, only in the past two centuries has The
Market risen above these demigods and chthonic
spirits to become today's First Cause.

Initially The Market's rise to Olympic supremacy
replicated the gradual ascent of Zeus above all the
other divinities of the ancient Greek pantheon, an
ascent that was never quite secure. Zeus, it will be
recalled, had to keep storming down from Olympus to
quell this or that threat to his sovereignty. Recently,
however, The Market is becoming more like the
Yahweh of the Old Testament -- not just one superior
deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the
only true God, whose reign must now be universally
accepted and who allows for no rivals."

- The Market as God (Atlantic Monthly, 3/99)

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Though Taurus was addressed in the first album ( 21st Century Schizoid Man ), it only received the space of a single verse. However, , by expanding on the idea of "blind man's greed" , Pictures of A City seems to continue the theme of Taurus into the second album.

"Taurus, astrologically, is the first sign of the Earth Element. It is feminine or Yin in nature. Its resonance or vibration connects us to Gaia or Mother Earth because we have been created from Her body and, as such, we are Her "earth children". The natural expression of Taurus is earthy, practical, tangible, tactile, sensory, sensual and fruitful. Taurus is Mother Nature as She, through form, represents the physical world of manifestation. She expresses Herself through Her material creations. The resources of the earth are under the rulership of Taurus as are what we own, possess, acquire or use as an exchange principle such as money or currency. Trading systems, barter and the exchange of one resource for another are also under the rulership of Taurus.
The "quality" of life is also a Taurus issue. "I Have" declares Taurus. Taurus is associated with the desire and ability to work for, own and accumulate physical acquisitions and monetary wealth. Poverty or abundance are states of consciousness that emanate from this sign.
The ecological natural balance of Gaia has not only been altered but irreparable damage to the ecosystem threatens extinction of the plant and animal kingdoms. With the current value system accepted by our culture any life form is expendable if it interferes with the profit margin. Taurus on a negative level encourages greed, hoarding, "the one with the biggest toys wins!" Ethics, integrity or fairness have nothing to do with the ability to achieve monetary success, clout, and control. The negative Taurus declares, "The end justifies the means."

- The Taurus Ambassadors and Their May Assembly

Pictures of a City depicts the album's obstacle to further development, blind cravings & instincts, and points the way to the album's goal, the transcendence of duality (subject and object) and desire.

"According to Gautama (Buddha), men sleep away their lives in senseless and self-centered preoccupations; this self-centeredness can lead only to pain and suffering. The illusion of selfish craving blocks awareness of things as they really are.

In order to bring an end to suffering, one must bring an end to self-centered craving."

- Buddhism: the Life and Message of Gautama

"Taurus is the symbol of desire in all its manifestations. It sees average man impelled by desire and unruly appetites ...driven by wilfulness, stubbornness and insistence upon material or sensual satisfaction; the other uses the energy as a motivation towards constructive."

- D. K. Foundation

"In some Eastern religions, desire is the cause of all pain and suffering in the world, and eliminating desire is the means to end human suffering. In the Western myth of Genesis, the desire of Eve is seen as the downfall of humanity and it is her desire that causes her expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Eros bursts from the golden egg and his name, which means "demanding love," tells us he represents love that desires.
And the human newborn experiences the same thing; he or she is born with desire. The first conscious feeling is desire, which comes from the first conscious body sensation that delivers the message that he or she is no longer one with the world, but separate and in the world."

- The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart

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In Pictures of a City , which is a commentary on our consumer culture, people are "no longer one with the world, but separate and in the world". Having lost all humanity, they are no more than commodities. How, you may ask, does this relate to Eros? Without Eros (Desire) there would be no consumers.

"In Eros and Civilization , Herbert Marcuse supplemented the traditional Marxian interpretation of capitalism in terms of economic exploitation with the Freudian one in terms of psychological forms of control. What was new in late capitalism, particularly consumerism, Marcuse argued, was that the work ethic, which required that the desire for pleasure be sublimated in order for worker or capitalist to succeed, was now being overturned."

"Dream flesh love chase perfumed skin"

"The market's power includes the power to seduce. If the expansion of the System's empire requires the re-channeling of human needs, the System has the power to engineer the necessary restructuring of the human psyche."

- Andrew Schmookler

"Greased hand teeth hide tinseled sin
Spice ice dance chance sickly grin
Pasteboard time slot sweat and spin."

"The logic of consumerism was precisely the repressive structuring of pleasure for the purpose of control. Consumers were encouraged to desublimate and indulge their desires for a myriad of products..."

"Red white green white neon wheel."

"...which were made all the more alluring by the glossy images of advertising ."

- Nietzsche at the Mall: Deconstructing the Consumer
Daniel R. White and Gert Hellerick

"Marcuse sketched the outlines of a non-repressive civilization which would involve libidinal and non-alienated labor, play, free and open sexuality, and production of a society and culture which would further freedom and happiness. His vision of liberation anticipated many of the values of the 1960s counterculture and helped Marcuse to become a major intellectual and political influence during that decade."

- Illuminations by Douglas Kelleher

"Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization (1955), explains why Orpheus has not become a prominent hero for a modern civilization devoted to economic accumulation and hostile to free expression: his is �the image of joy and fulfillment, the voice which does not command but sings.... The Orphic Eros transforms being; he masters cruelty and death through liberation. His language is song, and his work is play.�

- Lyres Against the Law

"Man's Promethean attempt has ended in shambles: the forces unleashed by his creative consciousness have become fetters, and the generality of human beings becomes enslaved by its own needs and by the modes of satisfying them."

- Hegel's Theory of the Modern State

"Blind stick blind drunk cannot see
Mouth dry tongue tied cannot speak
Concrete dream flesh broken shell
Lost soul lost trace lost in hell."

"The glorification of materialism and the brutal subjugation
of everything to its service will prove to be the nemesis of
the modern world. The secular religion of materialism is its
own grave digger. Historian Arnold Toynbee saw the
putrification of our time when he wrote:

"...Technology had inveighed her victims into putting
themselves into her power by selling them new lamps for old.
She had bribed them with 'the pictures' and 'the wireless'
into selling their souls; and the outcome of this ruinous cultural
'new deal' was the spiritual wilderness which Plato had
dismissed as a 'Commonwealth of Swine,' and Aldous Huxley had
satirized as a 'Brave New World.'"

- The Modern World

"Taurus is the sign in which desire is transmuted into aspiration, darkness into illumination. The Buddha taught us the effects of unenlightened desire; Christ taught the transmutation of desire into aspiration. Gradually, the disciple learns to distinguish between soul and personality levels."

- D. K. Foundation

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