ex cathedra: Totem animal

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Totem animal

Been in a funk the last couple of weeks. Started when I lost my glasses. Hate it when I do that.

Moved to feeling irritable and irritated, lazy, circling, centrifugal, intermittent, eremetic, wasteful, even cowardly. Unhappy with myself, unhappy with the world...despite much evidence to the contrary. I think I'm a bit cyclothymic. Try to keep it all in perspective, not fight it too much, not give in completely.... walk around the paddock with the horse but not become a centaur, though I am tempted to be the conquistador some days.

I know from my history that I marginalize myself in every group I have ever belonged to. I try not to blame the groups too much now, knowing that I always do it. Wrote a poem years ago about the cycle of my exilic longing for home and then needing to escape it.

Feeling strongly my marginality to the city, to many of my countrymen, and to the tribe of gay men. Reading Androphilia and a lot of the gaymale responses to it has not helped, but has only given more language to my edge-dwelling. I feel paradoxically closeted here in the biggest ghetto in the world...well, if not numerically biggest, symbolically.

An outsider looking down from a rocky ledge.

Hence, the title above: totem animals.

Was chatting online with my new pal BDD --a complex and unusual guy who under other circumstances would be a kind of sexual icon for me, but for whom I instead feel a combination of things: curiosity-turned-into-personal-interest, respect, admiration, puzzlement, caution, affection and sympathy. We got into discussing totem animals and, to make a middling story even shorter, I remembered the Mountain Goat, who for years back in the 80's seemed to embody my life. And lately does again. Even though we don't know each other well, BDD is a quick and clever fellow on several levels and he strongly suggested I give the Goat , Oreamnos Americanus, a close look.

The Mountain Goat (Oreamnos americanus), also known as the Rocky Mountain Goat, is a large hoofed mammal found only in North America. Although it resembles a goat it is not a true goat, being in a different genus, related to the antelope. It resides at high elevations and is a sure-footed climber, often resting on rocky cliffs that predators cannot reach.

Not even a true goat, being in a different genus! Fits me.

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's only job is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.