[My comments are in brackets.]
Hello James! How are you doing?
Since I last emailed you, I have done a few neat things. The first neat thing is, I got in touch with Lloyd du Jongh, on your recommendation. That guy is awesome. He gave me some clarity on things that had been plaguing me for a long time—answers that had been staring me right in the face!
The second neat thing is, I have been working out a lot with various different implements over Corona...bodyweight, kettlebells, dumbbells, dynamic movement, static stretching, etc. I have been testing them out working long hours lifting, pushing, and pulling heavy objects on my feet all day. This is paralleling my deep research into Catch Wrestling, which I have come to believe is the ultimate hand-to-hand tactical combat tradition of the Great Western Warrior Tradition.
In conjunction with that, I have been reading the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf... Beowulf killed Grendel with a Kimura! The mystical connection that I feel grappling is all the stronger...knowing that what I am doing is not the domain of foul-mouthed jocks, but of the Great Western Warriors of Old. My brother says I'm superstitious as all get-up...and guess what? He's right!
[Superstition, I have come to understand, is a sign of rational hope. No mind is more easily duped and less adaptable than the worshipper of science, the religion that denies higher intelligence, like a chimp that insists that any thought that something as smart as a human exists is blasphemy against Science. The orthodox cultists of today always follows the science, never tries to get ahead of it and never questions scientific media pronouncements.]
The third neat thing is, I have been reading a lot—many of your works in fact. I have read "The Gods of Boxing", "All Power Fighting", "Your Trojan Whorse" (one of my favorites in the Lafond collection!), "Taboo You" (another favorite!).
[I think the dust cover of Taboo You is my best piece of autobiography.]
From these, I have learned that I am an Omega Man, and that Omega Men can be tough. For much of my life, I was banished to the library, and was content there. But when I decided to come out of the library, I felt pushback from many in my life.
[The alpha-omega-beta complex is best understood as Wyatt Earp-Doc Holiday-everybody else at the OK Corral.]
They told me I was a bookworm, and didn't belong out adventuring in the big, wide, scary world. I realize now that I am not a bookworm, but an Omega Man, and for two decades the agreement society had made with me was to send me to the library—a way to control the Omega Man.
[The Omega man or alienate masculine mind is best served with information that is rarely got and therefore sets him up to be the advisor and natural ally to the Alpha male, who can appreciate his knowledge where such knowledge terrifies the beta, who cannot think outside of his tiny box. The natural alpha knows that the world is won by those who can think outside the box even if the struggle must maintain the appearance of being waged within the box. The alpha male with the omega male ally is like the military commander who has a satellite feed, and the alpha without an omega is like the commander still working from Vietnam Era paper maps.]
I don't mean control in a malicious way, but as a way to keep the social balance for all involved. However, things change, and we must change with them.
[That is the lesson of combat and why men who do not risk combat in at least a training context can rarely adapt under stress and tend to be easily fooled by lies such as “the policeman is your friend.”]
What I got from your works that being a bookworm is a symptom of the condition of strangeness, and not the cause. The cause is the Omega Man Personality—and one can have it and be very, very tough!
[The state of alienation demands superior information and a prism for appreciating reality, because the Omega is always outnumbered in any setting, for his like-mind is also not with him and often against him—think of Doc Holiday and Ringo—whereas betas tend to flock and school together.]
In the past few years, I have tried to negate my Omega Man Personality...hide it, bury it, ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist. I did this because I thought I couldn't be tough and have the Omega Man Personality. But your example and your writings have shown me that I can—and indeed, that this fact was before my very eyes the whole time, I was just too caught up in my own melancholy sadness to see it!
[Twerps like us are fortunate in this sissy day and age. For, in Soyboy America, most of the natural physical specimens are not conditioned to combat, and runts like us can still compete on a primal level if we dedicate ourselves to hardening, conditioning and training.]
As I look over my historical and fictional heroes, I see them all being Omega Men. Also, the most meaningful relationships I've had in my life have been mentor-mentee friendships with older Omega Men, almost all of which are very, very physically tough!
[Gilgamesh-Enkidu = Alpha-Omega: Achilles-Odysseus = Alpha-Omega: Charlemagne-Roland = Alpha-Omega, etc.]
Game recognizes game, they say. So I suppose it's no coincidence that Charlton Heston's "Omega Man" is one of my all time favorite movies. "Lose the halloween costumes, and get organized!" as Charlton Heston says!
And what do you know...my PT and fighting skills get a lot better as soon as I accept that I am the Omega Man...Omega and Tough! I feel free, calm, happy, even-keeled. The way I used to feel. I feel that even when I'm beat, I can't be beat. That's a wonderful feeling, and up until about 5-6 years ago, was a dragon I had mastered. I lost it, and have been chasing it ever since. Now it is found, and it shall never depart again.
[The alienated soul understands instinctively that victory is in the mind, that one has not lost until he has submitted, whereas the alpha male will tend to think of victory and defeat in more physical, and therefore less direct and more peripheral, terms.]
I have also learned from your works that the kind of females I have been attracted to are the Priestess. The important women in my life have been women that I think could be termed "Omega Priestesses". They generally have odd, eccentric personalities (a la the Omega), are always very sexual and beautiful, but prize devotion and loyalty to family above all else. They are also very intelligent and widely read, and have been a great source of wisdom to me on my life's journey.
[An intelligent and widely read woman is by definition alienated from her gender.]
I think Dejah Thoris is the ultimate example of this type in literature, and I think it's one of multiple reasons why I always connected with John Carter as my life role model over Conan the Barbarian, as have you. I find that in the Lafondian classification system, Conan dates Slave Girls. He doesn't like a Priestess to tie him down. He never got with a chick on the level of Dejah Thoris, and that's because he wasn't interested in the long-term commitment as was the Warlord of Mars. You are the residential ERB expert...what do you think of this analysis?
[In the Conan stories the priestess, tends to be a villainess not a love interest. Where Burroughs was addicted to the idea of the perfect renaissance-woman—a 1 in 1,000 creature—Howard was more practical and understood that such a woman would destroy a heroic personality through seduction.]
Some other neat books I have read are "Metaphysics of War" by Julius Evola...an interesting one worthy of a much longer analysis; "Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam" by James Gibson on Western Warrior Culture in pop culture Post-Vietnam (one of my favorites right now!); and "The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers.
[One of my favorite books, is The Power of Myth. You should read Transformations of Myth Through Time, which is a transcript of a 13-part lecture that is most pertinent to the alienated mind of post-modernity.]
I have always liked Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell's framework, but the more I read old Joe's words himself, the more I find that he was very hostile to Christianity and the Western Warrior Tradition, two things near and dear to my heart. I don't like that much about him. I also don't 100% agree that all cultures and myths are the same.
[Campbell is important to looking at syncretic elements in spirituality. But, of course, he takes it too far for the skeptic or the partisan. Campbell is of course hostile to religions that claim there is only one true faith.]
I agree that they have many similarities, and this is proof the Law of God is written on Man's heart, as Romans 2:13-16 says. However, the similarities do not mean they are all the same—something even Campbell admits in a roundabout way.
[He was building a thesis his entire life, which is an exercise in developing a pillar of understanding and a single pillar, no matter how strong, is not going to support an entire house.]
The simple truth is Yahweh is not Allah, Petraus is not Saddam, and the Western Warrior Way is not the Third World Warrior Way (something you discussed expertly in your recent post, "Heroism, Honor, Horses, and Hounds: A Look Into the Commanding Soul", a post worth a deeper response from me most definitely).
[I suspect that God has subordinate deities {angels for instance} and heretical supernatural insurgents and also that such powers are parasitic to humanity and wax and wane across the ages.]
There are similarities, yes. And Jung and Campbell's model of similarities has been the intellectual framework I have been filtering all my intellectual work through for the last five years. However, with your help, and following my own gut, and guided by the Hand of God, I am now looking at the differences—and am arriving at a more balanced view in regards to both sides of the similarity-difference coin.
At the end of the day, old Joe Campbell was also obsessed with the one-world mythology of Buddhism, and believed that farming societies based on mother goddess fertility worship were superior to those evil raiding herders based on father worship.
[He was seduced by the Subcontinental metaphysics and stood as a classic cosmic oatmeal cookie.]
He says the Hebrews were a people of father worship—and he was right! They worshiped God Almighty the Father, and indeed, their entire metaphysics were based off of "Yetzer Ha'ra", the action-based equivalent of "Agon" in the Greco-Roman Tradition. And indeed, Abraham was a warrior, who left "the city that makes a coward for a hamlet that makes a hero" as the classical quote goes, and rescued his cousin Lot from the hands of evil and depravity, raiding the enemy tribesmen with his own kinsmen to rescue one of his own.
[Campbell seemed to me to be obsessed with the synergy of the Mother Goddess and the Father God in the form of their Osirian offspring.]
To me, the Old Testament is a part of the Western Warrior tradition, and as Jesus said "I did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it", in Matthew 5:17, I do not see any disconnect between what was taught in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Christianity adopted by the fighting, confrontational Germanic tribes of Europe in the Medieval Times.
[Through the Aramaic, and particularly the figures of Samson, David and Solomon, you see a very strong Arуan influence which, in the New Testament is developed into a synergy between the Near Eastern and European mind, as the gospels and other books of the New Testament were written either in Greek or under Hellenistic influence. Note that Christ-like figures are prominent in Pre-Christian, Hellenic myth and literature, and not in the Judaic tradition.]
This then is my heritage! And I wouldn't have it any other way!
I hope you are doing good, James. I have much more to write and say, but I will leave you with the broad outline for now.
I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Sincerely,
Richard Barrett
[Thanks, Richard.]
