Hey there James, I hope that everything is well. When you have time, I wanted to get your thoughts on this hour-long documentary. I remember you mentioning the Japanese situation in one of your earlier articles, and I hope you're interested enough to give your thoughts.
Take care,
Adam
link › vimeo.com/80542212
Wow Adam—what a mirror into the emasculated future this film holds!
This BBC documentary begins with a look at the town of Yubari which went from 100,000 to 10,000 and has shut down its maternity ward. Japan is shown to be a nation where adult diapers outsell baby diapers, men are immersed in the fantasy culture of comic books and virtual dating with doe-eyed school girls, all the while Japanese women are wondering where the aggressive men are they would like to meet.
This brings to mind Sam Shepherd’s second book in which he describes traveling to Japan for a Pride fight as the member of a Brazilian fighter’s entourage and seeing crowds of Japanese women giving their phone numbers to the fighter. The women are obviously missing that old Bushido spirit in their men, who now peruse a seven-story comic book shop!
The obvious conclusion upon viewing this film is that the Japanese are experiencing the cultural costs of the denatured man in the mature economy, who, like his terminal trajectory society, has nowhere to go but down. What postmodern feminists and multiculturalists are attempting to achieve in America has been achieved in Japan, a separation of the sexes and an erasure of masculinity as a cultural centerpiece.
On a deeper level, which I gather is where you wanted me to go, Adam, is the role of fantasy to the warrior. You and I, being involved in fantasy literature, and such masculine pursuits as real stick fighting, are obviously placed on a moral knife edge here.
As fighters and fantasy buffs, do we have one foot in Manginastan and the other foot on a banana peel?
Fantasy in Masculine Culture
There is a corollary to fantasy, horror, comics, science-fiction, roleplaying games and other foci of geek culture in all ancient warrior societies.
This is the Dream Time; that ever underlying allegorical place where the seer, the shaman, the bard, transports the warrior in his extremity [often as a form of PTSD therapy] through the artifice of the fairy tale, the myth, or the interpreted dream. In IndoEuropean cultures epic poetry—now almost entirely lost—has traditionally served this function with the epics of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Beowulf providing an imaginative vehicle for the troubled soul.
In aboriginal societies one is usually taken directly to the dream space. The vision quest common to Native American peoples was a way of establishing a psychological portal for the warrior so that, in times of need, this dream space might be accessed with the aid of ritual device and/or shamanic advice. In such a society a man does not become a warrior until he has established—with help from sensory deprivation in the context of the natural world—a door into this dream space, a psychological escape hatch.
After experiencing war, and committing the taboo acts of blood shedding and killing, the warrior must then undergo a ritual—whether meditative or guided—whereby his dream space is accessed in order to center himself for a return to normal social conduct.
Keep in mind that primal man had 70,000 years experience with war before the slave masters of civilization invented the soldier, a supposedly unfeeling war slave that could commit the acts of the war without attaining the defiant spirit of the warrior. It is therefore no accident that the slave masters that operate modern armies have not bothered to develop an adequate means for dealing with the trauma of war to the masculine human mind, for such a ritual—being many, long established and effective—would produce an introspective spirit in the man that might leave to defiance of the slave master’s world order.
Instead, the mind of the soldier is cast into the muck pit of history as he is discarded and a fresh replacement is indoctrinated in his place. It has been known by military psychologists since 1915 that continuous combat of more than a month produces insanity in all men.* Yet the purification ritual of the warrior has yet to be adopted by the masters of soldiers. This is without accident.
*This was clinically established after the Second World War, but was a known fact by 1915.
What we have now, primarily in our video-fantasy, but also in comic and book form, is the permanent retreat into the dream space. In a world without warrior paths the denatured male can—with the aid of these dreaming devices—establish his psychological escape hatch into what the Australian Aborigine knew as ‘dreamtime’, and perhaps retain a vestigial identity in the absence of a warrior path to follow. This is a dream time without a shaman, a poem without a bard, a vision without a seer; and is therefore closer to the type of sorcerous constructs imagined by Robert E. Howard for his wizards, who worked their magic in a dehumanized realm of shadow bordering the overlying physical world.
Fantasy in this post-cultural context is a refuge for the potentially masculine mind, a place where an idea of what men once were might be stored in hopes of resurrection when the time is once again right, when the last slave master finally becomes weak enough to fall.
Speaking as a warrior trapped in a soldiers body you capture perfectly the contrast between the two. The state needs it's war machine, but can't let the soldiers start to become too warrior like, else they rage like Achilles against Agamemnon's leash. My constant point of study is how to do just that. I spent a good long while serving the state in Mesopotamia, because it afforded me the opportunity to test myself in the mortal arena. It was only later that I realized how they control the expression of our instincts as warriors.
Captain,
I am quite surprised—and pleasantly so, as I was the only one of my brothers not to serve the military—that so many war vets have been reading on this site.
If you've read much of my stuff you'll know I think our military policy is crap. And what I am going to write is obscene by current standards.
I regard combat as having a value all it's own, a good beyond any political or humanitarian consideration, primarily associated with the risk taken rather than the destruction dished out.
You would find Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation of interest, I think. You can read almost all of it for free by searching through the man cave posts from November 2014 thru December.
Good luck on your search.