I Hate Everything bangle by Me and Zena
See website for full details: meandzena.com
I am often asked what the phrase torpedo the ark signifies, despite the fact that I have explicitly stated in several posts that, for me, it primarily means having done with the judgement of God; i.e. rejecting any notion of indebtedness to a deity and refusing to face a celestial tribunal where one will eternally be found guilty and sentenced to death and damnation.
In taking up this critical project - one that Kant failed so miserably to accomplish - one hopes to continue and possibly develop or send spiraling off in a new direction, the work of the truly great artists and thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and Deleuze.
For those, however, who like things expressed in less philosophical terms, then torpedo the ark might be said to simply mean this: I hate everything.
The concept of hate, of course, mustn't be understood in a purely reactive manner; hate is more than simply love on the recoil (as if love were the great primary term or essential prerequisite). And it's crucial not to simply fall back into metaphysical dualism, where love and hate are two fixed terms of opposition.
That said, I suppose we can provisionally agree that love is ultimately a will to merger and the dream of blissful union with all mankind, the heavenly host, and, ultimately, God himself, whilst hate is the desire to be separate and the ability to discriminate and distinguish between things. Thus whilst love makes us open up our arms and embrace the universe, hate teaches us to kick with our legs and stand on our own two feet as sovereign individuals, proud of our own singular nature and keen to discover and create new worlds.
When Zarathustra encourages his listeners to become hard like diamonds, he means they should abandon love when it has become a morbid moral ideal exclusively tied to values born of sickness; he means they should become a little more independent and a little more hateful; that they should shatter the old law tables, tear down the Cross, and torpedo the ark.
This might seem to be an evil teaching, but, as Blake pointed out, evil is only the active or most vital power that flows into us from behind and below. And it is this power - or more precisely the feeling of this power - that causes delight and helps us give birth to what is best in us and to the future.
We can conclude, therefore, that whilst kindness, kisses, and cuddles all have their place within a general economy of the heart, so to does cruelty, combat, and the determination to kick against the pricks and all that is rotten. As Lawrence writes, we must learn to accept all the subtle promptings of the incalculable soul; from the most passionate love, to the fiercest hate. Only this will keep us sane and beyond judgement.
The post's commendable central tenet - that 'love' and 'hate' should not be understood dualistically (with the latter, moreover, derogated as love's reactive/ negatived counterpart) - appears, unfortunately, the very opposite of what the paragraph that follows it precisely appears to fall into the trap of reaffirming. However, I'm not clear if or why we have to understand either love or hate in the purely antagonistic ways portrayed (as the allure of the One and/or the resistance to same) in any event.
ReplyDeleteTo follow Rilke, (self-)love, for example, can be seen as a way to sharpen the contours of the self - within an economy, of course, of inescapable human intervolvement. As Nick Land has brilliantly argued, we are only separate individuals at a certain level of molecular magnification; withdraw our human-all-too-human short-sightedness like an alien camera into the ethers, and we quickly become blurringly burrowed into everyone and everything else. In a sense, to borrow Nietzsche's genealogical approach, the individual is a prejudice, or, in psychological language, a narcissistic pretension. On the other hand, we might also explore the 'gentler' textures of hatred in sadness, disappointment and grief (cf. the word's etymological roots in the Gk. kēdos: ‘care, trouble, sorrow, mourning, funeral rites’) in this sphere, as well as the passion for change that its raging can obscure. On this basis, a more fruitful starting point for thinking about love and hate could be to examine their alienated affinities.
Blake's vitalisation of evil as a formative principle is a valuable source here, but Blake was also as hooked into a poetics of contrariety as was the young Nietzsche and, later, the psychologist Jung. As he wrote in his ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’:
'Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.'
As a visionary thinker, I would argue, Blake's use of the word 'progression' is crucial here - he is looking ahead, beyond the idiocies of religion - and as such his reference to 'what the religious call' good and evil implies that these concepts are so saturated in theology we cannot yet recognise them, and ourselves, for what they and we are. If we did, we might recognise that everything is 'poetically' evil when it originates (vital, creative, innocent) and 'goodness' would be subsumed.