Beautiful Passions -- Primal Passions

I said earlier that in this blog I would be discussing not only the wildness without but the wildness within - of our need for a wildness in our passions and creativity, and in our primal and loving relations with others.

Primal passions can initially seem scary. Sometimes they are. Sometimes there's unnecessary violence in heart, mind, and action. But sometimes that can be a starting point for tapping into something deep and powerful and ultimately beautiful within the human psyche.

A case in point. Here's a scene from one of the world's finest 20th century novelists, James Baldwin (whose picture I uploaded). In this scene (from Another Country, 1960), a black man is at a party during the night-time hours in New York City. He has started a relationship with a white woman. They are on a balcony:

Her fingers opened his shirt to the navel, her tongue burned his neck and his chest; and his hands pushed up her skirt and caressed the inside of her thighs. Then, after a long, high time, while he shook beneath every accelerating tremor of her body, he forced her beneath him and he entered her. For a moment he thought she was going to scream, she was so tight and caught her breath so sharply, and stiffened so. But then she moaned, she moved beneath him. Then, from the center of his rising storm, very slowly and deliberately, he began the slow ride home (p. 21). ...And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry. I told you, he moaned, I'd give you something to cry about, and, at once, he felt himself strangling, about to explode or die. A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies. (p. 22)

Words in the mind of a fine novelist like Baldwin can go to some amazing places. What is it exactly that makes it primal? Maybe some of it is the violence? That's part of the Marlon Brando character in A Streetcar Named Desire. Maybe that sexual violence - and of a man using a woman and a woman using a man - is part of our evolutionary history. I don't know. I don't know if anyone knows. Regardless, today that violence may well be a perversion of the primal. But that energy is not.

The sexual primal energy without violence - what does it look like? Maybe the answer has embedded within it still the concept of use. But of a different form.

According to Richard Nelson, Koyukon elders of their traditional way believe no animal should be considered inferior or insignificant. Each deserves respect. All are part of a living community. It is a community that includes not only humans and animals, and not only plants, but mountains, rivers, lakes, storms - the earth itself. Nelson (1989) writes: "According to Koyukon teachers, the tree I lean against feels me, hears what I say about it, and engages me in a moral reciprocity based on responsible use. In their tradition, the forest is both a provider and a community of spiritually empowered beings. There is no emptiness in the forest, no unwatched solitude, no wilderness where a person moves outside moral judgment and law" (p. 13).

In The Old Way, one kills. One kills to eat. But one kills with respect, engaged in a moral reciprocity based on responsible use.

Imagine then a person using another person, but based on moral reciprocity which is itself based on responsible use. What might that look like? Perhaps it's first feeling confident in giving the other pleasure and when that is substantiated and solidified psychologically the "use" - the "objectification" - of the loved one can occur, and in that context the other welcomes it, needs it, and that need drives the other forward as much as the forward motion drives the other, and the two become one within the one and within the other, and - as Baldwin says - there's no stopping it. Perhaps that's Baldwin's primal energy done well. That's human nature, too.