Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-24. Zlataya (conclusion). Homo. Die!

Enchained (conclusion). Zlataya. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp. Part 24. Zlataya (conclusion). Homo. Die! Like a dog. The last enemy. More than one. From an evolutionary standpoint, the development of aesthetic sensibility can be viewed as a component of the process directed at weakening natural selection and withdrawing individual variability from its sphere of action — variability whose adaptive significance is gradually being lost. Adaptively neutral characteristics that form the foundation of personality thereby move to the foreground. To cite Oscar Wilde once more: "It is a humiliating confession, but we are all made of the same material. That which distinguishes us from one another is of no consequence whatsoever." In the transformation of the essential into the inessential, and vice versa, a general pattern is discernible without which the evolution of the human being is difficult to comprehend. The sense of the beautiful arose as a metamorphosis of fear, and the means of attraction developed as the reverse side of the means of repulsion, through the displacement of the original function — the initial utility. Therefore, beauty at the level of basic vital functions is useless. The ancients saw its specific utility in catharsis — the purification from divisive passions as a condition of harmonious existence in accord with the entire world and with oneself (this is likewise the essence of L.N. Tolstoy's aesthetic theory, which saw the purpose of art in the unification of people on the basis of shared feeling). However, the development of aesthetic sensibility proceeded within the general current of the individualization of human beings and ultimately led to the destruction of universal aesthetic standards. At the same time, the sphere of the beautiful expanded relentlessly, providing space for all individual manifestations of aesthetic feeling. In this sphere, an ideal state will probably be achieved before any other: to each — his own aesthetic niche. Homo Aphrodite, who transforms enmity into love, extended her touch even to sexual rivalry. For social hierarchy rests not only on confrontations and threats. Stability is lent to it by a particular feeling — a mixture of fear and love — which all its members experience toward the dominant individual. Since sexual competition underlies social hierarchy, it is not surprising that sex participates in hierarchical feeling in one way or another. Not only do females, regardless of age, show preference for the leader, but males too will often adopt the posture of the female — "presenting" — in the leader's presence. In such cases the leader may simulate copulation, thereby reinforcing the relationship of dominance and submission. It is possible that homosexuality in primates developed on the basis of such hierarchical relations. Although the human being possesses a unique capacity to suppress unwanted feelings in the subconscious, there is nonetheless sufficient evidence of sexual experiences connected with the person of the leader (Salvador Dali's admission of sexual attraction to Hitler was not particularly original: in the Third Reich, similar feelings were apparently experienced by the majority of citizens of both sexes). At the root of these experiences lies the interconnection of fear and love. They are akin to the feeling that a slave experiences toward a master who cruelly and with impunity oppresses him. The aggressive reaction turns inward in such cases — into self-destruction and self-mortification — making room for hierarchical love. The latter becomes a rival and, in the extreme case, a substitute for sexual love. In search of a master, a human being is capable of much. And even marriage is frequently founded upon the half-conscious desire to belong to someone. Among primitive peoples, the chieftain not only enjoyed sexual privileges but was identified with sexual potency itself. The fertility of livestock and harvest depended upon him. The supreme deity, the universal symbol of fertility, was endowed with these same properties, only on a cosmic scale. Religious feeling, having grown out of the hierarchical, inherited from it a persistent sexual component. Earth — Gaia — fertilized by the sky — Uranus — gave birth to titans and monsters, until Uranus was castrated by his son Cronus, who was in turn overthrown by Zeus, who fertilized an innumerable multitude of goddesses and mortals. Yet what transpires on Earth does not bypass the gods. The story of the boy Ganymede opened a new chapter in the biography of Zeus. And already bearded philosophers were declaring that marriage and procreation were for common folk, while they themselves were better suited to the love of boys: one could hardly reproduce philosophers by primitive means, after all. And in general, one must not confuse the Heavenly Aphrodite with the common one, the Heavenly Eros with Eros the infant. And so Athena, the stern patroness of philosophy, casts tender Aphrodite down into the dust. The appearance of homosexual and childless gods signaled the development of urban civilization, which opposed itself ever more sharply to the traditional way of life with its cult of reproduction. Cities were already threatened by overpopulation at that time. Athens with ten thousand inhabitants was not a large city by modern standards, but if philosophers were permitted to live in wine barrels, the sanitary situation presumably left much to be desired, as in Jerusalem, above which hung a cloud of poisonous smoke from the "fiery gehenna" — the city dump in the Valley of Hinnom where refuse was burned (ice-core samples from Greenland provide direct evidence of atmospheric pollution by ancient cities approximately two thousand years ago; see S. Hong et al.: Science 1994, 265, 1841–1843). A revaluation of values familiar to us from biological evolution was underway. The city, which arose to protect the interests of citizens from plunder and levies, acquired an autotelic significance and became a fetish. Natural feelings and the lives of city dwellers were sacrificed to it. In the ideal case (and partly in practice), the city-state strove to fully regulate and subordinate to itself both sexual and kinship love. Plato had already raised the sword over these feelings. Down with Homer, and long live Lycurgus! The ancient cities received their laws from Delphi. Apollo, having become the progenitor of the Athenians (who descended from his son Ion), relinquished the attributes of the life-giving sun to the archaic shepherd-god Helios and took upon himself organization, management, order, harmony, and ideal beauty (in Athens he was venerated as "Apollo of the Streets," since among his numerous divine duties was the keeping of order in the streets). This truly Platonic god, vanquisher of the Serpent (though the founder of Athens, Cecrops, was himself half-serpent), stood in a strained relationship with elemental fertility and exterminated satyrs and their playful companions the nymphs. The golden-haired god's attempts to enter into amorous relations were, as a rule, fatal to the objects of his passion. Apollo pursues the nymph without success and weaves a garland from her body, returned to nature. An instinctive revulsion from the Apollonian principle seizes the entire fair half of humanity. All the Lottes flee from the young Werthers, all the Marys from the young lame lords. Not that these Werthers and lords do not please them, but something in them is not right: the elevated tenor of amorous feeling enters into contradiction with sexual love and reproduction. This is the result of the competition between the two Aphrodites. The young skald Kormak was captivated by the beautiful Steingerdr and loved her all his life. Even when she had married another, and an opportunity presented itself to assuage his love-suffering (the husband did not object), Kormak did not avail himself of it. A spell prevented him — what else could it have been. The young pseudo-Trojan warrior Troilus fell in love with the beautiful Briseida (Criseyde), who gave herself to the fierce Greek Diomedes. Troilus remained forever faithful to his elevated feeling and fitted perfectly into the age of chivalry, when, by Chaucer's will, he was at last permitted to enter the beauty's bedchamber. And there — an evident anachronism — the courtly knight swoons, struck down by a love stronger than love itself. Such is the first European novel of the modern era. This fashion did indeed seize all of Europe. The Heavenly Aphrodite — she who is also the Fair Lady, also the Eternal Feminine, also Sophia — conquered hearts, compensating for what the common Aphrodite refused (she who is also Criseyde, also Lotte, and so forth). The ideal beloved, whether Beatrice or Laura, possessed no individual distinguishing marks and her proper place was in heaven — an encounter with her on earth boded nothing good. In the Christian paradigm of love, the central figures were Jesus and the Virgin Mary, toward whom a sexual relationship was considered sacrilegious and was severely punished. In an attenuated form, the prohibition extended to sexual relations in general, as a base and secondary element of love. The Fair Lady was the earthly embodiment of the Virgin Mary and could be the object of service, but by no means of carnal desire. To be sure, the numerous troubadours, trouveres, skalds, and minnesingers (like their predecessors, the cleric-poets of the early Middle Ages) subsisted mainly on the patronage of noble ladies, which inevitably introduced a certain pragmatic element into the elevated tenor of their feelings. As Byron justly remarked (in the preface to Childe Harold), "the good old days when the love of the good old times flourished was precisely the most debauched of all historical epochs." The "Romance of the Rose," popular in the Middle Ages, was replete with elevated feeling and abstract allegories. But the rose could also be interpreted as the female sexual organ. This ambivalence manifested itself also in the paradoxically inverted relations between courtly and Goliardic poetry. The wandering cleric-Goliards, unlike the secular poets, were by no means preoccupied with spiritual love. As the Archpoet of Cologne justly remarked: To war against nature is, truly, a labor in vain: Can one preserve before a girl an air of dispassion? The rules hold no power over the soul of a young man: He is set aflame by a beautiful form. The common Aphrodite was taking her revenge. Sex, overcoming prohibition, invaded the sanctum sanctorum. Phallic cults, temple prostitution, Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries left their trace in the covert symbolism of domes and spires, in holy harlots, Easter kisses, the nudity of the Jesuses, Sebastians, Magdalenes, and Agneses reproduced by monastically inclined artists. With a not entirely Christian love did Pushkin's Poor Knight burn for the Holy Rose (and his archetype in Platonov, the knight of revolution Kopjonkin — for the distant Rosa Luxemburg, saint of the new religious formation). Exalted love for a barely known or altogether nonexistent lady — the subject of courtly poetry — was in some cases encouraged as evidence of high spirituality, in others became the subject of mockery, or, if its object stood too high, as in the case of the Poor Knight, was condemned on suspicion of sacrilege. Examining such feelings as components of the metaecological system, we can evaluate them by means of systemic criteria of structural complexity, dominance, stability, and productivity. In the general case, the feelings evoked by Laura or Beatrice enriched the metaecological system and unquestionably contributed to the enhancement of its productivity (not necessarily at the expense of genetic productivity). The case of the Poor Knight is another matter. The unconditional dominance of a single feeling — however undeniably elevated — exerts a simplifying influence upon the metaecological system, undermining its stability and depriving it of productivity. Pushkin's phrase "burned out in his soul" conveys the essence of the matter with complete precision. In the depleted system of the inner world, no room remains for anything except the destructive hatred with which the poor knights burned on the plains of Palestine, smiting the infidel in the name of sacred love. To overcome these contradictions, the competing Aphrodites had to be reconciled, and this could only be accomplished through love. Under the sign of courtly love, the cult of the childless Son was supplemented by the cult of the Virgin-Mother — a self-sufficient, life-giving principle. The feminine hypostasis of God was conceived as the Church as his living body, or as Nature as the mode of his (dissolved therein) existence. Marriage was imagined as the earthly reflection of the union of God with his feminine alter ego, which constituted the sanctity of the transformation of two into one flesh. In the merging of two lives, mutually complementary, was seen a miniature model of the relations among all people, of the ideal ordering of the world. The task ultimately consists in the conjunction of counterparts by a double bond — both natural and metaphysical. If you make the two one, states the Gnostic apocryph, you shall enter the kingdom of heaven. But Troilus and Criseyde did not enter it, nor Tristan and Isolde, nor Paolo and Francesca. It was no accident that separated Romeo and Juliet: it could not have been otherwise. "To him I was most cruel," says Gudrun in the Icelandic saga, "whom I loved most of all." Whom did Gudrun love and whom did she destroy — her Kjartan, her own conception of him, or his conception of her? In the conjunction of two, each attempts to impose upon the other an authored model of himself, expecting the other to fit into it as its likeness — a double of the double. But the other expects the same. The formula "they were incompatible" (inapplicable to animals, though they too have different characters) means that the process of creating doubles did not succeed owing to the resistance of the source material. A more productive variant is that of endless quarrels and reconciliations, when one must spend one's entire life proving that I am who I consider myself to be, not who you consider me to be. The interaction of two systems — personality and family — providing impulses for the development of both, allows both partners to refine their models of themselves and achieve a more complete alignment. Worse, when the formulas "I wish to preserve my freedom" (you will not gain access to my double) or "I shall endeavor to be worthy of you" (I shall replace my double with your conception of me) come into play, threatening in the first case the dissolution of the family, in the second — the dissolution of the personality. Othello, the paradigmatic jealous husband, was not, by his own assessment, jealous by nature. But Desdemona had fallen in love with the Moor out of compassion for his laborious life, and thereby inspired in him a reciprocal love. Already in this difficult process of identification lay the seeds of the subsequent slow strangulation. Othello had found his Beatrice. And since she, unlike the original, had not died in infancy, he was compelled to do away with her, "so that he might love her afterward" without impediment. Doubles cannot find one another, but they can create one another. In this process, love and jealousy acquire a new dimension. In the metaphysical sense, love is the attainment of wholeness (unachievable in nature for sexually differentiated beings) and the fear of losing it. For the matter no longer concerns competition of gametes, sexual selection, property, or social humiliation (though all this remains). The departure of one's double is an event so contrary to nature that it is simply impossible to survive it, for he or she is the reflection of my uniqueness, the only one in the world. Behind the word "the only one" stands at least three and a half billion years of evolution. Life arose as the capacity for reproduction. The sexual process developed as a means of storing nutrients, withstanding adverse conditions, and, later, compensating for congenital defects. Love appeared in rudimentary form as a stimulus for the energetically costly sexual act, an overcoming of the conflict between attraction and repulsion, the competition of contacting individuals. Orgasm as a mechanism of gamete selection was engaged in the regulation of the sex ratio. The convergence of sexual openings with the oral, anal, and urinary openings promoted the sexualization of all primary functions of the organism, characteristic of infantile sexuality and manifesting itself in the diversity of sexual behavior. Genetic recombination produced individual variability — the basis for sexual selection. The demands of sex imposed rules and prohibitions that became the foundation of ethics. The overcoming of conflictual tension in the approach of mating individuals was achieved through species-specific sign systems — primary symbolic languages. Secondary sexual characteristics became the first signal system, which gave rise to aesthetics as a domain of semiotics. Sexual preferences — the second stage of the evolution of love — promoted the development of individuality. The attributes of sexual attractiveness evolved from rare anomalies, the preferential selection of which was primarily connected with the prevention of close inbreeding. The transformation of threat into attraction gave rise to aesthetic feeling with its dialectic of the terrible and the beautiful. Aestheticization spread from secondary sexual characteristics to other characteristics, to the entire body, and from natural objects used as supplementary means of attraction — to nature as a whole. The inertia of enriched sexual love (the third stage) sustained marital pairs after conception, throughout the period of care for offspring, and was transformed into parental love. The prolongation of childhood — the period of offspring dependence on parents — stimulated individualization as a condition of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of mating partners. Upon the foundation of sexual competition arose a biosocial system held together by hierarchical love, which had absorbed elements of sexual and kinship feelings. The metaphysics of the twofold life-giving being — God and his feminine hypostasis — enriched the individual experience of love and lent new dimensions to earthly feeling. The human being began to justify its generic name Homo — the unique one. Life was transformed from a commonplace comedy into a high tragedy, for the loss of the unique one is irreplaceable. Die! Life is a strange process in which the verdict has been pronounced and announced in advance, but its execution is deferred for some period of time (the ancients regarded the uncertainty of the final date as a gift from Prometheus, our advocate), while in the interim one may attend to everyday affairs and even hope for acquittal. To be sure, cases of full acquittal are exceptionally rare, and the accounts of them are more legendary in character than documentary. One can believe them, but nothing can be proven. The very best that remains is to prolong the proceedings as much as possible. Nothing is eternal except the paradox of death. Why has a death sentence been pronounced upon us all? Is life not a mockery if it is annulled by death? It is true that the death of a chicken boiled in broth does not seem particularly paradoxical. In the end, all living beings serve as food for other living beings, they die in order to preserve life as a system of biological diversity. Perhaps our problem consists in the fact that we occupy the very summit of the ecological pyramid. After all, we do not die in order to serve as food for worms. Our ancestors, who served as food for the leopard, were not troubled by such questions. Perhaps because individual death was most often accidental. Now, however, we are far better protected, and organ prosthetics will soon make death by accident improbable — only so that the paradox of programmed death may arise in full stature. Who remembers how Abraham, Isaac, or Joseph died? The accounts of the deaths of the biblical patriarchs are dry and documentary in character — died at such and such an age, and that is all. Quite different is the death of Heracles, Achilles, or Jesus. It eclipses life itself, transforming the latter into a preparation for a worthy finale. For a hero is one who does not fear death, who seeks it. The aim of Aryan upbringing was to raise a hero — that is, to prepare a person for the encounter with death, in which he would display valor and win posthumous glory, thereby achieving victory over so formidable an adversary. Death in the form of a female figure with a scythe goes back to ancient Aryan mythology. There was Athena, goddess of battles. There were the Valkyries, who escorted the souls of fallen warriors to Valhalla. There was Macha, who gathered severed heads like acorns. Even in the sagas of the Ulster Cycle, the Celtic heroes are instructed in the art of war by certain demonic old women. But in its first, unaltered form, there was Dis, who incited to battle in order to mate with the slain. From her other name Hel derives the ancient Germanic word for the underworld. Among the Romans, Dis (Dite) is one of the names of Pluto, lord of the underworld. The consonance of "dis" and "deus" — god — indicates the genealogical connection of the gods with the demons of death and the dead (cf. Hel, hell, Holle — the underworld, helios — the sun, helig — whole, holy). The echo of Dis-Dite is heard in the names of Diana and Aphrodite. Like the gods, the dead and the dying are endowed with the gift of prophecy, because the final secret — death — is known to them. Thus Hector, breathing his last, prophesied death to Achilles and heard in reply: Die! And my own inevitable death I Shall meet whenever the thunderer and the eternal gods send it. The prophetic severed head passed into Russian folklore from pan-Aryan myths, the echoes of which — in the form of the heads of Mimir and Bran — have also been preserved in the Celtic and Scandinavian sagas. Since conception is more or less accidental and the subsequent events of life also depend on many circumstances, death is the sole non-accidental thing that renders our freedom illusory, for there is no freedom from death. Its inevitability tempts the human being. If we have been offered a ready-made scenario with a predetermined end, then one may at least become its director and make it less banal. Heroism is ultimately a struggle against the non-accidental, the inevitable. The challenge flung at death allows one to take fate into one's own hands; therein lies its appeal for all mortals. All, all that threatens with destruction For mortal hearts conceals Inexplicable delights — Perhaps the pledge of immortality. At the lower level, the same effect is produced by smoking, drinking, drug addiction — all self-destructive behaviors whose meaning cannot be grasped through linear logic. The tragedy of death is transposed into the comic register, is played out in burlesques, capriccios, carnival performances, which passed from the orgiastic cult of death among the pagans into the Christian tradition of the danse macabre on the eve of All Saints' Day. Experiencing death in the form of farce purifies from fear. This is catharsis — the primary function of art. We understand that we will die, but we cannot bring ourselves to believe it. Here the paths of reason and faith diverge, and a double life commences: one lived in expectation of death, the other in anticipation of immortality. Death becomes the crossing between the antipodal worlds of dust and spirit. Enchained (conclusion). Zlataya. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp. Part 24. Zlataya (conclusion). Homo. Die! Like a dog. The last enemy. More than one.