Part 2: War Cries
Songs of Grief
hard as stone
22. GUNBOY RHYTHM
which we can bravely undertake :
and thereby be healed.
of Men’s boy-lives as they mature :
every single Woman and Man :
this Male within our Spectrum.)
For Women, too, must search out and come to know,
and thereby understand with compassion,
the reasons why they have been so ceaselessly hurt by Men ;
and why they too have inherited some male compulsion to
challenge and take aim at others growing up around them.
*
* *
FEEL THE LONELY EXPERIENCE of most men of Warrior cultures : the penalty of hoarding to themselves all political and sexual dominion.
THE PRICE PAID BY COERCIVE MEN for demanding feminine restraint and propriety, in public presentation and in domestic sex : the passive, fearful female partner. Her cervix in anxious retreat : the endless unrequitement of his unmet climax.
And found, too, in more liberal cultures : the tense closure and guarded eyes of suppressed and unconfident girls. Or their flagrant pushing, daring men’s shoving sex and derision. Or their precarious navigations towards effectiveness, the crushing challenges and defeats of showing natural powers.
THE VICIOUS SEXUAL CYCLE driving Warrior cultures : Shamed and fearful women offering passive passage, deeply unsatisfying sex, its legacy of angry male urge to Fire : the firing into enemy men, enemy women, and its upshot ~ yet more fearful, retreating, captive sex.
The culture of hard profit that drives men and women apart : of swords, guns, lewd and often violent videos and magazines, bought fantasy-sex : the posturing silicone girlies, peepshow sex-mates, indentured sex-slaves, and cynical actor-women with artful tools of trade who can offer all the pumped-up fake-push come-ons : without the final, vital ingredient for deep satisfaction ~ responsive, fearless, sensual Love.
It is not hard to witness this equation at work, in the angry and frustrated aggression of macho cultures and power-echelons : the exposed bimbo-flesh or downcast-hooded women, the drive of invasion and armament, the appetite for aphrodisiacs made from murdered animals, the furtive and overt trades in pornography, of bought-and-sold sex, of mistresses, the outrageously-assaulted children ; the cultures of hegemony and assassination and annexation.
~ This behaviour of lone male sex-power which can be seen quite clearly in the ranks of corporate and military and political command :
domination, murder, cruelty, conflagration, revenge, sadism –
epidemic in devices in near-every human society on this Earth.
WE LIVE IN A METALLIC, MECHANISTIC WORLD-CULTURE OF FRUSTRATED, ERECT PENISES : loaded, ready to fire : in an endless and ultimately futile search for a generous receptor. Demanding release.
As sexually-aroused men do : need Release.
It is a total event, men’s arousal : from tingling stir, to rigorous rigid excitement,
to ultimate orgasm and ejaculation.
WE WOMEN MUST REALISE THIS : how very much more difficult it is for an aroused man than an aroused woman, to pause, and to desist, and to retreat into controlled quiescence.
How inconsiderate, how ignorant, how wrong it is, for us to tease or treat men’s sexual love casually.
It is a fact : the nature of men’s autonomic nervous system.
Their difficulty : the tremendous volitional and conceptual effort necessary to resist and reverse their trajectory to magnetic climax.
seeks too often to excuse its force.
Of course men can stop, withdraw from error ;
as all people can, from any near-misfire ~
~ before too late.
It takes strong resolve, respect, self-respect, and self-command ;
of which All Grown Men are capable,
every single one of them.
*
IT IS THIS CHARGED NATURE of men’s sexual arousal ~ this loaded gun ~ which commands so fiercely their behaviour in War.
The rifle, the bazooka, the sword, the fast car ~ . We have always made jokes about them as penis-extensions. But like all good jokes, they persist because the punchline is a sharp and manifest truth.
The analogy is obvious, is utterly self-evident :
the behaviour of a man with an erection,
and the behaviour of a man with a gun in his hand:
~ the driven warrior,
the compulsion to climax,
to Fire,
to Ejaculate.
How well we know it, we women.
How many women have succumbed, knowing that it is more than her safety is worth, to dare to challenge the juggernaut drive in its gasping acceleration. Submitted, surrendered, and worn its painful force. Never even told anyone of it, often : this familiar overpowering.
This armed erection. Worn throughout recent history, in peace and in uncountable rapacious wars, by the uninitiated, self-indulgent, vain and bullying sons of a Warrior Culture.
Millions of them, now, with Live Guns in their hands.
Power-drunk street soldiers, sexual militia.
Their loaded guns. Their charged erections.
~ primed with their bombastic, self-proclaimed right
to carry their arousal to its convulsive conclusion :
to ejaculate, to fire.
* A near-entire World Warrior Culture : of old men armed with Power, arming young men with guns and pumped vanity, and giving them the order to go out and repeat their own youthful history :
– an army of young men with phallic weapons, charging into their inevitable climactic holocaust of firing. And many to their climactic deaths.
* The bullets. The pulsing bursts of mass-relief. *
The appalling power of the modern detonation-powered
weapon of war :
which has magnified a thousandfold the ancestral, simple and proper hunter’s
spear-thrust metaphor of sexual release,
and transfixed mass-warrior men in an
orgy of electro-ejaculation.
THIS IS THE TRUTH, THE WAY IT IS :
~ Innumerable Women of the World live in national citadel-homes, surrounded by street and sniper infantry boys,
hands wrapped around their shuddering weapons :
poised to jerk off at each other,
in a lethal spew of semen-projectiles.
Their boots splashing through street blood and spent-cartridge muck.
And when they break through the walls of shattered homes, they can go for their age-old warrior climax :
to fire off their last shots into women and children. Their rape and often their murder.
~ The massacres of beirut, of gaza. Thousands in a few hours.
~ Just more massacres, like thousands of past others. Millions of raped, dead.
~ Like dresden, and hiroshima, and dachau, and warsaw, and hanoi, and kosovo, and dili, uzbekistan, guinea, cairo, south sudan, sinjar iraq, congo, ruanda, myanmar rohinga. More, and more, and more, without end….
Our escalating, unconscionable history of slaughters, throughout the world.
Mass murders authorised
~ or silently tolerated ~
by the highest, most legitimate levels
of male command.
*
* *
O warrior men : Understand this of what you are doing :
The ancestral human alliance between sexual trajectory and climax,
and the launching of a weapon of death,
has an Ancient and Honourable Purpose.
In earlier, gentler times ~ not long ago, and even in some living ancestral civilisations today ~
Grown men gripped and hurled their spears in projectile arcs : a compelling, even exhilarating re-enactment of sexual power and release, in order to carry out a painful, reluctant, and necessary task :
~ to maim or kill a fellow creature for capture :
for Provision for his family and for himself.
This difficult task :
for a Man who, by his very nature,
is dedicated to Life.
This is, also, why men of simpler weaponry and higher balanced understanding,
undertake formal sorrow for their victim, their obligatory kill :
as they conjoin with the Woman within and beyond themselves
to give Thanks and Regret for this essential deed :
~ and by their sorrow and apology receive into themselves,
metaphorically,
the point of the spear :
as does Woman,
in her own willing sexual reception :
Earth-daughter offering her metaphorical provision,
giving life to this family.
The lineage of Life.
Thus was Balance maintained in Ethic ;
and deep within Man and Woman.
*
* *
And in modern technological times, armed men follow the same compelling trajectory from loaded power to firing : –
but taut hands no longer releasing and hurling their long weapons to proper conclusion :
instead now locked on to them, in a juggernaut pounding
of unrelieved, compulsive, self-induced orgasm.
And their machine-gun battlefield :
from what was once the solitary proper action of the hunt,
now the unbridled targeting,
and often Mass Killing
of Their Very Own Species.
No other species on Earth could ever conceive of this.
*
* *
It is not a primal male evil or even aggression that drives this modern-day militia carnage amongst Men :
It is the rigorous and rightful passion-bond between sexual release and the obligation to kill for Provision :
~ which Evolved for a Grown Man’s simple and decent family survival ;
and was never shaped for the Murderous Excess of these recent millennia,
not for iron-spiked clubs nor legions of crossbow-and-quiver,
nor the maelstrom of repeat-firing
steel phallic weapons
gripped in the jerking hands
of whole armies of Uninitiated Boys.
The savage and outrageous power of the modern detonation-powered weapon of war :
The Gun, in every single one of its thousand repellant and ugly penile deformities.
The Modern Gun. The most concentrated density of lethal matter, of explosive Terror,
which humanity has ever devised.
The weapon which is close to making a lie of the Truth : that Evil is a mind-creation.
THE GUN :
the incarnation of the livid power of naked rod steel and combustion :
which condemns adolescent men
(and juddering virtual-gaming-killers)
to a Lifetime
of lurid and humiliating Boyhood,
and has deprived the world of nearly all its Grown Men.
*
* *
AND THAT IS HOW IT IS, that the ordinary sons of decent men and women become butchers, become monstrous for a day, or for years : and commit deeds of atrocity and torture whose extremities of evil leave their parents in devastation, and themselves in paralysed Disbelief.
Disbelief. The only way they can continue to live with themselves, these sons of farmers and seamstresses and fruit vendors and office workers. Disbelief.
(It wasn’t me. It was the others. It was the crowd, the Mass-hysteria. The Massacre.)
No, boys. Not good enough.
Yes, boys. It was you.
It was you, personally : each and every single one of you.
There is no such thing as “crowd consciousness” ~ this psycho-fiction created by the guilty and the bewildered, to account for repeated mass deeds which spill human beings into hell-pits of incomprehensible barbarity and suffering.
A crowd is only as beneficent, or as malevolent, as the ranged emotions of its members. Its achievements are only as strong and magnificent, or as cowardly and debased, as the extremity of their individual imaginations.
There is such a thing as Crowd Heroism : fortified by the umbrella of collective strength, which can deliver to each of its members a resolution and bravery which few could have achieved alone.
~ Thus was Mahatma Gandhi carried by his millions of people in their march to freedom.
~ Thus did crowds of ordinary western men and women, fifty years ago, confront police and militia and prison, month after month, year after year : and prevailed to end a tawdry, arrogant and mean-spirited war over superpower hegemony in a hungry south-east asian country.
– Thus are the Children of today spilling out defiantly into our streets, crying for their future, abandoned by their forebears on a burning planet : crying for their Elders to join them, to call out with them.
And there is such a thing as Crowd Disgrace : fortified by the umbrella of massed power, which can offer to each of its members cover and licence to give way to their worst fantasies, their most cowardly impulses, their deepest recesses of hatred and cruelty : –
– of which they themselves can conceive.
From their own personal imaginations.
*
Yes, boys, it was you.
You, personally.
Each of you holding in your hand your loaded erection, your charged gun ;
and holding in your head the arrogant, outrageous Lie of your Warrior Tradition :
that you have the god-given, man-given right to discharge it
into living people, or female recesses, caught in streets or in hiding,
in your hunt to Hurt, and to Maim, and to Kill.
The streets of kigali. The beirut massacre.
Vast massacres of algeria, srebrenica, south sudan, syria, gaza.
The cowardly, remote-controlled, mass-murderous conflagrations
of incendiary air strikes.
*
* *
THUS EVERY GENERATION of every nation on Earth knows this of Men :
~ That armed men in stirred crowds, in vigilante posses, in armies, can become gang-attackers and even gang-rapists : their long weapons firing seminal bursts of bullets, their cannons immolating whole suburbs.
~ That the actions of Men at War, in no matter what perceived cause, are acts of Calculated Murder.
~ That these daily Barbarisms are disguised and justified as honourable actions, under symbols such as nations, flags and ideological colours.
~ And that there is not one single act of Warrior Assault, which would be tolerated as the act of an individual Citizen :
under the enshrined Laws of his Nation at Peace.
*
Not one single Warrior Act, i n the decent civilian codes of behaviour to which most of us now belong,
would not arouse horror, denunciation, condemnation and rightful punishment.
This Hypocrisy, this Double Standard, of Men-made laws :
the Just and Proper laws of Peace ;
and the Mutilated, Mutilating Laws of War :
made, at this time and throughout our whole recorded history, without exception,
by dominating Men.
These laws of Warrior Cultures : whose nations create true and beautiful spires of social justice, and advancing ethic ~
~ but which yet erect a legal barricade of steel around the separate, exclusive laws of War.
A barbed-wire stronghold of permitted, legal Atrocity, where all the rules are changed to suit an exclusive brotherhood of self-aroused men.
Where the nation’s high laws of Truth, and Protection, and Provision, and Peace, are cast aside ; and the laws of Invasion, and Vanquishment, and Capture, and Legalised Mass Killing, are instated like gross steel gods.
Where shameful acts of gratuitous cruelty and abuse can be overlooked, excused, exonerated, honoured even :
~ in this hot-lit shooting-arena, which Self-Aroused Men the entire world over have decreed shall be their playground when they choose ;
~ and in which, as part of every warrior conflict, you immobilise terrified old people, women and children as prisoners, as bomb-targets, as collateral damage, as spoils and as desperate refugees;
~ without whom your heroic, ludicrous fantasy of rescue and protection falls flat, like a horror-movie without a sound-track.
~ And the honoured atrocities that you have committed with your Guns upon each other,
and upon the defenceless and uncomprehending,
are the final thrust that triggers your orgasm : releases your ecstatic flood.
Delivers you, for a moment : before you fall back expended.
Until you re-charge for your next pulsing outburst.
Dresden. Nagasaki. Taiwan 1947. Korean War. Chjarsadda Pakistan. Paris Algerians. Dominian Republic. Indonesia. Sharpeville. My Lai Vietnam. Hue. Ketnar Bil Pakistan. Mexico City. Munich. Philippine Muslims. Lebanon. Tadmor Prison Syria. Hama Syria. Dujail Iraq. India Sikhs. Accomarca Peru. Tienanmen . Sri Lanka. Dilla Somalia. Dili East Timor. Azerbaijan. Waco Texas. Algeria. Johannesburg. Uzbechistan. Virginia. Guinea. Columbine kids. Sukhumi. Waco. West Bank. Srebrenica. Port Arthur. Dunblane. Utoya. South Sudan. Rabaa Egypt. Sinjar Iraq. Peshawar kids. Paris again. Christchurch mosque. Ukraine. Gaza.
(That’s just some of the bigger ones, each felling 50 to 10,000 dead, during the last 60-odd years. There’s plenty of others, and uncountable smaller mass-murders.)
Now you can call the war over.
Go home to your mutilated families.
Heroes for a day.
*
* *
O Brothers of the Earth :
Those great numbers of us who have been blessed with the companionship and love of good Men,
know that you are not evil.
All those of us who have enjoyed the bounty of your immense capacity for Provision, for construction,
your extravagant productivity, know of your high Goodness and your love of decency and Peace.
All those of us who have survived because of your Sacrifice, are beholden to you for your bravery, your singularity, your power of self-immolation. We honour you at your monuments of Fallen.
All those of us who have shared our lives with growing and Grown Men, have loved you for your Honour, your self-restraint, your courage, your delivery, your beauty, your principle.
We share with you our grief at the attrition of young men returned from frightful confrontations – their PTSD, their shocking numbers of suicides.
UNDERSTAND, I BEG YOU, that these pages of grief and accusation are not the words of reactive hate. They are not cries of anger, of rage : but of Despair.
~ DESPAIR for the cycles of threat and Fear in which we all live, men and women : whether our own nation is at war at this moment, or not.
Our own long euro-american Invasion history is ravaged by great wars of legal, indefensible cruelty, bondage and murder of men and women and children.
Our own western civil warfare is killing our children in gun-crazed school-shootings and gang reprisals, at this very moment.
Our vast war-machine and ammunition and bomb-incendiary industries compel avaricious, unstoppable, economically-embedded readiness-for-war in all countries.
Our global images bring daily to our living-rooms this reality of the World’s ceaseless outbursts of Assault, Invasion, Combustion-Munitions and Suffering.
because when the Mirror is held up
to the face
of Violation and Mass Death :
~ the Face in the Mirror is the Face Of A Man
~ the face of an Adolescent Boy-Man :
in his phase of self-obsessed, Fearful,
hand-powered night-dreaming.
*
* *
O MEN OF THE WORLD, WE WOMEN ARE CRYING TO YOU TO DISARM.
O GOD, LAY DOWN YOUR TURBO-CHARGED GUNS.
No Peace on Earth can be attained
until you un-hand your shuddering steel.
*
*
We must Know this of the Nature of things :
~ That the power of Symbol is awesome in our lives :
~ that we can give symbolic life to the mystery of Beauty by simply painting an exquisite picture,
or composing a graceful sonata ;
~ as we can give life to the concept of Victory by inventing an intricate game,
in which one or other team wins ;
~ as we can give life to the abstraction of Speed by creating an aircraft
which can arc beyond gravity into orbit ;
~ as we can give life to the drive for Sexual Release by shaping a spear
to impale a good meal for our family ;
~ as we can give life to Gang-Rape and War-kill,
by fashioning and holding in our hands a steel phallic machine,
in the company of multitudes of like-armed, like-aroused boys :
whose brief relief comes only with an orgasm of bullets.
– And we must Understand this of Symbol too :
~ that we can relinquish physical Beauty by turning the painting to the wall,
or departing the theatre part-way through the sonata ;
~ that we can dissipate Victory, by choosing to play the guitar instead of football ;
~ that we can zero Speed, by returning the aircraft to Earth ;
~ that we can expend Sexual climax, by hurling the spear to its proper target ;
~ and that we can have done with Gang-Rape and War-Kill,
and raise ourselves to Honour and Peace, with this Purposeful Decision : ~
LIFT YOUR HANDS FROM YOUR GUNS, your violent video-games,
your magazines of hate and contempt, your movies of assault :
and see these for What They Are.
SEE THESE SYMBOLS FOR WHAT THEY ARE, the Phallic-Shaped Weapons
that you and your forebears have carried for centuries ;
and What You Are Doing when you oil them, stroke them, repeat-fire them.
SEE THE THIRD-RATE NATURE of your glossy sordid pin-ups and bondage pix ;
and understand that it is not the prospect of real naked women, or of sexual domination,
which keeps you in your state of agonised arousal ;
but what you Symbolically are Doing With Your Warrior Hand :
~ as the other hand works honestly at its sacred tasks of Provision, Construction, Delivery, Creativity, and Inspiration.
O Men :
O Yes :
Understand this :
that the shuddering release that comes
from the end of your warrior-gun,
and your virtual-blast-assault-laser,
is Not a Symbolic Consummation
with a Woman :
but the lone, sweaty, hand-jerked discharge
of a Masturbating Boy
in his years of adolescence.
No Grown Woman in history has ever come
to the bed of a boy-warrior.
*
* *
*
There is Release from the steel playpens of Boys,
their barred and dreadful War-Arenas, these Grotesque Theatres of the Absurd :
their deadly Fantasy-games of planetary take-overs, and alien invaders, cops and robbers,
heroic rescuers, evil witches,
and yearning maidens in distress.
LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS
And then there will be no more need to claw at the citadel, strip distant women with your eyes because they stand beyond your reach, see them recoil when you come closer.
There will be no more need to work your own grim sexual satisfaction upon yourselves in the absence of willing women : as You Have Done Throughout Remembered History.
NO : Because you will find them everywhere.
These curious, exploring, great-hearted girls: coming out into the sun of your peaceful streets.
These loving, strong, passionate Women.
Up close : as you have never in history seen them before.
Oh, no.
We Women would not show ourselves to Boys.
Not to warmongers, or tyrants,
or sexual deviants,
or to pubescent night-dreamers.
Not to you.
Never.
* You have not, ever, seen even one of Us. *
*
There are now quite a few of you standing up, at this turn of the millennium,
can begin to see us :
as we women, with gratitude, are seeing you rise up into our sight.
* Because for the first time in these recent millennia of human suffering, many strong Men and their Nations have begun to look into their own exposed history of ceaseless war-horror and losses, and dropped in sorrow for what they see ; and then looked in silence into themselves, and found their Power in their own balanced Maturity and Goodness.
* And for the first time in these millennia of human suffering, numbers of Women have reached out from their ceaseless cycles of child-bearing and domestic obedience, their silenced voices, their enfeebled camp-following and losses, and found each others’ hands ; and risen together to display their Power of balanced Maturity and Intellect and Spirit and Goodness.
*
Many more men will come to see and to know women :
~ Those who have withdrawn their hands from their boys’ armed and lonely self-gratification :
~ which for many is true Self-Abuse ;
– and raised their eyes, and stood up ; and looked at the grown woman who stands before them.
*
These are the Men.
The Grown Men : the Men who can See.
The Men who will find emotional and sexual bliss
within the grace and simplicity
of their own unadorned, Unshielded bodies
~ in the deep requitement of
a Woman’s receptive heartland.
