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flamingsword
Violence is part of how I am built- how we all are, to some variable degree. It may be the tool of last resort, and it is a much more difficult tool to use gently or with precision, but our culture has been over-reacting to something that is basically a chainsaw. In the right hands, it is no more to be feared than a screwdriver. In the wrong hands a screwdriver is deadly. And that used to scare me a lot more than it does, until I realized that (in real-world models) violence doesn't do a tenth of the damage that inattention and indifference do. Abuse of power is not more reprehensible when violence is the medium of the abuse; abusive voiolence is just the most visible format. You fight the enemy you can see, but indifference is almost invisible.
Violence is visible. It breaks open static orders, rearranges things: that's kind of the point.
Violence has the ability to change the world.
Fire is the most common metaphor for destructive change. The reason the young and the active have such greater attraction to fire is simply this: if the four magickal elements are a metaphor for the four states of matter, then fire is plasma: the element that can't decide if it is supercharged physical matter or the pure distillation of energy. Restless, oscillating things that are too full of motion to NOT radiate can see the parallels between their state and the nature of plasma. Plasma is bright and amphibious, like fire. And fire is really fucking pretty.
Violence is pretty.
The strength you feel when you destroy something is not an illusion. It is very real. It's easy to ignore your power when you're not using it, and you get dissociated from that part of yourself. When you force change on yourself or the world around you it's scary to think how easily you could be changed. But that's also beautiful. All the broken pieces we have can be eventually made to not matter, can be reworked into something fuctional and cool. Or we could be demolished utterly, grisly bits scattered about, maybe not so pretty. But the motion of it, the sense of life and freedom, those are beautiful.
The abuse of violence for unjust ends is a perversion of the thing, not it's true nature. I don't think our culture has very realistic attitudes towards violence, to what it is or how it makes you feel. Dancing, sports, chess, driving, these things are all violent in their execution. What is chess but an orderly interpersonal war? It is intellectual violence- no grey areas. It may seem ordered and boring to an observer but to the opponents it is a battle.
If you take what you are and aim that the world, you are challenging the world to be stronger than you. You are setting up a contest of conflicting orders, a battle of wills. Sometimes you break; sometimes the world does. The martial arts as they apply to social situations and financial stuctures are still in their infancy. There's not much science to it yet, unlike the shaped charges and GPS guided missiles that are scarily freakily cool even to people who hate the thought of war. Maybe once the destruction of a flawed order is seen in a rational light, our cultural attitudes towards violence will change.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 04:44 pm (UTC)I remember summer evenings in the Midwest, watching the stormclouds roll in: huge, black, roiling monsters, a wall of stygian darkness, illuminated from within by a thousand crawling legs of lightning, occasionally skittering across the surface, still silent in the distance. They would come after a day of stultifying heat, heralded first by a feeling, a drop in temperature, a sudden cooling of the air, just seconds before the wind picks up. And you could smell it. I remember the hair on the back of my neck standing up and my pulse rising in anticipation. The feeling of the storm in the air and the distant shadow looming on the horizon, often blotting out the setting sun. I remember breathing it in and feeling a stirring inside, resonating to the pure chaos roiling overhead. It was magnificent.
For some reason, though, I could never get people to see violence with intent in the same light.
Is Destruction Always an Act of Creation?
Date: 2006-07-24 06:23 pm (UTC)And if I realise that there need be no conflict, that I & the world are innately part of the same whole, what then? Is it better to be the unyielding oak then the flexible willow? All strength is not measured by confrontation, and the style of all martial arts is not hard.
Re: I Contain Multitudes
Date: 2006-07-26 04:56 am (UTC)It was deeply revitalising.
Re: I Contain Multitudes
Date: 2006-07-26 05:01 pm (UTC)Re: I Contain Multitudes
Date: 2006-07-26 05:57 pm (UTC)As for glee, I confess that I have reveled in the joy that comes with breaking the Other's strength upon the dark stone of my will. Solidifying that which is variable is no less a change then making fluid the defined, and Ego/soul/self can feed & be revived from either.
Re: I Contain Multitudes
Date: 2006-07-26 05:17 pm (UTC)I envy your free access to water, and the awakening it brings.
Creation is an act of destruction.
Date: 2006-07-26 05:15 pm (UTC)The Proof is in the Pudding
Date: 2006-07-26 06:01 pm (UTC)Re: The Proof is in the Pudding
Date: 2006-07-26 06:32 pm (UTC)