Crossroads of Edom
The Dominion of Edom is filled with crosses, burdens for the rest of us to bear; for its own people too, not only the consequences of the power games of their rulers who are the precipitate of its cultural principles but of its way of experiencing the world, its habits of thought and expression. As explained in other essays, the drive to idealize its identity and gloss over its hybrid and, in many respects, contrived, self-irritating nature leads Edom in every field of endeavor from idyllic dreams to apocalyptic fantasies and events and then to elegiac laments. It is a culture of aesthetics and a cult of bathos, glory and grand games; of fireworks, memorial displays and blissful bad faith; a culture of images served by the media distraction machine that helps keep Edom (the West) from seeing in itself the horror its surface beauties veil. The counterpart of the beautiful show of fashion pages, sports and preening politicians is horror films and a vast array of social and political terrors.
The soul of Edom as it runs its course was termed vividly a “flabby, weak-eyed, pretending devil of rapacious and pitiless folly.”1 Inside its magnificent machines and grand guignol (played in deadly earnest) is a terrified, thrashing “spirit storming in blank walls” aghast at what its lies have built: “a dirty house in a gutted world.”2
This essay focuses on a simple, large-scale depiction of the veins of image-play in Edom. It is a geopolitics of Esau you can make yourself with a map of the world and a red marker. “Esau, he is Edom” and the old lies die hard.
Lay the map down and consider that we are speaking of “the flabby devil,” Europe headed by Germany (as since the days of the Holy Roman Empire), inheritor of and enforcer for ancient Rome and its ghostly successor in its principality on the Tiber. Let’s begin with the core of the double cross for all Edom’s image play concerns ambiguity, bad faith, reflection and doubling, the hall or mirrors effect that would mimic meiosis, “a natural perspective that is and is not.”3
Draw a thick red line from Paris to Moscow; cross it with a stouter one from Berlin to Rome the cesspit to which all descending roads lead, the source of imperial illusions and the comprehensive perversion that clusters around transferred identity, identity theft and the wolfish envy that drives it. This is the core of Edom but the refractions are complex, as complex as the harlot is acquisitive.
To the original tetrad of terror and passionate imperial imagery add a red line from London to Rome, a bridge of malicious co-dependency. Draw additional red lines from London to Washington, Moscow and Berlin. The hive on the Thames is itself a cruciform juncture of the four major power centers, a traumatic tetrad of terror implicated in the Quartet whose ‘world community’ fig leaf was cut from imperial cloth. As in Macbeth, the violence and delusions are “doubly redoubled”; the deceits are not simple nor are they matters simply of greed or the arrogance of power but a madness ingrained in a hybrid character seeking overlay foul with fair and occasioning for all it touches “toil and trouble,” making every victory a traumatic defeat. Just as the innards of Aphrodite are bloody and perverse horror so the mysteries and magical accomplishments of Edom are “fog and filthy air”4; obsessed with hell because, like Milton’s Satan it bears hell within it in its greatest assertions of power and deceit, its killing of the true King, it knows and feels that “hell is murky,” the reflection of its own shadowed and tormenting identity5. All its fields, from geopolitics to entertainment reflect this hard fantastic fact.
That Washington has linked with Tokyo and London and with Beijing, Moscow, London and Berlin (Europe) only doubly re-doubles the double cross and makes the glittering web more inclusive and inescapable. The same can be said of the over-determined nets connecting Damascus, Riyadh and Teheran to Edom’s major centers. All will sing their note or be blotted out6 before the world is gutted and the contrivances collapse as the masters giddily intend. “Esau, he is unstable.”7 It is “the heart of an immense darkness” that increasingly generates images of collapse, death and decay as its governing fictions dissolve or grinningly expose their hollowness in “rat’s ally where the dead men lost their bones”8; the city without a name, Brussels, whose self-negation (without a genuine name or identity is to lack integral being) reminds Marlow of “a whited sepulcher.”9 It is apt that the dynasty that rules this fictive nation like a fief also occupies the British throne going on two centuries. It is part of the wayward and perverse Anglican Church falling back into the arms of the holy yoni in the universal city with each hand happily washing the other, so to speak.
In his last and perhaps greatest work, a searing critique of the morbidity of image-worship, Shelley emphasizes the bond between dazzling, blinding imagery, morbidity and self-destruction. It is an ultimate repudiation of magike tekne (image-weaving) that brought in the dawn of the modern-postmodern era, the age of masks and shadows and the last imperial end games they sub-serve:
The grove grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,
The earth was gray with phantoms, and the air
Was peopled with dim forms…
Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling
Shadows of shadows…
Some made a cradle of the ermined capes
Of kingly mantles; some across the tiar
Of pontiffs sat like vultures; others played
Under the crown which girt with empire
A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made
Their nests in it. The old anatomies
Sat hatching their bare broods under the shade
Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes
To reassume the delegated power
Arrayed in which those worms did monarchize
Who made this earth their charnel …10
The dance of death also strikingly featured in this masterwork and associated with the Dionysian energies that pervade image play and poiesis, continues until the revelers sink into the dust of fire and frost.11 So to the grand game, its processing of peace and myriad forms of counterfeit reality, “fiends that palter with us in a double sense” and “lie like truth,” in the end “signifying nothing” but the collapse of the illusion 12. By its own logic, “literate despair” becomes illiterate and speech dissolve into “mere lumps of sound” as the flabby devil places its crown on “a baby’s or an idiot’s brow” the better to crush out the humanity remaining in the cultural stock from which illusions were generated and whose life they absorbed into fantastic idealizations and mystical creeds.13
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical 3rd edition, Robert Kimbrough editor, 1988), 20, 24
2. Wallace Stevens, “A Postcard from the Volcano” (1937), 21-4
3. Shakespeare, Richard II
4. Shakespeare, Macbeth (Penguin 1995, editor G.K. Hunter), 1.2.38-9; 1.6.14-15; 1.1.1-10
5. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Odyssey 1962, Merritt Y Hughes edition), IV 73-110 passim; Macbeth 5.1.35; Satan’s character exemplifies the inner conflicts and torment of the West and its commitment to illusion as self-transformation, a balm haunted by doubts and bad faith.
6. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Harper 1996 revised translation Aaron Asher), 1.5
7. The phrase in the Midrash actually is spoken by Ishmael, thus: “Esau, you are unstable” and refers to the twin’s homicidal and fratricidal plans for Isaac and Jacob, a game it obsessively plays to this day. Midrash HaGadol and tractate Baba Kama 92
8. T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” (1922), 38-9
9. Heart of Darkness, 13
10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Triumph of Life” in Shelley, Poetical Works (Oxford 1970, Hutchinson edition corrected by G. M. Matthews), pages 518-19, verses 480-505
11. Ibid. pages 510-11, verses 137-75
12. Macbeth 5.6.58-61, 5.5.43-4, 5.5.28
13. Stevens 12-13 op. cit; Conrad op. cit; Shelley verses 496-505, making “this earth their charnel” is echoed in Conrad’s comment on Brussels, the city that reminds him of “a whited sepulcher” (whorehouse), with its deadly illusions of love, a premier city of Symbolist decadence, of Khnoppf, Ensor, Maeterlinck and many others.