(no subject)
An insight came to me about masculine anger. Just from watching surfer-gang tough guys surfing angrily and pushing people around with their localism, as compared to the Dharma-surfer's feminine embrace and love of the wave, I somehow made the connection to a deep kind of Freudianism. What are they so angry about, these thugs, I thought. It doesn't seem to add up that one could surf a beautiful wave with such an oppositional, masculine attitude stoked by deep-seated anger. In that moment, aided by those images, the truth of the Freudian parent-complex dawned on me. No, I don't agree that parent-complexes are the norm for everyone - though this is the standard Freudian conceit - but this kind of reduction works well on so many more basic and primitive individuals, such as these surfers. I saw these surfers out there battling their fathers. Where was all this surplus anger coming from, was the question. There's no rival gangs present, no bosses cracking the whip; battling the wave is a battle against the father, whom the surfer hates. It makes sense too, given the general underemployment and poverty of the surfer, and the history of paternal neglect or abuse that keeps the poverty-cycle alive for the father's offspring. Maybe the father was abusive to mother and son, a drunk, a cheater, a runawawy, a pushover, a homosexual, an impotent, a shell-shocked vet, a pervert, a schizophrenic, an obese, a religious kook, an ineffectual. It could be anything. Hating the father only leads to a violent lifestyle, which perfectly matches the violence of these localists. And this oppositional, masculine disposition only takes one so far in riding the wave. Its limited nature leads to a ceiling on the skill one may attain, and, to be sure, almost totally prohibits one from gaining greater insight from the activity itself. The value, then, of Freudianism is that it renders the most fearsome and threatening male into a literal psychic infant, and correspondingly shows violence to be the outgrowth of not only infantile rage and infantile modes of behavior, but a refusal of one to face one's inner suffering and fear, and, instead, rail against it and project it futilely. Freudianism thus can make a baby of a monster. It is a devastating rebuke of what counts for strength and control in this society, who counts as strong and in-control in this patriarchal-capitalist society that mythologizes the body and the athlete, the athlete whose ceiling of ability imposed by masculinity is perfectly adaptable to the stripped-down and enclosed environment of competitive sport, these developmentally arrested babies who would wilt and wail at the light of the sun.