Brutality
possibly a Salaambo spoiler...
Feel like writing some coffee crap this morning. Not sure what about, but reading Salammbo is really putting me into a strange state of mind. A good state at least for conceiving the late swords, which are famously brutal. The closer you get to Malkuth the more violent and conflicted it all gets. Malkuth being the Earth, this our material reality.
Brutalized people, and those who brutalize, have a strange psychic deadness about them. You can see it in their eyes. Acts of violence, especially on a mass scale as in war, are usually accompanied by an intense feeling of boredom...that's the best word I can find for it. A kind of total lack of life force that creates a leaden oppressive atmosphere. You could feel it in the footage of the recent London riots. It is a hopelessness that comes from closed hearts and minds. Shut down humans become like demons. I suppose it's because energy and love are the same thing. When it becomes impossible to open your heart, when you are in a frenzy of violence, then you are already dead in a psychic, spiritual sense. The same could also be said of those who live only for greed and accumulation. The character Hanno in Salammbo is a most classic and extremely disgusting example of this. He is every mining magnate, every corporate fatcat, rolled into one enormous pustulated package. No wonder Hollywood won't come at this one, in spite of it being perfect for the cinema. Perfect only for a cinema of honesty, which I don't think exists.
I was extremely disturbed by the scene I read last night. Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general returns after 5 years warring abroad and finds his palace has been wrecked by the Barbarians he himself employed as mercenaries. He doesn't want to go to war against them, even though one of them has messed with his daughter, but when he finds they have killed and mutilated his elephants, he goes wild, and decides to cut loose. The scene where the elephant, whose trunk has been cut off, tried to touch him with the stump (it recognizes him) broke my heart. Fuck tha Barbarians! Basically everyone is going to get fucked in this novel. And I can't say I feel too sorry for any of them. Maybe there is brutality at the heart of all of us somewhere.