Transcript for The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Báyò Akómoláfé)

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is the Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel and space. If you visit the website of Nigerian born writer, philosopher, trickster and culture disruptor, bio-comalafa, the first thing that greets you is this impressive piece of prose. Welcome, traveler. It says, I am quite confident that even as the ocean's boil and the hurricane's beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice. That there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat. The place we do not yet know the coordinates to. A question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bull's eye and carry the trophy. The point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path of the third way of the broken binary of the traversal disruption, the chaotic moment. the post-human movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs. And this piece summarizes well why I wanted to speak with Bio for quite a long time, especially the part of it where he says that there are things that we must do that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. For, as discourse gets increasingly predictable and increasingly polarized I find Bio to be a voice that is comfortable dancing in the in-between spaces. From where he sends invitations for those daring enough to tread, and you have to be daring to listen to Bio's words. You have to be willing to let your feathers get ruffled a little bit. He revels in the place where, as he says, the gods of the fault lines live, and things don't adhere to easy definitions, and assumptions are challenged and histories rewritten and previously unseen relationships are articulated and deconstructed before our eyes. In his emphasis on in-between spaces and relationalities, I find his work to be deeply animist. So much discourse these days is position versus position. Even those discourses that supposedly exist in support of non-traditional modes of communication seem to auto-construct along the same positional dynamics, the same positional lines, but not bios. There is what you could call a commitment to discomfort. As if he's saying, I'm not going to make vast over generalizations about movements and situations. I'm not going to succumb to villain narratives, victim narratives, pathologizing narratives. I'm not going to fall into the trap of easy vernacular. I'm not going to say a word because it's the right word to say. Even the biography on his site speaks relationally as opposed to positionally. In other words, he spends a lot of time in his biography speaking about other people besides himself. Biocomalafe is the grateful life partner to E.J. Father to Alathia, Ania, and Kaya Jaden Abayomi. Son of Olafun Malaio Ibidapo Akomalafe, and Ignatius Abayomi Akomalafe, and descendant of Europa fields of archetypal becomemings and mythopoetic landscapes. He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power with and querying fond formulations and configurations of hope. Other spaces of power with, like, you know, the power that invisible Saharan dust storms have on Amazonian soil, and on New Yorkers' lungs, the power of a North story reimagined through an Nigerian trickster's lips. Like I said, I'd been wanting to talk to Bio for a long time, so when I saw him post on a topic that I've thought quite a lot about, the increasing dominance of psychology vernacular as the medium through which pretty much everything in our modern world is measured and evaluated, I knew the time was right. Specifically, Bio, who himself was trained as a psychologist, wrote this. Quote, I have nurtured an urgency to decenter Western psychology. I have felt the need to say more about the colonial dynamics at work within the discipline of psychology. How it manufactures its objective analysis. How it is, value-laden and culturally composed, instead of being as is often presumed, an epistemologically superior glimpse of the true nature of the psyche, and how it is entangled with the politics of sameness and control. So that's where our conversation starts. Why the need to de-center psychology? First and foremost, right off the bat, you wrote a little while back, I have nurtured an urgency to de-center Western psychology. Why do you see this urgency to de-center Western psychology?

It's one thing that I've noticed a lot recently is that maybe originally that psychology vernacular arose at a time when people were needing greater insight into the forces at work inside the individual, but it seems like psychology vernacular has now risen to become like the medium through which the success of a society is evaluated, the success of a relationship is evaluated, even if there is any value let's say to something like animist ritual it's thought to be like a psychological value and not necessarily a the value of actually interacting with and feeding a web of animate forces around us. It's like, oh, it must be a psychological value. So it's like everything it seems is weighed through the through psychology vernacular.

I mean, you know, that's very interesting. I think I think of colonial anthropology and colonial psychology and really, like, terms like disassociation, for example, like disassociation as a pathological label, right? And then you look deeper into, say, like traditions that practice what's called by psychologists like dissociative trance, right? Yeah. And so, see, Asian actually brings with it a whole lot of benefit in a lot of communities. Dissociation isn't just an either or thing. Either you're normal and whole and not dissociating or you're dissociating and pathological. There has seen to be from the Greek priestesses who went into dissociative states to traditions like the European trans-traditions in which dissociation is actually the lifeblood of a community in a way.

I love this phrase, pale impcesses of multiple crossroads. How many forces are at play within what you call you? Where do these forces come from? Where are they going? What is success for them? It's been revealed in recent years that what you call you contains more cells that aren't technically you than cells that aren't you. The microbiome that inhabits you that rents space within your miles of labyrinthine tubing certainly has agency. This microbiome certainly affects mood, worldview choices. Where did you fit in with all this? What caused you to do that one thing? What strange cocktail of feline toxic plasma in five space? What shutter of the passing breeze? What twilight fluttering of a hummingbird moths wings set the thoughts and motion that architected the trajectory of your life's inspirations. Human beings are porous, as you've heard me talk a lot about recently. So to label all the agencies at play as mine to assume the one static subject who makes their way through a world of objects, processing my issues, my patterns, my anger, my rage is perhaps too much emphasis on the individual and not enough on the living, animate geography which they inhabit. On the one hand, it places the individual as the most important thing in the universe. On the other hand, it burdens the individual to be the one who has to fix everything. The one who is solely responsible for everything that's, quote, wrong with them. And I'll go a step further and say that this ongoing stubbornness of insisting that all patterns are ours actually prevents us from coming to resolution around those patterns. Things, as I said in the previous episode, that could be cleared relationally, through external ritual, communal ritual, through fire and water, offering and song, are dwelled upon fixated upon endlessly rehashed as static individual things, properties that I own, masses that live within us and are even claimed and owned as inseparable from us and worn like a badge. I am my anger, I am my trauma. If everything, absolutely every external event is seen as an intrusion on a static self, this reinforces a very particular story of the world. That we are really ultimately the only things living in it. From bio, quote, nothing feeds our modern hubris and civilizational pathology like the myths that the non-human world is bereft of agency, of vitality, of story. that we humans are Magisterial anomalies interrupting a dead swirling heap of mute passive things, and that it best, the grace of human sentience, animates objects with nothing more than a metaphorical vitality they otherwise lack. This binary view which divides the world into man and his playthings has helped catalyze a politics of indifference, an ecosystem of abuse, and a generic culture wherein an economic metric standard, a single notion, is offered as the measure of all value. Does psychology help treat refugees of this fracture? Sure. But it also can, as Bio is saying, perpetuate the fracture as well. What may be necessary is not to be so definitive in our causality, so delineated in our proclamations of trauma and not trauma. so quick to own pathologies and emotional states as real estate. For things are far more intricate than they seem and in this breathing intricacy, this world populated with ancestral voices, the lines of what is pathology and what isn't, what is condition and what is divine gift are not always so definitive.

And so what do you think then that something like modern trauma discourse? Like what is that seeking to manufacture? And I'm sure it's inadvertent because I think there's a lot of people who have adopted trauma discourse as an attempt to, you know, grapple with the great forces of the world. But what does that manufacture? Like where does that lead us eventually? To me, it seems almost Puritan at times. the desire to read ourselves of trauma and exist in some type of, I don't know, vision of perpetual safety. It seems like the exact same project as the Puritan project in a way.

And then what I've noticed recently is that we also point fingers at it when it's in other people, but then kind of celebrate it when it's in us or it becomes the discourse also becomes weaponized, right? It becomes like, you know, my trauma is something precious and sacred, but like your trauma is something that really needs to be gotten rid of. Or can't you see all of your actions have to do with your trauma, but I'm allowed to have all of my actions come from my trauma.

Pathology as currency. These days, everything is addressed as an individual symptom. Everything is owned as property within the individual subject. And this is part of why claiming pathologies is so popular right now. Pathology is owned as identity. And this isn't to dismiss the fact that it can be valuable and important to have a diagnosis, but it's gone way beyond that now. Like the latest thing, have you heard about this? Performative and actments of dissociative identity disorder, what used to be called multiple personality disorder on TikTok. So people performing their multiple personalities on TikTok for public view, and psychologists scrambling to determine whether those enactments are real, DID or not. And of course, whether the DID is real is the hardest question at play here. It misses the overarching aesthetic of it all, the great fractal beauty of it as a brilliant, kaleidoscopic lens into the postmodern state, because what part of it is real? Is the disorder real? Is the absoluteest framework through which the disorder is named real? is the medium of TikTok real. When we film ourselves in any situation, is it real? Perhaps all of it is pathological, or none of it is. And so this image is a perfect reflection of the modern world, mirrors within mirrors, a thousand platoes of brokenness. Each of them, what Gregory Bateson called a continuous self-vibrating region of intensities. But yeah, you could say that the end result, the final culmination of the culture of the individual subject, is the worship of individual pathology. Where else could it possibly have gone, this culture of individualism? First, we had subjects questing for perfection as currency. Now we have subjects proclaiming brokenness as currency, but it's still all about the subject. About what bio would call the citizen. What I find is that it often recapitulates that worship of the individual. I mean, you know, it's interesting because it's like on the one hand, you know, if you take the view that, okay, the purpose is to just like get rid of all the trauma, get rid of all the trauma, then you're you're playing into, you know, you could say that kind of puritanical worldview. And then the other hand, if you say like, the purpose is to just celebrate the trauma, celebrate the trauma. So it's like, well, what if you weren't the issue at all? Like, what if it's not about you either doing like endless amounts of shadow work on one end or, you know, in a being like, like, or like, reading yourself of all demons on the other hand, like, what if it's about a web, a relationship, a system? Like you said, like, You know, what if ancestral trauma is much more about, oh, do you have a shrine to your ancestors? And do you say their names and much less about like something that always has to be tackled inside the confines of the individual head? Because, you know, it seems to me that like individual heads aren't designed to absorb that much shock.

The idea that there are certain things that need to be tended to relationally and externally. Like, you know, through simple ritual or through, you know, through the way that we interact with the larger web as opposed to taking all on ourselves. I see people cracking under the pressure of either the need to rid themselves of trauma or the endless shadow work. It's too much about the individual. This isn't the true understanding of bodies and how bodies are in interaction and how forces that are at work. you know, why when you went to that place, did you feel a certain thing? Or why when you, you know, what got stirred up was it, you know, you wrote this beautiful thing about the dust from, I think it was from Chad, it was from Chad, the dust and the atmosphere.

And in this dust plume of multiplicity that fertilizes even as it disrupts, that brings life-giving oxygen and the Amazon, even as it causes respiratory illness in New York, that makes the world simultaneously more and less breathable at the exact same time. What is the line between individual body and world between thinker and thought?

And it's interesting, you know, you're mentioning thought. And I think you wrote something that says thoughts do not come the inside nor do they come solely from the outside and this is between us really interesting in relation to the discussion on psychology you know many many many traditions around the world will tell you that thoughts aren't just generated by the human head right that There's a larger flow, or there's a being who got a hold of you for a second. I think this is interesting in terms of the weight that modernity puts the value of individual thought, and also the gravity task, the weight of individual thought, and that's something that I think in relation to what you're saying needs to be blown open a bit. And if the individual is the prime unit of everything, then the individual thought must, you know, it's what creates genius, it's what does all of these wonderful individualist things, well, well, that's not how many traditions around the world have seen it, many traditions have seen that as an interplay with meaning being.

Just sit with that for a moment. All those thoughts that pass through, those ones that seem like the most important thing in the world. What if just what if they're not actually ours in the way we think of as ours? Have you ever seen a wave of agitated thought take a room at the exact same time? Thoughts are not that different from weather patterns. There are low pressure fronts, there are periods of high friction, there are vortexes that are torrents and there are hurricanes. Within this flow, this current of consciousness, what is ours? What of the individual psyche is actually ours? As Bio says, quote, thoughts don't come from within, neither did they come from without, they emerge between. It's the same with feelings. I like to think that the gentle dipping of a leaf under the weight of a new drop can set off a series of events that flow through us as what we call depression, and that the molten formation of Iraq through the interactivity of weather and technology and story is experienced with joy in a specific moment. I like to imagine that when a seed falls into the earth, it experiences grief, and its grief is met by the loamy femininity of the soil and that is how trees sprout out with joy. Perhaps those moments of unspeakable silence, when depth's turn and sides growl, when words escape you, when a pill or a diagnosis doesn't add up to much, when all you want to do is squeeze yourself into the tiniest place in the universe. It is because you, for all intents and purposes, are co-performing the disintegration of imaginal cells within a cocoon and knowing the pain of becoming a mob.

I want to repeat one line that Bios said, emotion is not ours. It's not a brain phenomena. It's a territorial phenomena. And it enlists bodies in how it comes to matter. What a quote that is. This is one of the beautiful challenges of talking with bio. He spouts these phrases as if they're nothing. And each one, of course, could be unpacked and given its own shrine and its own episodes and its own hymns of praise. So let's take that for a minute. Emotion is not ours. It's a territorial phenomena. A geographical phenomena. It is born of wind and corn kernels and drum rhythms and how far it took our ancestors to walk to the well for water. and how their lungs interacted with ancient dust blooms in which animals skirted the periphery of their storytelling fires. Emotion has current just as thoughts do. But even though tradition after tradition after tradition directly says that we don't own our emotions, the psychologistation of discourse has emotion owned as property and identity. Even to the point that yoga and meditation teachers will talk about owning emotion as identity, as if this is yogic teaching. And it's definitely not yogic teaching, and I know it's an intricate issue, but for today, how does it feel to feel into emotion as geographical, as weather, as vagabond spirits seeking compatible harmonic receptor sites, as microbiome, emotion as fully realized beings, as passing gods,

concretizing the wilds. How many ways do we try to concretize the wilds? And is it possible that liberal discourse, the very discourse that is supposed to be saving the wilds from concrete, unknowingly concretizes the wilds itself, could it be that in its own efforts to find sanity and safety, it is participating in the very lupicide that it fervently petitions to prevent? You know, lupicide, the extermination of wolves, The elimination of all that howls in the night beyond our fences, of unwelcome vernacular, unwelcome perspectives, unwelcome traumas, unwelcome others, specifically because they are wild. We claim to love wildness. Do we? I do not see much love of wildness anymore. Love of wildness means loving the world on its terms, loving the uncontrollable other. Loving the callous roar of the fierce goddess as she devours all we know and all we love over time. We'd love to proclaim our love for the balance of nature. We claim to be on the side of nature when it serves. We love it when that balance arrives in the form of wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone or a new national park designated. But when nature's wild intent, nature's balance on nature's terms truly impacts human populations when it butts up against the Anthropocene, the overarching humanism project, then we immediately retreat to walling off the wild. We become loopocidal. Truly loving the wild means loving the fact that we are just passing through, loving the fact that our lifetime is limited, loving the fact that nature is going to devour us to, loving the unwelcome perspective, loving the howl of the unfamiliar. It also means understanding the ways that nature self-corrects in times of crisis, and that a lot of what we might be experiencing as out of balance is, in fact, nature itself continually balancing herself, and it only makes us uncomfortable because, ultimately, it is out of our predictability and out of our control. And here, there is something deep at play and what BIOS says about the city. Most modern liberal discourses, he says, is the discourse of the city. It wants to marry itself to nature when it serves, but it is a discourse born of the city, and it remains often blind that it contains within it the same geographical blueprint as the city. The same walls and compartments, the same siege defense tactics, the same goals of comfort and convenience at the expense of the wilds, the same fear of barbarians from other places. So, what I see happening most often, instead of an embrace of wildness, is a response to a crisis being met with desperate attempts to control. The wilds have gotten wilder, they must be controlled, as Bios says, quote, I cradle a potent question that touches today's very crucial attempts to make sense of an addressed climate chaos, racism, and other civilizational ills. What if the ways we are in response to a crisis are the crisis? In what ways might we say, along with Jean Ré, that the hospital is ill? How does the therapeutic reproduce the familiar? How do our solutions leave us trapped within cycles of sameness? Responding to a crisis with crisis, responding to puritanism with more puritanism. So liberals write our shocked and dismayed when right-wing Puritans banned books. And then we go and do silly things like trying to extricate all the problematic words and names from role dolls children's books. You know, names like Redured Kippling and Words like Fat or Ugly. Tell me, how is that not a regurgitated Puritanism? And what is the vision of the sanitized world in which nothing problematic is allowed within its walls? And yet everything other outside those walls is barbaric. It is the walled off city. It is Puritan, Siberia. It is the simultaneous banishing of the monster and the worship of the monster from afar. Yet it turns out that the delicate balance of nature is far more monstrous, far more other than we'd even imagine. Even the wolves of Yellowstone, poster children for the feel-good balance of nature, are governed by something other, something wild, toxoplasma. The behavior of the wolves of Yellowstone is governed by a feline-born bacteria that drives unpredictable behavior and increases risk-taking. And the infected risk-takers are either rewarded as leaders of the pack, or vilified as outcasts. And so the behavior driving the delicate balance of nature comes from something that most closely resembles in animate terms, spirit possession, in which everything, every being, in one way or another, is being made use of by greater forces. In this case, a larger microbial animate agency who's soul intent is to try to get beings to act more unpredictably so that they might find their way to a big cat's jaws and get eaten. Do we love this too when we proclaim our love for nature? Do we understand that in the movement of human events and human history, what we consider agency might not be agency at all? And what we consider ownership might not be ownership at all? and that what we consider hours might not be hours at all. And even what we call the Anthropocene might have been driven by microbes or spirit possessors. Or do we love nature only in so far as it fits our definitions of what natural balance should be? Do we love the wolf only as a symbol of wildness? Do we love the reintroduced wolf more than the historic wolf that howled on the periphery of consciousness, and invaded Freudian dreams? We like our wolves wild enough, yet not so wildest to sing aloud the unwritten agenda of nature, which rings out everywhere should we care to look and listen. She is the possessor, she is in control, she wants our hearts on a plate, She wants our demise just as she wants our praise songs. And there is no alignment we could ever find with her in which we are not ultimately at her feet. And I feel what you're talking about is really like the foundations of an animate worldview and you know within this animate worldview re-evaluating and refueling and reassessing, you know, where the individual is placed within that web of relationality. for like, for psychologists to come along and say, oh, oh, you must be depressed. Well, look at the web of relationality in which that person exists. You know, at the famous Christian emergency quote, like it's, it's no measure of health to be well-educated. Well, it's not my society, right? We have to look at all of these webs of relationality and understand that, yeah, of course people are depressed and of course people are anxious. And then from that, maybe not try to treat it as like, an individual isolated pathology that we need to just address piece by piece and one by one, start to reevaluate systems relationships, like the relationship of whole systems to one another.

It's profoundly difficult for us to worship the mysterious. It's what's coming to me. Yes, it's very difficult for us to worship the mysterious. even we have the best intentions, but it seems that we always want to find categorizations and find culprits and then you see like the growth of artistic traditions and spiritual traditions which always seem to arise out of some kind of story that's not so neat and tidy. It's not so, you know, it's not so, you know, safe.

You know, I've talked on the podcast about how when those types of sacrifices are ritualized and conscious within a culture, it's very different than when that worship is under the surface. And so that fundamental human need to have that basic energetic of sacrifice will find different ways to play itself out.

Well, you've talked about the spaces between the punctuation spaces being where trickster lives and it reminds me of issue

I want to go back to this. talk of safety in the modern psychological world. And there's a story from the Polynesian traditions about how before Trickster came along, humans were basically like this amorphous mass. They were like gelatinous kind of, they didn't have any, they didn't have any joints, right? They didn't have any movement capability and Trickster Maui and that tradition came along and was like Wow, this is extremely boring. We have to give these people some limbs, right? So he took out his club and basically broke all their appendages so that they could move. And that particular blunt force trauma created all of the movement possible in created this world of movement. I kind of think of the over-emphasis on safety as like a desire to return us to that kind of gelatinous non-moving state, right? And to me, it's very much like a religion of like the suburbs. It's like the let's have a safe individual enclosed and their little nice suburban house. And that's like the in a way like kind of the ultimate vision of safety. Now, obviously, you know, obviously I want people to feel safe. It's not an indictment. But I think the over emphasis on safety, like, where is it seeking to take us? And what is it? What is really the paradigm that's being spoken of? What is the actual where in history does safety live? Has there ever been an example of safety? You know, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Yes, the story starts with Baldur, the most beautiful of the gods. He's fair and bright like the sun. His hall is a joyous hall. All the gods love him. There's nothing wrong with boulder at all, except for one thing. He has bad dreams. He dreams as Neil Gaiman writes of the world's ending, and the sun in the moon devoured by a wolf. He dreams of pain, death without end. So his father Odin seeks out the source of Baldur's dreams. He travels far and wide. He goes to the land of the dead where a crown is preparing a mu in a cauldron. Who's that? Meal for Odin asks. It's for Baldur, she says. For he is coming here soon. Baldur, your beautiful son, is going to die. Odin tells the grave news to the gods. They can't have this. Baldur cannot die. He's the most beautiful being in the world. So Baldur's mother Odin's wife, Frigga, sets out on a great quest.

She walked the earth and exacted an oath from each thing that she encountered, never to harm Baldur the beautiful. She spoke to fire and it promised it would not burn him. Water gave its oath never to drown him. Iron would not cut him nor any of the other metals. Stones promised never to bruise his skin. Fring a spoke to the beasts, the trees, and to the birds and to all things that creep and fly and crawl. and each creature promised that its kind would never hurt the balder. The trees agreed, oak and ash, pine and beach, birch and fur, that their wood would never be used to hurt him. She conjured up diseases and spoke to them, and each of the diseases that can hurt or wound a person agreed that it too would never touch balder. You heard it here first in the Norse myths, conjuring up diseases and trying to obtain from them contract agreements of safety never seems to work well. She asked everything. Everything. That is except one thing.

The little spray egg of mistletoe. I mean, it was so small. and young, and it wasn't even really its own plan that lived on other plants. It was just kind of a little tiny, neither here nor there, thing.

give us the gift of dying well yeah beautiful and you can feel right like the attempt to obtain contracts from everything that like okay this is going to be this way and this is going to be that way and this is going to be expressed this way and this is going to be said that way and everything is right everything's going to happen exactly the way we want it to right And that's the biggest invitation card for Trickster that exists. That's exactly Trickster's role. There's always going to be someplace we leave exposed and often in seeking the safety we leave more exposed than we know.

back to Baldur. The gods were stunned. In the very act of trying to prevent a thing, they had caused it to be, in seeking promises of safety, they had made themselves less safe. They began to prepare Baldur for his funeral, mourners wept at the side of his body. And as they wept, and as they lamented, Odin crouched down by Baldur's ear, and he whispered something. and what he whispered only Odin knows. When Odin whispered in Baldur's ear, nor God, nor man, was nigh to hear. What Odin whispered bending low, no man, knoweth, or air shall know. Baldur's spirit was taken to the underworld to hell, as it's called in the Norse traditions. And Baldur's brother, Hermod, was sent to the underworld to plead with the queen of the underworld, to plead with hell herself, to revive him and let him live again. Please, Hermod implored, Baldur was loved by every single creature in the nine realms. Every creature is weeping for him, as frosted leaves and grass, sweat with the thaw of spring, Every single creature in the nine realms weeps for Balder. Can't you bring him back to life? And hell asks, every single creature? If you can show me, she says, that every single creature in the nine realms weeps for Balder, then I will restore his life. If but one creature does not mourn him, then he stays here forever. So, hermod travels across the nine realms, and he finds that everywhere the creatures of the world are weeping for Balder. Quote, the sound of weeping was heard like to falling streams. Men wept, as did also every animal peaceful and wild, stones had tears and metals were made wept. on trees and plants and on every grass blade were due drops of morning for balder. Trees and stones, bears and salmon, eagles and sparrows, all the beings of the nine realms weeping for balder. All of them, except one. One, giantus, who did not weep for him at all? He never was particularly nice to me, she said, and she didn't weep for balder. and so, Baldur was lost to the world. The gods grief was deeper, and their vengeance against Loki was swift. They found him, captured him, how they captured him as a tale for another day, and they imprisoned him. They imprisoned him beneath the world, bound up, immobilized, unable to move or stir. With a venomous serpent above his face whose open mouth dripped, scorching poison, and Loki's wife sat by his side for an eternity, catching serpent poison in a jar, and then emptying it out. And as she emptied it, and turned her attention away from Loki for just a moment, the poison would drip on Loki's face, and he would ride and scream and paint. And as he ride and screamed and painted the very earth which tremors and tombs marking the onset of the apocalypse. Ragnarok. Yes, the Norse apocalypse comes when the gods try to pin down trickster. Try to pin down the other. Try to create a false safety. For trickster needs space to breathe, to move. Conflict needs healthy ritual outlet for it to is sacred. The story of Balder and Loki speaks directly to what to do, in a world in which things do not transpire on our terms, in which there are no guarantees. Loki is not the force to be shunned, to be walled out because he doesn't speak the way we want him to, to be extricated from books, to be silenced in the mouths of comedians. He is part of the great play. We need to remember tricksters in this time of polarization, and views that are neither here nor there, gods of the spaces in between. Again, this reminds me of what you've written about the spirits of the fault line. I'm actually very excited because I feel like some of these kind of false walls of safety are starting to crack and crash down or maybe they were never even really constructed to begin with. and it seems like this is a time when new gods may be arising and spirits of the fault line may be active and learning how to navigate that rather than trying to simply put up flimsy shelters in the midst of the hurricane may be what we're called to do.

You know what you're saying about like falling to one's knees and kissing the ground. I've spent a lot of time amongst the devotional traditions within India. And you know, The the mad saint who simply runs out into the street and has no choice but to cry the the name of the divine or fault of their knees. you know, how does this meet psychology and there are situations I see, you know, situations like maybe what you need to do is run out into the street and fall on your knees and cry the names of the gods and you know, there's a certain movement that I think modernity prevents itself from feeling because it's so afraid of words like devotion or words like worship or words like, you know, Oh, surrender or words like, you know, loss of control in terms like loss of the animal. Celebrating that lack of control or loss of control actually made you more to actually get things moving in the way.

Yeah, or it's like sense-making through the senses as opposed to sense-making is like a rigorous intellectual exercise, right? But I have to say like, of all the like horrid metaphors I've heard for modernity, there's something more frightening about the image of modernity as a giant Freudian couch.

Good one. I'd love to. Here you explode that one out more.

I'm picturing the picturing like this very like, you know, Austrian couch, but it's starting to get a little frayed like. Yeah, at the end. The foam is starting to poke through a little bit. Meanwhile, the tentacles of the monster are engulfing you. and wanting to make new gods out of your skull. So what are we called to do in this age of the Anthropocene? Is it to turn the lens on ourselves again and again and again? Is it to try to petrify and classify stories within us? Or is it to fall to our knees before vast powers fall to our knees? In gratitude again and again. What does it mean to discover alignment to a world that unfolds on its terms and its terms alone? For the Aruba of West Africa he says, every seemingly ordinary moment is braided with gratitude, with a sentiment that goes a little deeper than saying, thank you. I've often wondered why he says, it might have something to do with the humbling sense of forces beyond our control. With rumors of our littleness and the cosmic scheme of things, and with a cultural history that reminds us that we are not masters of our own destiny. May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future. May it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. Welcome to the decade of the fugitive. First off, many, many thanks to Biocomalife for this wonderful conversation, and there's more with Biocom. And you can find out more about his work at Biocomalife.net. That's b-a-y-o-a-k-o-m-o-l-a-f-e.net. There were other contributors to this episode that I want to briefly mention CD Bay, the wonderful singer who I've been working with for quite a while now, sang on this episode, and you can find her work on Spotify. Her name is SID, IBE. My old friend, Sunny Ryan Hart from the band Necrot offered some guitar. And Ben Murphy did that beautiful haunting, low vocal chanting. He's in counting the old Norse story of Baldur. And it was wonderful to have Ben's voice on this episode. Ben is an eco-bardic vocalist composer and storyteller in residence at the School of Mythopoetics. I referenced a couple books in this episode. These are Neil Gaiman's Norse mythology. just an absolutely wonderful read about the Norse myths and a thousand platoes by Delos and Guatari. And then I also referenced the TikTok inspired surge of dissociative identity disorder and article in psychology today from March 2022. If you liked what you heard today, please consider becoming a patron. It costs as little as $6 a month and patrons get access to two monthly online study groups where we get to dive really deep into the topics that are explored on this podcast. It's a wonderful conversation. It's a great group of people. And I invite everyone to support the vision of the podcast by becoming patrons and joining us for the conversation. If you're interested in becoming a patron, you can find out more at patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. That's Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash the emerald podcast. And until next time, may our lives be filled with imagination, vision, and wonder.