Charlie’s Angels

A post over at Tim’s blog examines Charles Manson’s stance on language. A lot of discussion back and forth over whether Charlie got “it” and what “it” is. The author of the below (i.e., “The American Meaning of Charles Manson“) speaks to these issues in a way that resonated powerfully for me:

“…the point is not simply that Manson is speaking metaphorically. He is doing that, but he is also saying that everything is a metaphor, that our very lives, our bodies, our surroundings, are metaphor; that we live in an illusion if we think this material reality is real. Like Emerson and the earlier romantics, he is a philosophical idealist. He believes that what is ultimately real is not matter but consciousness. This whole thing we call reality, or the universe, is an illusion, a dream. What we call God is the dreamer. And our bodies are no more real than are the strange beings that flit through our dreams at night. The whole world is a thought, and each person’s perceptions are but a series of thought within the framework of the larger thought…

It is not a question of being brainwashed by the Capitalists’ game, as the Marxists imagine, but of being brainwashed by any game, Capitalist, Marxist, Buddhist, scientific, you name it. All of rational human consciousness is a walking dream from which people need to be awakened. “

Personally I have always been crazy about Charlie, but unable to articulate why. Fortunately The American Meaning of Charles Manson says it better than I could - Cosmic Charlie is but one in a long line of antinomian monists along with Norman O Brown, Emerson, Whitman, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Ranters, the Ismaelis, the Thuggees, William Blake et al. Whatever his faults he lived his life with rare courage and conviction, serving as a scapegoat and also a mirror for a society in a time of troubling transition (which, many would argue, we have yet to complete - America is still living in its shadow side, a neurotic hell plane of dehumanization and psychological distancing, abdication of responsibility, ignorant armies clashing by night, etc.):

“…for reporters to harp on the literal facts of who did what when during the murders often seems as absurd as showing “Reefer Madness” to High School kids to keep them from smoking pot. Once again, the adults haven’t a clue. Until they address Manson’s issues, they won’t have any credibility either. Someone needs to address these questions in language which people understand. Otherwise, kids will turn to the Mansons among us for their answers. “A lot of the kids,” says Manson, “never met anybody who told them the truth. They never had anybody who was truthful to them. You know, they never had anybody that wouldn’t lie or snake or play old fake games. So all I did was I was honest with a bunch of kids.” That is a powerful indictment of our society.

However appalled one might be by the literal reality of Manson, it is almost impossible not to also take him on the level of symbolic consciousness. “They don’t want to ever let me go,” he explains, “because they feel secure as long as they’ve got me locked up in that cell. They feel like, yeah, they’ve got THE MAN locked up right there in a box.” Perhaps this is only literal; or perhaps Manson has taken over the role in society that black people used to play the symbol of the terrors of the subconscious. We need to keep our rational consciousness safe from the chaos on the other side. So we lock up the subconscious under what Freud called the censor. And through the power of symbolic consciousness we imagine that by segregating black people, or locking Charlie Manson in a cell, we have the irrational forces of the subconscious under our rational control. We try to keep the conditioning going. We try to make the combine run more smoothly by adjusting everyone’s programming so everyone will think and behave as they should. And yet the secondary meanings are always there. The literal continues to point to the symbolic for anyone able to read the text. Even when, perhaps especially when it is least intended, the ironic meanings bring us up short. “

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