Thoughts on Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. Most of this will sound both confusing and possibly startling if you haven’t read at least some of the introduction to the book, and perhaps a bit of the first chapter on Egypt, toward which these reflections are primarily aimed.

Tansvestism is no strange phenomenon, it is merely part of the return to pagan night from the bright and hard daytime of Christianity. It is not, in the larger sense, a personal phenomenon. It is a sexual and cultural archetypal conflict over an innate tension within the species. How can we possess the other sex and that which they possess?

Women have an innate instinct to believe that whatever men produce should belong to them, and men have a similar belief that whatever women are should belong to them. Both desire some aspect of the other, but cannot easily produce them, or cannot do so without compromising or diminishing their own native capacities, without tradeoffs. Technology seeks to meet these twin needs, these desires, but does so imperfectly. You are always dealing in substitutes that you can and therefore must possess, and that possess you. That is part of the bargain.

The desire to avoid trading life for life in a sexual economy means that you keep your innermost self at the cost of losing someone else’s. There is a strange wonder in giving that goes beyond the mere magic of keeping or possessing or aquiring. You gain autonomy, but lose economy. And I mean that in both senses. Exchange is not only more efficient than mere posession, surprising as that is, it is also more productive. It is complex, messy, and requires greater intelligence and administration. It generates losses as well as profits. But as a system, it beats mere possession hands down.

The vision of Egypt and its culture as the objectifying eye defeating the chaos of nature that we find in Paglia has some validity. Peterson has also remarked on it. But in human society, both in concept and in practice, the goal isn’t to defeat or eliminate nature or the feminine. The ideal state isn’t one where either defeats the other, though it has certainly been imagined so. The central archetypal concept, the highest concept of human society, is marriage, the unity of male and female. And it is far more than possession or subjugation or even contractual or casual exchange. Its goal, and therefore the goal of beauty and truth, of art and morality, of statecraft and society, is cohabitation. To create a place where the two sexes can inhabit one another. Man creates culture to defeat nature, but also to make a place for it. The goal is the unity and integration of opposing forces. To free oneself and then to return to voluntary servitude. That’s the journey of a young man leaving his mother to be joined to his wife. He is victorious and defeated, and both by choice, and both with consent from the women, and for their benefit. His benefit becomes theirs, and theirs his, as the eternal cycle and exchange is renewed.

The Appolonian is already implicit in nature. It emerges out of it, as if it had always been. Nature is chaotic, but not merely chaotic. I don’t think that beauty is merely an Appolonian creation from or imposition on the actual chaos of nature. It is present, but to see it is to take on the power to extract, or abstract, it. But it is there to had. It is implicit, it just hasn’t been called out. The principle is there, but the pattern is invisible in the infinite complexity of undifferentiated matter. Observation, particularity, abstraction, valuation, and discrimination must call it forth. But there is something there to flower as the seed is cast, it is not merely inserted wholesale from the outside.

Math works because on some strange level it captures a truth about the universe, something implicit in its organization. And it isn’t the case the nature is merely chance and chaos. It seems to have purposiveness. Even evolution isn’t merely chance or arbitrary. The genome discriminates and protects the most important parts of itself (which it is able to identify and protect) and confines mutation to those areas where mutation would be most useful and least problematic. What’s more, adaptation to pressures is not entirely random either and favored only by selection. Adaptation is favored by mutation itself. Adaptations arise specifically where they are needed, not only at random and to be selected for.

Both of these facts may be hard to reconcile with some models of natural selection, but they present themselves nevertheless. And that is before we add in the actions of the competence hierarchy and sexual selection, the selection that species (particularly humans) enforce on themselves that is extremely purposive and directed. Ultimately, the sky god isn’t the enemy of the mother cult, though he may have to oppose her at certain times when the pagan pantheon must be pushed back like an encroaching jungle of vines and darkness, so his art can be revealed. He was always implicit, and he doesn’t destroy nature but reveals its inner order and abstracts and extracts it so it can be made explicit. The story (art) isn’t false, it is hyper-true, as Peterson would say. Its truth was there to be extracted and encapsulated out of the mass of experience. In the end, nature gives birth to supernature, which creates and created a place for nature. Woman brings man into the world, who brings the world to woman, and man and woman inhabit one another in their mutual creation.

Pornography in part is about taking something mysterious and ineffable and making it explicit and overt. It’s about taking something terrifying and uncertain and making it certain and safe. It is about taking what robs you of your nerve and strength and capability and making it ennervating. It is about revealing mystery and making it mundane. It is about dispelling darkness and hiddeness and mystery and unreachableness. It is about taking the forbidden object and by doing so breaking and dissolving the taboo. It is a sacrifice of the sacred to make it ordinary and achievable.

There is some idea hidden somewhere that feels or worries or even candidly admits that the Appolonian revelation, especially as it is revealed in Christianity, its greatest expression, is somehow a a half measure or a pleasant lie, something that holds at bay the real, terrible truth. And at some point it always falls apart and fails and the night comes over us again. That is the fear lurking in the tale of the madman. That the beautiful lie truly is a lie. But that is the question, isn’t it? Is nature only the Cthonian? Or is the Appolonian just as real and just as much a part of the deep truth of nature, lying within it, waiting to be revealed and grasped? That, ultimately, is the question of faith. Which vision of the world to give yourself to. Existentialism is only possible after Christianity, atheism and solipsism only become possible when you can seperate yourself from the miasma of Cthonian nature and cyclical history. They are what’s left after the collapse of the faith that lifted you out of the dark jungle of the mind.

The argument Tolkien made to to C.S. Lewis was that he was entirely right about Christianity and its place as a mythological progression in the story of humanity, but that it wasn’t merely a hopeful lie. Tolkien’s argument was that in this case the Apollonian myth was trying to reveal itself in truth, the story revealing itself in life. It was not merely interjected as a lie into eternally chaotic nature. It was implicit and real all along, and revealed itself mythologically because mythology is the story of how we conceptualize and relate to unabstracted and undifferentiated nature. Jesus may have been incarnated at a particular moment in history, but the Word, the principle of the Apollonian, was implicit from the beginning. In the end, you choose your faith. And in so choosing you decide between worlds, not mere propositions, nor between mere Apollonian and Cthonian. Between marriage and divorce.