Alchemy of the Blues
Are the color of one’s skin, the color of one’s land, and the color of one’s soul connected? This is a dangerous question to ask in our time because the answers to such questions have been used in the past by people of light skin to degrade people of dark skin. To ask the question is to risk an answer that might be used again to degrade. Today our collective cultural ego has at last established that such degradation is wrong, and its devastation must be ended. This is very good. Unfortunately, in the way of the ego, that collective has insisted that the remedy for the problem is to make the question wrong. We called this repression. As is often the case with the ego in its efforts to ease guilt and anxiety, the question is attacked instead of the problem, an action that can, and often does, inadvertently make the problem worse. Curiosity, in turn, may be a better remedy.
Like many white men and women who have been touched deeply by blues-based music, I have an intense curiosity about the “souls of Black folk” and, likewise, the color of my own soul. Through the years my interest, nay, obsession with racial issues has led me to the difficult conviction that people with dark skin have darker souls and people with light skins have lighter souls. The blues unflinchingly teaches this fact. The best and most famous white blues players, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Janis Joplin, Ry Cooder, Eric Clapton, can come close but never really achieve the dark soulfulness of the average Black blues player let alone the greats like Howlin’ Wolf, Charlie Parker, Bessie Smith. Is it cultural? Very likely. Is it genetic? Heaven forbid. Is it the color of the soul? Of course.
When the white supremacist asks the question about skin color and soul it is with the intent to claim the inferiority of dark-skinned people. Fortunately, we white blues players have a way to ask the question that is devoid of that intention. We white blues boys have turned the question on its head because we ask it with the goal of honoring the Black soul and, ultimately, emulating it. The fact that we fail in our attempts to play the blues and so in emulating that soul leads to the conclusion that our souls in some way are not up to the task. They are … too white. So, I and other failed white blues players are probably the proper ones to ask the question because, if anything, it is we who feel degraded or, better said, humbled by it.
To answer this “racial” question I will pursue two directions of the movement of psyche in relation to the body. The first is the way in which projection and introjection color the soul from the outside moving in. The second is the way that archetypes of color poetically color the physical world from the inside moving out. Then, I will tell an alchemical tale about the way in which the blues has changed the color of the collective American soul and, in the end, Western culture consciousness itself.
Color From The Outside In
It is a given in Jungian psychology that light-skinned people project "shadow" onto dark-skinned people and that this is the cause of most racial problems. Eric Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1990) is a classic example of this idea. It is a simple, direct, and most certainly accurate explanation of how souls are colored through projection. Dark-skinned people have “dark and dirty souls” because light-skinned people cannot face their split or repressed negative qualities and so imagine that they exist in dark-skinned people. The psychic effects and related behavior of these projections eventually color the souls of dark-skinned people, such as American slaves, who must somehow endure the outcome. The problem is compounded by the fact that the projection is unconscious leaving light skins in authentic belief of the inferiority of dark skins. Even Abraham Lincoln believed that Negroes were inferior.
I cannot argue with this explanation, but I am concerned with its limits. In his forward to Neumann’s book, C. G. Jung does a beautiful job of pointing out that such a view, if expressed with moral intent, unavoidably forces a narrowing of vision. If projection is the cause of dark souls in dark people, one cannot openly consider that darkness phenomenologically without abandoning the only acceptable moral position. The projection explanation creates a trap similar to that of political correctness in our time. The question is not repressed entirely, but its answer is monotheistic and, once given, closed to further consideration. Jung makes it clear that while the “chief cause” of neurosis is moral conflict, moral answers are inadequate to solve them. Psychological openness is the best way to resolve moral dilemmas.
Hillman catapults the projection explanation into a different realm with his idea that white casts its own white shadow (1986, 38). The ”shadow” is not black, it is any color in its shadow position. That white sees its shadow as black is a function of white’s predilection toward splitting and oppositional thinking. Hillman’s idea liberates the soul’s color identity from the trap of anti-projection moralism by giving all manner of colored souls a full range of psychological qualities. The white conscious and the white unconscious exist in and of themselves without the need to claim black as either. We do not need to stop projecting our “blackness” on dark-skinned people, rather we “should” recognize our own white shadow. His move also implies that the conscious and unconscious of white are qualitatively different from the conscious and unconscious of black or green or whatever color.
Hillman effectively rocks the foundation of the projection explanation but he claims that light-skinned people became identified with the white soul only recently. This “whitening” occurred during the Age of Exploration with the identification of dark-skinned people with “blackness.” I accept the accuracy of his view but suggest that it, too, is limited. I think that we must ask why whites began to think of themselves as white in the first place. Did their skin invite them to assume the archetypal position of white, or was white consciousness already there anyway, or both? Is it purely coincidence that it was white skinned people who exaggerated the qualities of white consciousness? Projection alone cannot answer these questions.
It is a maxim of object relations theory that the infant internalizes psychologically the breast upon which it nurses and this breast represents core positions of early identity. I want to point out the very obvious fact that the infant who nurses at a dark-skinned breast internalizes darkness and the infant who nurses at a light-skinned breast internalizes lightness. It is a substantial failing of object relations theory that it does not give color a place in psychological development. Archetypal psychology has learned through careful observation that color has priority over other archetypes. Color consciousness seems to exert a psychological primacy over other forms of consciousness.
I propose that the internalized breast of color creates a fundamental consciousness within the infant. Kandinsky (1977) suggests that there are two “main results” of looking at color, the first physical, the second psychic. The psychic effect produces a “corresponding spiritual vibration” with definite effects on consciousness depending on the color. Thus, our psychic and spiritual states of consciousness are affected, perhaps dominated by the colors we see and, I would say, with which we identify. If a person draws identity from his mother’s breast, from his family, and from his community, that identity will unavoidably reflect, to some degree, the skin color of these people. While the person will undoubtedly have a variety of states of consciousness, each at times manifesting psychologically as particular colors, his sustained identity will be significantly and primarily influenced by the color of his people and the color of his own skin.
Part of physiognomy is the color of the face. Who I am, to some degree, is the color I am. Because my citadel of metaphors, my personal referent, my body has specific qualities, those qualities must shape the personal imaginal state that is my identity. One of those qualities is the color of my skin. When I share a collective identity with my closest associates the color we are shapes that shared identity. The colors of skin that surround us will be internalized by us and the soul we organize around those colors will reflect the archetypal qualities of those colors. And if color is psychologically primary, skin color identity may have primacy over other forms of identity, such as gender.
But here is the dilemma. There seem to be limits on the degree to which people can internalize a soul color that is different from their skin color. White Southern infants who nursed on the breast of a beloved “mammy” likely had darker souls than their Northern counterparts who had no exposure to the dark soul. But even so, a fundamental whiteness remains in that Southern baby. Even if I do everything possible to identify with Blacks in order to introject that black soul so that I may play the blues, there is a persistent whiteness to me that can only give so much. My face, my physiognomy, is white and, so it seems, is my soul. Projection and introjection together are not enough to answer this racial question which implies that we must move beyond psychology for a definitive explanation.
The Poetics of Matter
David Miller (1994) proposes that where psychology stops poetry must take over for knowing to continue. He invokes Lacan who says, ”I am not a poet but a poem, a poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.” While I believe this idea opens the door for an answer to our question, it also exposes a persistent problem with postmodernism that must be overcome in order to proceed. That problem: Where is the body? Where is the object? Where is matter? Hamilton asserts that “with the postmodern necessity to abandon the heroic fantasy of positivistic science, we have become lost in a universe of refraction and indeterminacy in which it has become sacrilege to attribute a quality or value to anything without being accused of Cartesian dualism” (1994). This leads unavoidably, says Hamilton, to a domination of the subjective. Paradoxically, deconstruction of the subject has led to subjectivism. To “overcome” Cartesian dualism is a reactionary move that merely replaces the obsession with objectivity with an obsession for subjectivity. As the “subject” is being deconstructed by postmodernism, subjectivism is taking over because the object» disappears without its Cartesian opposite.
Modern Cartesian consciousness claimed separation of mind and body but in fact practiced mind/body unity. Because the only valid image was an exact “objective” replication of the referent a fascist but clearly congruent state of mind/body unity resulted. Postmodernism claims mind/body unity but practices a separation between mind and body through Hamilton’s paradox. Cartesian mind/body dualism must be rejected in favor of theoretical unity, but in doing so we find that it is only in dualism that we experience phenomenologically the congruence of mind and body predicted by the theoretical unity. Paradoxically, qualities must be assigned through dualism for unity to occur. To find the congruency between mind and body, begin by splitting them.
Certainly I leave myself open to the charge of dualism by attributing the quality of Blackness to dark-skinned people and the quality of whiteness to light-skinned people. And, in fact, I am proposing a dualism, a subject/object split. But, I am asking that the split come out of poetics, not literal science. The way out of the subject/subjectivism paradox is to include Lacan’s body, his matter, as part of the poem. His matter is the objective part of his poem. Our acceptance of literal science and our emphasis on the primacy of image has convinced us that objective matter belongs to science and objective psyche to us. I propose that objective matter does belong to us but poetically, not literally. Deconstruction of the subject need not result in the loss of the object if we hold fast to the idea that objective matter is a poetic reality as well as a scientific one and that the aesthetic imperatives of poetry are as powerful and relevant to objective matter as the natural laws of science.
Or perhaps it is this. If psyche is the object, then matter becomes the subject. And if there is no subject, only a poem being written, then the body becomes the poem. The objective psyche in its archetypal forms writes poems that are bodies.
I remember the dead body of my friend and first clinical supervisor, Ken, lying in a casket. It was clearly not him. He was dead and gone though I could feel his spirit nearby. Yet as I looked, it was clear that his body was the most perfect expression of who he was psychologically. His body evoked his psychic essence so precisely that I had the feeling that he would sit up at any moment and laugh. His nearby spirit evoked no such essential feeling. The matter that was his body was part of the poem that was Ken. Psyche and spirit wrote him not only as an individual personality poem, but also as matter that was that poem in the physical world.
The body is not only a citadel of metaphors that feeds the psyche, it is also an objective citadel that best expresses the psyche. If Ken’s personal body is the best expression of his personal psyche, then could it be possible that our collective bodies are likewise the best expression of our collective psyche. The best place to look to know the nature of our collective psyches may not be our myths, it may be our bodies. To the degree that our collective psyches are archetypally formulated so also are our bodies archetypal poetic expressions. The bodies of white skin people are poetic expressions of the archetype of white. And if the archetype of white does indeed create white skin people, it does so from within their collective soul so that their racial character must also reflect that whiteness. The poem of whiteness is both my skin and my soul.
Literal science says that my skin is light because my ancestors came from a place with long winters, lots of clouds, and little sunlight, therefore, they did not need much skin pigment, melanin, to avoid sunburn and in fact got more of the sun’s benefit because of its lack. Literal science says Langston Hughes had dark skin because his ancestors came from a place with near constant sun and so developed large amounts of melanin for protection as an adaptation. Langston Hughes himself says:
I am a Negro
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.
(1959)
It is unclear whether the “I” he is referring to is his skin or his soul, but one gets the feeling that he is not separating them. His skin and his soul are merely different reflections of the same identity. His poem suggests that his dark identity is an expression, a metaphor, of the dark depths of Africa. His color identity is an exposition of the soul of his land. Recall Jung in Africa sensing that “a darkness altogether different from natural night broods over the land” (298). Recall Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Are these racist stereotypes or accurate perceptions? Hughes, certainly no Uncle Tom, seems entirely comfortable with the idea that these are accurate perceptions. Can it be that psyche, spirit, soul made African people dark-skinned and dark-souled as a poetic act that metaphorically matched the nature of their land? Are black skin and black soul a rhyme?
We might call it an “enduring synchronicity.” As such it is an acausal effect of psyche on matter that lasts beyond the moment. This is not a theophany nor an epiphany nor a premonitory dream nor the loud report of a bookcase, but psyche making lasting metaphors in the physical world. A scientific, literal explanation must by definition be causal. At the opposite pole to science is poetry and the acausal perspective. Let us take this perspective, retain the separation of psyche and matter, but throw out causality in favor of poetry. In doing so we might be able to abduct matter back from the literal, for it is in matter that psyche and spirit write their poems. Matter exists separately to contribute forms for imagos to psyche and to manifest poems for psyche. Psyche exists separately to experience imaginally the forms of matter and to shape matter according to its rich imaginal variations.
This view forces the question, how could people with dark skin not have darker souls and how could people with light skin not have lighter souls! The two must certainly reflect each other. Of course we should not get literal about this. The shunning of Cartesian dualism in favor of a poetic dualism can result in its own literalism. Here, psyche and matter always must have a congruence that leaves no room for the freedom psyche needs to make objective poems that vary according to the mood of the poet. To guard against this literalism we should leave substantial room for the diversity of the poet’s impulses and its acausal nature.
Consider the variation of the individual color constitution of the soul. Perhaps the poet colors each person a unique and individual mix of the humors—black, rose, green, and yellow—and this mix is as stable as a racial color constitution. This fundamental color orientation and identity of the individual personality would, in combination with the racial identity, shape the physical body in a poetic fashion. As a result, I would expect that a phlegmatic Negro person would be of a different sort than a phlegmatic Asian person. The poet mixes colors in all fashions; yellow on a white background, green on a black background, and so on.
Or, compare these poems to the transsexual. Her psyche is clearly not in congruence with her matter. She is a woman trapped in the body of a man. Could there also be those who are not in congruence with their skin tone? We could invent disorders of racial identity. Slang knows these conditions. The “Oreo” is black on the outside and white on the inside. Is there such a thing as a Black man trapped in the body of a white man? Most of us white blues failures would say yes. On the street we are called “wiggers.” These exceptions help the case for a poetics of matter, for in these situations mind and body are clearly split and psyche dominates identity in spite of the literal matter of the body. The psyche goes to great extremes to require the body to become the object of the poem. For the transsexual this might mean hormone therapy, cosmetic extremes, and even surgery to remove the matter that is incongruent to the poem. For the white blues player it can mean hours and years of frustration and failure, abandoning a successful career in the white business world, little or no money, no family life, addiction. Anything to play the blues.
Like other psychological qualities in the personality, perhaps there are color features in each individual that are relatively stable and unchanging and color features that have great latitude for variation, pathology, and creativity. The racial and humor color identities may be relatively fixed while the emotional and alchemical color identities ebb and flow and transform. I suggest that these color dynamics can be used to construct personal and cultural narratives that tell psychological stories in terms of the ways in which the stable and mutable states of color consciousness interact. It is to such a narrative that I have turned to make sense of my obsession with race and the blues.
Like many white people who have an unfathomable passion for African-American music, my color narrative is one in which black and white have played a central role. In order to play the music I love, I have tried for many years to be darker. I have succeeded a little and failed often, for I am Caucasian, white like the snow is white, white like the heights of Europe. My personal color narrative has revealed much to me about the basic nature of my soul and the fixed color identities that allow me to go only so far in the deeper darkening of my soul. But what it seems unable to reveal is the reason that I, and so many other whites like me, keep coming back to the blues in spite of the persistent experience of failure. To see through this insanity I was forced to try and tell the story of the larger cultural color narrative that encases the blues. What I found is a stunning tale of race relations and the transformation of the Western mind.
An Alchemical Tale
I propose that there are two histories of America: one is conscious and economic, the other unconscious and alchemical. Nowhere is this experienced more than in race. Africans were stolen into American slavery to satisfy the conscious economic desire to create wealth but also to satisfy the unconscious alchemical desire for psychological transformation. They were both cheap labor and “the nigredo.” And while the unconscious white fantasy ostensibly had a missionary zeal toward saving the “Blacks” from their nigredo hell, the other side of the fantasy, the unconscious of the unconscious, was bent on saving the Western soul from its psychotic flight from the body. Only the nigredo can “break into bits” the singular vision and dissociative defenses of the supreme white mind (Hillman 1986). The essential literalism of that mind required that Africans be that nigredo. If the American Dream is economic, the American Nightmare is alchemical.
Jamestown, Virginia, 1619. Slavery is that nightmare, or at least its most visible representation. Many writers have pointed out that the true treachery of American slavery was not so much slavery itself but the attitudes that surrounded it (e.g., Jones 1963; Du Bois 1994; Williams 1991). Historically, throughout the world, slavery has taken many forms of degradation. There were forms of European and African slavery in which a slave had substantial liberty, could make money, have a family, and even purchase free-dom. In these forms the slave was considered a person, and so it was for Africans in early American slavery. In early Virginia, African slaves had the legal status of indentured servants and their baptism was a bar against enslavement. But the attitudes toward African slaves in America followed a progressive deterioration underpinned by the progression of the dissociative flight of the white mind. In 1661, the Virginia Assembly passed a law differentiating African slaves from white indentured servants, making the Africans slaves for life. Within 100 years the deterioration was complete, typified by a Maryland law which put African and African-American slaves in the same category as “working beasts, animals of any kind, stock, furniture, plate, books, and so forth” (Foster, 37).
Clearly, this attitude was a psychological defense of rationalization to justify the economic benefit of lifetime slavery. But it was more than that as well. The quality of the defense betrays the psychotic state of dissociation that, in this case, is at minimum delusional and possibly even a mass hallucination. How can one look at a homo sapiens and not see a homo sapiens, but instead see a working beast or a piece of furniture? The white unconscious could not bear to identify with the evil it was doing and so called upon defenses that were consistent with its dissociative pathology to avoid this awareness. But we must ask, what does the symptom want?
Seeing humans as things suggests a desire of the white mind to be returned to the status of a human “thing among things” (Hillman 1986, 54). It is a projected wish to get out from behind the walls of the white mind and return to the materiality of the world. It is a wish to be brought down. The higher up the white mind went, the lower down it had to push the image of its shadow, the African slaves. This temporarily maintained its defensive homeostasis, but in the long run this breathless repression inevitably created a powerful nigredo poised to break the white mind to bits.
North and South. The white mind in colonial America naturally did what comes natural to it; it split in order to create oppositionalisms. The two splits of significance for this tale are the North/South split and the house/field split. North and South during the Age of Exploration were imagined by the Western mind in a way that Africa was black hell and Europe was white heaven. I suggest that pristine America was unconsciously imagined to be prima materia in a sterile hermetic vessel into which the North/ South opposition could be introjected. If the white mind was unconsciously stealing slaves to be the nigredo that would break it to bits, then it was inevitable that the playing out of this alchemy would be done in terms of the central metaphor of the split, North and South. Importantly, perhaps necessarily, the vertical geographic span of America provided it with adequate climatic difference to underpin the imagining.
The traditional split of North as white and South as black was greatly, and necessarily, complicated in America with the latitudinal political splitting of the land by the white mind at the Mason-Dixon line. This act resulted in the splitting of the white mind itself. Here, now, were two kinds of white mind, one North and one South; one cool and one hot. This development would Prove to be essential for the alchemy because it forced the white mind to turn its oppositionalism in on itself, rather than keeping it focused on the Africans. While this turn inward was carried out in relationship to the nigredo as represented by the Africans, it was primarily narcissistic, for now the white mind was projecting onto itself.
The tension between the northern industrial liberal and the southern agricultural conservative is the central theme of American politics. The tragicomic truth, however, is that both sides are actually the same white mind, fundamentally identical, merely having reached different conclusions about what it means to be supreme. The southern conservative concluded that supremacy meant keeping the nigredo repressed while the northern liberal concluded that supremacy meant lifting the nigredo up to the light. What neither could imagine (and what many still cannot) was that the nigredo was brought here to bring down the white mind in whatever form of supremacy it is in.
This paper owes much to LeRoi Jones and his classic work The Blues People (1963). In his book, Jones points out that there were two kinds of slaves in America, house slaves and field slaves. The house slaves were considered superior to the field slaves by virtue of their exposure to whites within the house. As a result they were at odds with the field slaves whom they felt to be primitive and uncouth. The house slaves’ primary adaptation was identification with the aggressor. House slaves went on to become the “Black middle class” through their use of craft, trade, and technical skill developed in and around the house. The field slaves, who did only manual agricultural labor, went on to become the “Black underclass.” The masterful splitting of the white mind is evidenced in the persistence of the tension between these two groups in post-slavery times, up to the present.
Jones calls house slaves “white Negroes.” Here is the beginning of the alchemy. The African slave is brought into the house of the white master, sealed in that hermetic vessel, and changed through association with that master into a “white Negro” or, as we say in alchemy, the albedo. The white mind changed the nigredo into albedo through the transformation of the house slave. Now, if the alchemy works both ways as Hillman (1986) claims, we would expect the white master also to be changed into the albedo by the house slave. But this did not happen. In fact, the master found his sense of supremacy reinforced by his ability to transform the nigredo. This reveals the alchemical power of the split, for it is the field slave, not the house slave, who eventually takes the white mind to the albedo by inventing and disseminating the blues. It will take the lowest of the low to bring down the soaring white mind.
Colonial America ended, of course, with the Revolutionary War. The conscious economic reasons for the war are quite apparent, those who lived here did not want to share the wealth of the continent with Europe. But underneath this obvious rationale, alchemy was at work. The war, along with isolationism and the Monroe Doctrine, can be viewed as a sealing of the vessel so that the alchemy of the white mind could begin. The doctrine of liberty, which is part and parcel of the economic fantasy, was important to the alchemy as a symptomatic opening into the denials of the white mind, for eventually the absurdity of speaking of liberty in a nation of legalized slavery would begin to open the door for the release of the nigredo into white society.
The Civil War. By splitting itself between North and South the white mind became stuck in an unsolvable paradox of the supremacy of white. “How can I repress my inferiors and simultaneously display my goodness by helping them to be like me?” The unsolvability of the split assured that the single vision of the white mind would grow ever more fragile, making eventual breakdown into nigredo possible. This fragility created tremendous internal tension as the two halves battled each other to determine which form of supremacy would reign supreme. The tension created the heat that the alchemy required, the culmination of which was the nigredo we call the Civil War.
The excess, the intensity, the hatred, the tenacity, the passion, the insanity of the war suggest, as we all know, that mere economics were not at the bottom of this struggle. At the bottom was the process that had been pushing the white mind’s penchant for oppositionalism to unbelievable extremes during the Piscian aion: the archetypal motif of the hostile brothers. But no longer was the white mind at odds with its anti-Christian Black “brother.” As the Western mind continued its dissociative flight, it got so far out of touch with everyone and everything that it was forced to implode and play out its oppositionalism with the only one left with whom it remained in contact, itself. White cast its own white shadow and projected onto itself: North on South and South on North.
If we employ a metaphor of therapist and patient, the Civil War might be imagined as the critical therapeutic impasse in which the patient, as Southern conservative, is in intense resistance within the transference and is battling the therapist, as Northern liberal, who is attempting “bring up” the repressed complex, or African-American slave. The Emancipation Proclamation releases the shadow, the nigredo, and the patient must admit the defeat of his ego, which has failed to keep the complex subservient. This brings on a depression or blue period. The “enlightened” white mind of the therapist has won over the “repressive” white mind of the patient’s ego. The therapist hopes that the shadow, now free, will be “integrated” by the patient who no longer will have the need to project his unconscious hatred and aggression. The therapist himself, however, wants to remain in his detached place, unchanged and unaffected by that shadow.
North and South were not fundamentally different, they were merely different faces of supreme white. The fact that the symbology of the struggle crystallized around the issue of slavery suggests that African-Americans had moved into the role of nigredo as change agent of the white mind, not the substance to be changed by it. Indeed, the war over slavery did smash to bits the singular vision of the American white mind. But this breakdown alone was not enough to bring about a true transformation of that mind.
The Birth of the Blues. The implosion of the white mind upon itself in the Civil War and the resultant release of African-Americans into the culture at large through emancipation allowed the alchemical transformation of the white mind by the nigredo to move to its next stage: blue consciousness. Immediately after the war and during Reconstruction, African-Americans began creating the fundamental agent of white mind change, the blues.
In “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” (Hillman 1993) says that in the movement toward the albedo a series of other colors can arise:
… notably darker blues, the blues of bruises, sobriety, puritan self-examination; the blues of slow jazz … The blue transit between black and white is like that sadness which emerges from despair as it proceeds towards reflection … [It] can also show as blue movies, blue language … Blue protects white from innocence … The transit from black to white via blue implies blue always brings black with it … It is the element of depression, that raises deep doubts and high principals, wanting to settle things fundamentally and get them right in order to clarify them. (132)
The unio mentalis implies a divine drunkenness … Dionysos … sees with the blue eye and to see him our eye must be colored the same way (141–42).
Now I will take a bold and probably foolish step. I will try to explain why the blues are called the blues. To my knowledge, no one has ever seriously attempted or been successful at such an explanation. The obvious reason for this is that no one before now has explored the blues archetypally. But it is more than that. In the artistic world of the blues an attempt such as this would be condemned as unnecessary, absurd, and even dangerous to the vitality of the music. This step might be akin to an archeologist digging up ancestor graves for “scientific purposes.” Be cause of my long association with the blues I am acutely aware of the arrogance of what I am attempting and I want to acknowledge that aloud out of respect for the blues. But perhaps the real arrogance is how serious 1am about taking the step. Most blues people would laugh to think that a white psychologist was explaining the blues.
The blues are called the “blues” because they satisfy the archetypal requirements and the specific cultural and historical necessities to function as the manifest blue or unio mentalis of the unconscious alchemy of race in America. The blues effects change in African-Americans and European-Americans as they have come to hold the psychology of black and white in a literalized enactment of the alchemical nightmare of the dissociative Western mind in its move toward a union of opposites, or albedo, at the end of our age. That they are called the “blues” confirms my proposal of an unconscious alchemy, for what else could have produced this name but a cultural archetypal process that identified people by color and then cast them together in a "melting pot.”
During Reconstruction, many former house slaves went on to apply their trades in the open labor market, though often with poor success as angry backlash left them chronically unemployed. But former field slaves had it even worse. With little or nothing to offer for employment the government gave them “forty acres and a mule” and instructed them to farm. Psychologically this action is based in the Western fantasy of individuality. In Africa and on the plantation, the life of field slaves had been tribal and communal. The government could have given them large communal plots to farm together but instead they were given single family dwellings and asked to be individuals. It was these people who first created the blues. Says Jones:
African songs dealt, as did the songs of a great many of the pre-literate or classical civilizations, with the exploits of the social unit, usually the tribe … The insistence of the blues verse on the life of the individual and his individual trials and successes on earth is a manifestation of the whole Western concept of man’s life, and it is a development that could only be found in an American Black man’s music. (66)
The original blues was a personal solo music concerning the individual musician who was making it. As such, it was based on the ”I,” self, or ego of the West as it came to be introjected into the rural unskilled African-American. In stealing Africans, Europeans, who were lost in their fantasy of individual conscious-ness, were stealing a communal, tribal, oral tradition. Slaves practiced this tradition when working together in the fields singing work songs. Sitting alone on their forty acres those work songs turned into the blues. For the first time field slaves had the leisure and space necessary to turn their dark despair into blue sadness on their way toward reflection.
As African consciousness passed through the blues and on toward the albedo, its primary change was the development of the Western fantasy of the individual. This individuality had already been introjected into house slaves but they were required to reject communal consciousness in order to receive it. Within the blues musicians that “I” or ego became integrated with the older forms of oral tradition that the field slaves had continued to carry in their collective soul. Here is the beginning of the albedo that is the union of the opposites, “I” and “we.”
The blues of these musicians reflects Hillman’s images of blue as the “unio mentalis” of alchemy, containing Truth, depression, and libido. Says James Cone (99, 102), “Implied in the blues is a stubborn refusal to go beyond the existential problem and substitute otherworldly answers … [T]o understand them it is necessary to view the blues as a state of mind in relation to the Truth of black experience.” And what is that truth? “The blues are an artistic rebellion against the humiliating deadness of western culture.”
The blues transformed European-American consciousness in the same way it transformed African-American consciousness; through an albedo in which western individual consciousness melded with tribal orality. At every turn, the blues smashed down the walls of isolation of the white individual mind. But it also did much more than this. It is most likely that the alchemical transformation of African consciousness was fateful but not necessary, while the transformation of the white mind was fateful and necessary. Contained in the blues is a stubborn refusal to go beyond the truth that the dissociative splitting, isolation, and humiliating deadness of the western mind were reeking havoc on the world. Because of this extreme pathology, transformation of the white mind was not optional. Through the racial alchemy of America the white mind was to be taken to the albedo via blue and in that way disarmed of its supremacist arsenal. The blue that would do it would have to be able to break down the fascism of soulless scientific materialism by doing therapy on its language and consciousness, and by seducing it down from its dissociative heights. The blues was just such a force accomplishing its therapy and seduction with depression, rhythm, intoxication, and libido.
I have built a cultural narrative about the transformation of Western consciousness through African-American music by focusing on color and alchemy. Twelve years ago, in Shadow Dancing in the USA (1985), Michael Ventura arrived at many of the conclusions I have reached here by constructing a historical narrative about jazz and rock ’n’ roll that focused on a return to the body through the loa or spirit possession of the musician and listener/dancer. Both Ventura and Julio Finn (1986) show that bluesmen are the secular carriers of the Hoodoo or Voodoo religion that is a hybrid of traditional West African religions and Christianity. As such, bluesmen and women tend to spirit and psyche in a manner handed down from Africa to Hoodoo; spirit possession. Where the Northern soul, from shaman to Christian priest, operates dissociatively, leaving the body to travel the spirit world, the African priest, the Hoodoo conjurer, and the bluesmen ask the loa to enter bodies and possess them. It is through this possession that the loa is known and expressed. It is said that B. B. King needs two hours to exit the possession trance of his performances. Return to with the body, says the blues. Says Ventura:
The history of America is, as much as anything, the history of the American body as it sought to unite with its spirit, with its consciousness, to heal itself and to stand against the enormous forces that work to destroy a Westerner’s relationship to his, or her, own flesh. This music, largely unaware of itself, carried forward through the momentum of deeply rooted instinct; contradicting itself in many places; perverting its own purposes in many instances; sinking many times under the weight of its own intensity into the nether world of hate and confusion and bad trips; and trivializing its own meanings at many a crucial turn; this music, yet trusted, rushes through every area of this country’s life in aural "great awakening" all its own, to quicken the body and excite the spirit and, quite literally, to awaken the dead. (159)
Blues lyrics have tremendous breadth, within which are two core streams, depression and libido. The depressive quality of the blues is the most recognizable to the majority of people, an example of which is the lament for being “done wrong” by a lover. But the blues is also highly sexual and at times exuberant. There are many “happy” blues about good time fun, including the joys of food and dance. The blues is about the passions of the flesh. Where the pathological Western mind tended to create dirty movies out of this blue, Blacks turned these libidinous hurricanes into the huge body of art called the blues. In the hands of dissociative consciousness blue veers toward pornography; in the hands of rhythmic consciousness toward art.
Depression and passion in the blues finds a strong association with Dionysos’s blueness as “somber madness” and instinctual sexuality. In Stomping the Blues (1976), Albert Murray says that in the “dance hall as temple” the “fundamental function of the blues musician (also known as the jazz musician) … is not only to drive away the blues and hold them at bay at least for the time being, but also to evoke an ambiance of Dionysian revelry in the process” (17). And so, the blues, commonly known as the “Devils music” in all of its myriad forms (jazz, rock ’n’ roll, rap, etc.) is most at home in our modern temples to Dionysos: juke joints, night clubs, bars, whorehouses, and “blue light” districts.
It is fascinating to note that in addition to the lyric content of the blues, its music and performance practices also worked to transform the dissociative consciousness. Harmonically, the blues is based on the tritone interval (e.g., F/B) which is considered the most dissonant of all intervals and thus full of tension. In Renaissance times this interval was known as the “Diabolus en musica” (Lee, 17) and for a time its use in performance was actually illegal. It was eventually returned to Western harmony but only in the tension of the dominant chord as it resolved into the purity, consonance and “salvation” of the tonic chord. In the blues, almost every chord contains the tritone, even the tonic.
The problem of union of the opposites is managed in the blues by permeating the music with the tension of the tritone. The Christian Devil is everywhere, the dream of salvation nowhere.
The musical feature most idiosyncratic to the blues is the flattening of certain notes. It is this that gives the blues its moanful expression. The performer either starts on the note and falls off the pitch or starts below it and with a pregnant weariness fails to reach the pitch. In a most elegant synchronicity the scale numbers that are pulled down happen to be those great Christian numbers, three and seven. These scaled pitches, three (E in C major) and seven (B in C major), are known as leading tones and are the fundamentals of Western music’s greatest accomplishment, vertical harmony. As leading tones, their movement is upward, leaving the earth, on towards transcendence. Their stylistic dominance began, not surprisingly, in the Baroque period when the dissociative process of the white mind was escalating during the Age of Exploration. The blues pulls on that upwardness, as if to say, come back to earth.
By now I hope you have become quite annoyed with the inconsistent conjugation of the verbs following the word blues in this paper. Like the practice in blues-based cultures, I decide whether to make the verb plural or singular intuitively, in the moment of writing. Sometimes the blues is and sometimes the blues are. From its inception the blues managed with ease the problem of the one and the many, the “I” and the “we.” Rather than confront this potential oppositionalism, either singular or plural, the blues simply made itself both singular and plural. This is not the only way everyday speech is expressively altered by the blues.
In performance, but also in the daily language of blues-based cultures, the distinctions between utterances, rhythm, and meaning are often blurred and the ambiguities between them accentuated. Words may be slurred so that meaning can only be accessed through a reading of emotional and rhythmic context. Or a word may be stated clearly but the meaning known only through the quality of expression. For example, the word "bad" covers a huge area of meaning from bad to good to virile to decrepit to many a subtle mixture of several valances. Discerning the meaning of bad on the printed page is very difficult because the significance of this word in blues culture is to be found in the moment from within oral consciousness. This linguistic style reflects the fundamental way in which African speech and music are different from European languages and music in modernity. Says Ernest Borneman:
While the whole European tradition strives for regularity—of pitch, of time and vibrato—the African tradition strives precisely for the negation of these elements. In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality. In music, the same tendency toward obliquity and ellipsis is noticeable: no note is attacked straight; the voice or instrument always approaches it from above or below, plays around the implied pitch without ever remaining any length of time, and departs from it without ever having committed itself to a single meaning … The timing and accentuation, finally, are not stated, but implied or suggested. The denying or withholding of all signposts. (cited in Jones, 31)
In the simpler words of the blues tradition, “It ain’t what you say, it’s how you say it.” Long before postmodernism, the blues loved to deny the referent. While both are able and willing to unhinge the scientific materialist fantasy of objectivity through that denial, the ultimate effect from within African-American consciousness is much different than the effect of postmodern denial. That words refer only to themselves is a problem only when they are locked up by themselves behind the walls of white oppositional consciousness. If the subject is words and the subject is opposed to the object, then words are opposed to objects. Postmodernism is denial of the referent from within oppositional consciousness, the result of which is Hamilton’s paradox of subjectivism.
African linguistic/musical consciousness, and thus the blues, does not ask words to refer but neither does it isolate them as opposed to the referent. As Duke Ellington said, “You have to find a way to say it without really saying it.” African consciousness asks words to live among things and ideas not to know them but rather to serve as the substance for a process that creates relationships between them so that in those relationships knowing may occur. By allowing a person to live in relationship with things rather than in opposition to them the body is affirmed, rather than lost, as in postmodernism. The body is allowed to be a thing among things. This is language as communal consciousness, not oppositional consciousness. Stunningly, blues consciousness as albedo extends psyche even further than African consciousness alone. In the blues, the union of communal and individual consciousness allows the individual to be affirmed without the oppositionalism of subject and object. The individual speaks of himself, but with a language that services a commune of things and ideas of which he is one.
Unio mentalis consciousness also allows the blues to do something different with the denial of the referent as it relates to the truth. Where the postmodern mind has created an oppositionalism between the semiotic process of signification and the archetype of the truth, the blues, in its functional role as the unio mentalis, is able to unite them. In the blues, the veiling and denial are not at odds with the truth, they are ways to reveal it. The blues is able to break down the tyranny of scientific objectivism without disavowing what is essential.
The blues that developed in post-Reconstruction America was a collective psychology that expressed the union of Western individual literate consciousness with African tribal orality. As such it was poised to change the American descendants of Africa and Europe in somewhat equal measure. To the Africans it would bring the psychology of individuality. To the Europeans it would bring depression and passions of the flesh as a way to return to materiality and a sense of communality. It would do so by manifesting itself as a language capable of breaking down the scientific literary consciousness that was holding the West captive. This in turn would create a space for a new white and a new black to appear; the albedo.
Nineteenth-Century Vienna. In Vienna they like to sit and listen. Vienna is the site where Beethoven, completing the task begun by Classicists, made non-participatory music the undisputed dictator of Western music. In Renaissance times, dance and music were inseparable and religious music was always part of a participatory Mass. But dance and religion as a focus for composition began to fade with the Baroque and were fully subservient as the Classical period came to an end. In the Romantic period music was all but synonymous with sitting and listening. Beethoven’s Third Symphony is considered a pivotal piece in this transition because sitting and listening to music was based on the "extra-musical thought" that it should be an individualistic personal confession (Jacobson, 10) and the Third Symphony was one of the first to embody this quality. As a music instructor once told me, Mozart is the last composer you can listen to without hearing an ego trip. With Mozart it was the voice of the community, with Beethoven the voice of the individual. Should we be surprised the Third Symphony is called the “Eroica”?
Three blocks away from the site where Beethoven wrote the Third Symphony in Vienna, Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, inspiration for the work coming from sitting and listening to the Personal confessions of his Viennese patients. The consciousness that made the music is somehow connected to the consciousness that invented psychoanalysis.
The body, the feminine, darkness, depression, and the passions of the flesh were all given great prominence by early depth psychologists, but because these men and women were locked into the mindset of their cultural and historical moment, they were unable to affirm on its own terms the unconscious they found so fascinating. Instead, they determined, perhaps unavoidably, that the great underbelly of the white mind needed a remedy and that remedy should be more white mind. Where the id was, the ego shall be. Because it was grounded in the dissociative symptomatic consciousness of the white mind, their method was doomed to perpetuate the very fault it would resolve. Sitting and listening to the individual was the problem; it could not also be the answer. These darker elements of body and psyche wanted to be promoted by their own Dionysian language, not rehabilitated by the rational language of the white mind. They wanted to be embodied, not replaced.
If depth psychology failed to transform the white mind because it was that white mind, the blues succeeded greatly in changing the white mind precisely because it was something else.
The Blues Revolution. The blues revolution is a psycho-cultural process in which the blues unites with an African-American dance-rhythm music and a particular style of European-American music to create a new form of music. At first, only African-Americans participate in the new form but soon European-Americans are attracted to the way in which the depression, sensuality, ambiguity, and dance-rhythm provided by the African elements have breathed a new life into the European musical form. As Europeans begin to participate in the music, it enters into the mainstream culture and transforms the white mind by bringing it back down to earth through the change of consciousness brought about by the music and the new communal Dionysian culture that has organized around it. The new music absorbs and becomes central to the cutting-edge technology of its time that adds to its potency and provides resilience to the powerful resistances of the dominant white culture. Though they are powerful, these resistances prove to be futile since this return, this alchemy, is the symptomatic creation of the white mind culture itself.
The blues revolution is Dionysos inciting the instinctual maenads to pull Pentheus from the treetop back down to earth and then tear his detached vision to bits in a dreadful nigredo. It is Huck and Jim traveling down the Mississippi together to escape the abuses of the white patriarchy and find some sense of truth. These images are congruent with the strong association between Blacks, women, and youth within the revolution. In the Western imagination, both women and Blacks are assigned the qualities of instinct, body, and primitiveness and both carry the repressed and projected qualities of that imagination in modernity. In the revolution, the liberation from this white repression is brought about by a soulful conspiracy between Blacks, women, and youth whose central battles and political gains run parallel to each other.
The blues revolution manifests itself in a series of cycles, roughly forty years in length. As twentieth-century American mythology is organized around decades, I will describe these cycles in terms of four distinctly identifiable and repeating decades. In the first decade (1900, 1940, 1980), white conservatism rises and produces a backlash against gains by Blacks. Ghettoed again, Blacks create a new form of dance-oriented blues. In the second decade 1910, 1950, 1990) Blacks respond politically by creating and beginning to exercise new agendas to meet the backlash. Some whites take interest in the new music and begin to play it. In the third decade (1920, 1960) a bacchanalia occurs. The new dance music triggers a blues-based return to the passions of the flesh. Intoxication and fornication surge as youth and women join Blacks in a rejection of white patriarchal values. The fourth decade (1930, 1970) is one of collapse following the bacchanalia. Absorbing the change it went through, the white mind recovers from depression, addiction, and the assorted pains incurred during its violent return to materiality.
Cycle One: The Jazz Revolution. The first wave of the blues revolution began with the creation of jazz around the turn of the century (Jones 1963; Foster 1953; Ogren 1989). White backlash against the gains of Blacks during Reconstruction resulted in Jim Crow laws and a renewed imposition of segregation that drove Creoles, who had formerly enjoyed much freedom in French dominated Louisiana, back into ghettos. Many of the Creoles were skilled with European instruments used in town bands at the time. They joined these instruments with the drumming popular on Congo Square in New Orleans and the Delta blues of the field slaves with whom they now shared the ghetto, and jazz was born. In the first decade of the revolution, 1900, the great sounds of Buddy Bolden and King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton were shocking and seductive to the Victorian, white mind.
In her book The Jazz Revolution, Kathy Ogren (1989) tracks the intense controversy over jazz at the turn of the century. She says that Americans shared a common perception that “jazz had transforming qualities that could last beyond the time of the song and the space of the cabaret act. For many Americans, to argue about jazz was to argue about the nature of change itself.” Those fearful of it said it was primal, uncivilized, and demolished moral constraint, while “jazz lovers hailed [it] as an antidote for repressive industrial society” (7). The qualities of jazz that made it so controversial were those fundamental to oral consciousness: it is felt bodily and it is participatory. Over and over this music is defined by people of this time as a “language” that requires participation and moves the body. These features are present throughout the music but exemplified by the “call and response” fundamental to African music and the inseparability of dance and song. In the second decade Blacks began political organization with the creation of the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League. The field slave/house slave tension was felt in attitudes toward assimilation epitomized by the differing positions of W. E. B. Du Bois, who pushed for assimilation, and Booker T. Washington, who favored building African-American power from within their own community (Du Bois 1994; George 1988). Women likewise were involved in strong political assertion with the suffrage movement. Whites began to be drawn to jazz. The sweet and syrupy sounds of the “King of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman (what a lovely synchronicity that name is!), represented the banal co-opting of the music, while Bix Beiderbecke created some of the first soulful white jazz.
In 1920, the “Jazz Age” bacchanalia exploded. A “lost generation” of youth flew with great abandon into the passions of the flesh, riding upon the sounds of jazz which dominated the new technology of phonography. The chastity and sobriety of women was compromised everywhere as their bodies awakened under the tutorial of the Charleston—which Jones identifies as an Ashanti ancestor dance (1963, 17). Church and civic leaders were aghast. Fueled by tobacco and alcohol, protected by the new technology of contraception, and led by the never-before-heard sounds of Louis Armstrong, these maenadic flappers went into head-on battle with Pentheus and his obsession with control.
“Inspired by Sigmund Freud [and those who tracked the repression presumed to be endemic to Western civilization], twenties artists and intellectuals invested primitive culture with ‘uncivilizing’ virtues … Experiencing jazz could release and rejuvenate buried emotions or instincts” (Ogren, 146). Freud wanted the ego to replace the id; jazz wanted the id set free. And so it was in the first bacchanalia.
The fourth decade, 1930, contained the tragedy that always follows a bacchanalia. The nature of that tragedy supports my supposition of two American histories. The smashing to bits of the singular vision of the white mind in the nigredo of the twenties resulted in the delivery of the blues to the conscious economic fantasy which the nation experienced as the “Great Depression.” Yes, the story of the Depression can be told in economic language, but it can also be told as a color narrative. In the latter telling, the unconscious alchemy of the blues pulled the body of the white economic fantasy, the corporation, to its knees.
Cycle Two: The Rock ’n’ Roll Revolution. In the 1940s, Blacks made many social and economic gains due to World War II. These came both from within the military and through industries supporting the military. This resulted in a backlash by white conservatives followed by a bitterness among Blacks who saw their gains attacked. In this decade a new music was born. Called “rhythm ’n’ blues,” it combined the twenties classic blues style of Bessie Smith with the rhythmic impulses of boogie-woogie and “shouts” of the Kansas City jazz style (George 1988). It also embraced the European guitar by incorporating elements from the guitar-dominated country blues style of bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy, In this way American country music, like the brass and reed band music of the jazz cycle, was combined with African elements and given new life. Louis Jordan led the way in R’n’B, which relied heavily on the new technology of radio for dissemination.
In the second decade, the 1950s, Blacks began a new phase of political assertion with the Montgomery bus boycott and Brown v. The Board of Education. The struggle over the question of assimilation was epitomized by the tension between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The civil rights movement began a huge sweeping effort that would carry into the next decade. The seeds of the women’s liberation movement were sown and, like civil rights, would explode in the sixties. Whites began to participate in the new music (Miller 1980).
Many guitar playing country musicians of the time enjoyed R’n’B and were aware that the youth of the time were enamored by it. Numerous attempts were made to capture and exploit the “Negro sound” of Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and others by combining it with country music. When Elvis finally succeeded, the rock ’n’ roll revolution began. As in the jazz cycle, the church, parents, politicians, and all those with an investment in salvation and stability saw Elvis and his new music as vulgar, obscene, and dangerous. After all, “rock ’n’ roll” was a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Of course Elvis pelvic thrusts were really nothing new but only simple emulations of R’n’B moves that Blacks had been performing for years. It was not the motions themselves that were the problem. What terrified white America was the infiltration of that libido into the mainstream culture on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
In 1957, one year after Elvis hit, Norman Mailer wrote an essay called “The White Negro” to describe whites “whose primary inspiration was the sexuality and music of Afro-Americans" (George 1988, 61). This counterpart to the “white Negro” house slave was an albedo form of the white mind transformed by association with the blues. The black “white Negro” was changed by living in the house with the master; the white “white Negro” was changed by rhythm and blues. The intense passion for R’n’B felt by the white Negroes was the culmination of the blues seduction of the white mind. This passion was the collective psychological force that would break to bits the final remnants of the dying cultural consciousness of the West and establish the albedo in its place.
The second bacchanalia erupted in the 1960s. Those long-haired Dionysians, the Beatles, arrived from the East with their white minds transformed by the blues and sent massive throngs of pubescent maenads into frenzied hysteria. While it may seem odd that English rock’n’roll figured so heavily in this cycle, consider that the alchemy originally was set up in colonial America by the English. It was probably inevitable that this music would return to England, and eventually all of Europe, to transform its progenitors.
Exploiting the new technology of television, rock bands ignited a blast of hair, hippies, journeys back to the land, and “drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll.” This time, the participatory, bodily-felt oral consciousness that had been awakened in the jazz bacchanalia carried the problem of soul disenfranchisement to the point of overt cultural revolution. These young people had the “Truth” and that truth said "no" to the humiliating deadness of the materialistic establishment of their parents. Hugely inflated in the midst of their Dionysia, they advocated peace, love, and the virtuousness of open sexuality. Blacks, women, and youth fought together on the streets, not so much for overt political change but for a fundamental change in consciousness. “It has been said that the Beatles and Bob Dylan changed the musical and cultural consciousness of a whole generation. In this context it is important to realize that this great change of consciousness is based on the blues and would have been impossible without it” (Berendt, 137).
This bacchanalia saw the return of Dionysian religious experience which was foundational to the albedo. The widespread use of LSD during the sixties reflected a desire for ecstasy not salvation. These were “psychedelic” times that even manifest a musical form called “soul.” Rather than fly upward toward spirit these revolutionaries wanted to go deeper into the soul-body intersection in a way imagined by all traditional blues players.
The 1970s were the tragic decade of the rock ’n’ roll cycle. The peaceful Dionysia ended in death, addiction, and cynicism. Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison enacted the role of the young dying god. Woodstock led to Altamont. The Vietnam War ended and as Theseus was returning home, Dionysos had his bride, and his father, Richard Nixon, took his own political life. However unexpected and bitter this tragic ending was for the youth, their revolution accomplished something gigantic—never again would the American Dream shine brightly enough to be believed.
Cycle Three: The Rap Revolution. In the 1980s yet another white backlash emerged in response to the gains made during the civil rights movement. The Reagan-Bush presidency was an attempt to assert once more the white supremacy of the economic fantasy. Affirmative action was attacked and the idea of "reverse discrimination" invented. Some Blacks, mostly athletes and performers, had become very wealthy, which was both hated by supremacists but also used as a rationale by them to stop civil rights activities.
Rap, a new music, was born (George 1992; Ice T. 1994). Rap was invented in the 1940s by radio announcers on R’n’B shows. They would speak rhythmically and in rhyme about themselves, their show, and the artists and music on the show. In the 1980s, this talk was retrieved and combined with urban street rhythms and electric drum machines to create the dance music that is rap. As a narrative, the European form of rap appears to be joining and transforming its poetic drama. Indeed, the mythopoetic men’s movement with its drumming, poetry, and story telling owes much to rap and may be the concrete Western form that joins with it to create the new form of music. For in rap we hear what is perhaps the purest form of oral consciousness spoken in the West since Homeric Greece as well as the most fundamental representation of the unified orality that combines individual and communal consciousness. Of course, church and civic leaders hate rap, and parents are terrified of it.
As for its part in the return to materiality, rap has taken on what is probably the last great denial of the detached white mind in modernity. If jazz in the twenties brought back the body, and rock ’n’ roll in the sixties brought back the soul, then rap today has brought back death. The youth gangs use this music of near pure rhythm to weave stories that accompany them on journeys of initiation, violence, and killing. We cannot deny death when young men and women die daily on our streets. Science turned the body into a dead corpse, not to honor Thanatos but to defeat him, or worse still, to tame him. But science has failed because Thanatos will not be tamed; he insists he will be honored and in our world the language that honors him is “gangsta” rap. However difficult it is for us to accept this music and the violent activity attached to it, it is clearly an extension of the return to materiality that started at the turn of the century with jazz. As we have come to recognize the gifts impacted in the tragedies of previous bacchanalias, the gifts of the return of body and soul, I believe we will come to recognize eventually a gift in rap in the return of death to our imaginations.
The 1990s is a decade in which Blacks are again moving politically. The “Million Man March” of 1995 is a sign of this move. The issue of assimilation continues to be played out epitomized by the tension between Colin Powell and Louis Farakan. Whites are becoming involved in the rap of Snoop Doggy Dog, Dr. Dre, Ice T. and Arrested Development. It is very difficult to predict how this cycle will play itself out but it is certainly possible that rap will lead to yet another bacchanalia. If so, this bacchanalia will likely enact the death of Pentheus as gangs in the wilderness of our inner cities spill out into upscale neighborhoods and display the viciousness of a Dionysian episode in its final phase. Perhaps the alchemy will be completed in this cycle and with the albedo in place a polychromatic cultural soul will emerge.
Conclusion
In the end I find myself returning with near boundless awe the music itself. If my tale holds water then this soulful revolution, this massive cultural transformation, rests on the shoulders of twelve bars, three cords, and two lines of primitive verse originally sung in a most humble way by people on the bottom-most rung of our social ladder. What powerful shoulders they must be!
I am also in awe of the musicians. These African-Americans lived in conditions so horrid they were utterly destructive both physically and psychologically if experienced only literally. Yet these musicians were able to take a metaphoric and artistic stance toward their lives and in so doing answer our unconscious collective need by creating a language, a music that is capable of transforming the very white supremacist consciousness that spawned the horrid conditions in the first place. Civil rights and politics are good and necessary, but they seek change only on the level of the collective ego. It is the blues that does therapy on the soul of Western consciousness.
The white mind hunger for depression and the passions of the flesh, for embodied participation, could not be satisfied in a dissociative state. Likewise, mere acting out of depression and libido could not be enough. A psychologizing of the hunger was necessary if consciousness was to be changed and it is this imagining that such unassuming music was able to accomplish.
In the alchemy of race in America, the unio mentalis is a Black man sitting on the porch playing a guitar and singing,
Woke up this mo’nin’, blues walkin; like a man.
Woke up this mo’nin’, blues walkin’ like a man.
Well de blues give me yo’ right hand. (Johnson 1990)
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The author wishes to thank Robert Romanyshyn for his concept of post-literate oral consciousness which was central to the shaping of this work.
Spring: An Annual of Archetype and Culture 61 (1997): 16–50
© Copyright 2026 Spring Publications, Inc. and the author