There is a profound violence in Yosemite valley, seen in the movement of rock as it rises explosively in sharp spires. This can be felt; one looks upon the rock and feels a hurt, and an awe.
Which does in fact take a kind of perception. What once was viewed statically as a rock of a certain shape emerges as a process not entirely separate from oneself.
The modern human condition can be construed as violence, or at least violent expansion. I'm thinking here of a restaurant and lounge we visited in Tahoe, which rested at the top of a mountain peak, removed from all subsistence save a tram connected by steel cables. An impossible formation save for an explosive exertion of petroleum energy. A spider found its nest in a corner of a hand rail out on the building's deck. How could it have gotten there save for hitching a ride on someone or something on the way up? Of course this is mere conjecture, but moving on.
One suspects that the medieval cathedral - built in part to inspire awe - may share an affinity for these forces of violence and turbulence. These structures were certainly expressing something important in the collective unconscious, or in a collective moment of feeling.
There was a profound violence existing in the European colonial powers, which existed prior to contact with foreign cultures, as there is no other way to account for the savagery with which they treated the foreign cultures they came upon.
Many racist, xenophobic, and homophobic individuals have been found to have particularly bad cases of paranoia, at least in older psychoanalytic studies I've seen. Not sure what the science has found today, and calling these things sciences comes with all sorts of qualifications of their own.
Whatever the case, projecting the shadow comes to mind. One speaks to xenophobes and one gets the sense that one is speaking to profoundly insecure and fearful individuals, in constant search of the monster within the shadow, of something to attack externally, which has its root in themselves. Many of them have been dominated by their society, and likely members of their own family, and then that domination must be passed on.
The police, and the Hillary Clintons of the world see "super-predators" in black youth, and the Neocons and Bushites see the great satan in Russia and the Middle East, without the awareness - or not - that the super-predators and great satans they see are within them, seeking expression in the external world, in the other.
The "white" power formation is perpetually dominating itself, and then finding the need to export that domination to the other, so as to maintain that power without having to begin feeding on itself.
And how is one to relate to such things today? Nietzsche had a love for lonely mountains and catastrophic force, violence. That was then. Today it is something to be mourned, regretted, repudiated. I still have a love for explosive mountains and rock, or soaring and crashing waves, because those things are a part of me, but I know that the tenderness should be reserved for the still and the calm, at least ideally.
Nevertheless, there is confidence through passion, or exertion and movement in a direction, hopefully towards peace. One must exert against what is exerting.
