So, the question of evil, like the question of ugliness,

 

refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness.  The desert of modernity.

 

 

   

 

 

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Surprisingly, this desert is not heartless, because the desert is where the lion lives.  There is a long-standing association of desert and lion in the same image, so that if we wish to find the responsive heart again we must go where it seems to be least present.

 

 

 

 

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According to Physiologus (the traditional lore of animal psychology), the lion’s cubs are still-born.  They must be awakened into life by a roar.  That is why the lion has such a roar: to awaken the young lions asleep, as they sleep in our hearts.  Evidently, the thought of the heart is not simply given, a native spontaneous reaction, always ready and always there.  Rather, the heart must be provoked, called forth … Beauty must be raged, or outraged into life, for the lion’s cubs are still-born, like our lazy political compliance, our meat-eating stupor before the TV set, the paralysis for which the lion’s own metal, gold, was the paracelsian pharmakon.  What is passive, immobile, asleep in the heart creates a desert which can only be cured by its own parenting principle that shows its awakening care by roaring.  “The lion rages at the enraging desert,” wrote Wallace Stevens.  “Heart, instinct, principle,” again Pascal.

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… The passions of the soul make the desert habitable.  One inhabits not a cave of rock, but the heart within the lion.  The desert is not in Egypt; it is anywhere once we desert the heart … Our way through the desert of life or any moment in life is the awakening to it as a desert, the awakening of the beast, that vigil of desire, its greedy paw, hot and sleepless as the sun, fulminating as sulphur, setting the soul on fire.  Like cures like:  the desert beast is our guardian in the desert of modern bureaucracy, ugly urbanism, academic trivialities, profession official soulnessness, the desert of our ignoble condition.

 

 

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The heart of Harvey, already dead, “fitness” replacing vitality, creates the desolation it jogs through, mufflers over the ears, blinded in the sweat of extending its life-expectancy, zombies creating the desert by running and running with nowhere to go. … Work it out alone, or secular sharing in group confession.  Subjectivisms without rage.

 

 

 

We fear that rage.  We dare not roar. 

With Auschwitz behind us and the bomb over the horizon, we let the little lions sleep in from of the television, the heart, stuffed full of its own coagulated sulphur, now become a beast in a lair readying its attack, the infarct.

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Psychologically, we subdue our rage with negative euphemistic concepts:  aggression, hostility, power-complex, terrorism, ambition, the problem of violence.  Psychology analyzes the lion.  Perhaps Konrad Lorenz is wrong, and the counselors wrong too, who see to find a way beyond aggression.  It is ‘aggression’, or is it the lion roaring at the enraging desert?  Has psychology not missed the native sulphur, neglected Mars who rides a lion, Mars, beloved of Aphrodite demanding right.  Splendor Solis.  Sol invictus: Mithra of the heart. 

 

 

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The heart as lion is truly king of beasts, a bestial King, and our inner beauty, our dignity, nobility, proportion, or portion of lordliness, comes as lore of character has always assumed from the animal of the heart.

<o:p>James  Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, Eranos Lectures, 1981</o:p>

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<o:p>Willie "The Lion" Smith</o:p>

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