Super Hero vs. Villain
Jedi vs. Sith
Black vs White
Women vs Men
Old vs Young
Poor vs Rich
Gay vs Straight
Introverted vs Extroverted
Cops vs Robbers
Nature vs Nurture
Offense vs Defense
Someone is within, making someone without. Someone is projecting, someone is receiving that projection. This list is endless. What came first, the chicken or the egg in this binary soap opera that’s been playing out since the start of time? Insert the game changers that add to the complexity. Bisexual, biracial, middle class, middle aged, intersex, midfielders, queer, gender non-conforming. The mixture, the in between. Now the binary has a 3rd; there is, was and will always be a 3rd. Nothing is new under the sun.
The couple is never in solitude, the number 2 functions as an illusion. As Jill Scott so infamously bellowed in 2007 while staring into my eyes on a melodramatically gray evening in Manchester England….. 1 is the magic number. The tension between meaning and meaninglessness fuels what I’d like to call “the binary wars”.
I loved re-reading this book. It’s brutal, grim, exciting and different from the academic literary pieces that I tend to lean towards. This intrepid, resourceful, determined man essentially spent a lifetime subjugating women after witnessing his mother reject a “decent” man, for someone who then subjugated her. I wish it were more complex than that, and I'm open to other interpretations. What an epic tragedy, an old school love story. Seriously, the underlying theme to this piece is expressive of the depths and lengths that a hurt child will go to undermine the dreams of their parent, who has quashed their soul. RAGE. Chronic, enduring, self righteous, boiling, gut wrenching RAGE. So how would a clinician work with an Iceberg Slim in their chair? What intervention is going to help map something anew? What modality would be best suited? Is anyone writing about the Iceberg Slim’s outside of the reference point that I stated above?
Before I get to a point of ranting I’ll stop here.
