Black Gold

The oil spill is the cruelest of ironies: a man-made natural disaster that is the result of our efforts to master nature.  For all of its gushing physical reality, it is even more psychically real.  The oil spill follows the first rule of psychic life, the return of the repressed.  The repressed content, what is unacceptable to modern humanity, is our helplessness in the face of nature.  Our conscious emphasis on the domination of nature is, of course, an enterprise fueled by oil.  So it comes as no surprise that the repressed content, human fragility, would gush out of the very place we go in order to master the natural world.

When a tsunami kills 100,000 we mourn our dead and move on with the project of subjugating the mass killer, perhaps even with renewed vigor and purpose.  But when the very weapon used to wage war on nature backfires in our face, the psychic fallout is devastating.  Because the oil spill doesn't just symbolize our fragile mortality with the image of slowly bleeding out from a wound that can't be staunched.  And it isn't even the fact that this wound was self-inflicted.  It's that this wound was self-inflicted by the very process intended to cure the disease. The oil spill is that quintessential late modern tragic figure, the kid who got autism from his vaccines.

By way of oil we thought we could divorce ourselves from nature.  But oil is a strict Catholic and doesn't believe in divorce.  The oil spill reminds us that we are bound to nature until death do us part.  And nature will tell us when we can part, thank you very much.  If BP doesn't stop outsourcing its efforts to Wile E. Coyote and Acme, that parting of ways might happen sooner rather than later.  When plans A,B,C,D,E and F don't work what can we expect out of Plan G?  I say it's time to bring in the psychics.