Heavens and Alchemy (fiction)

It was Love at first light, the interconnection of subatomics leaping across the solar winds and the vast gulfs between star systems, our photons rejoicing in that immediate recognition. It was always this way, since the People first flew the Cradle of Worlds into these wider Heavens, replacing the primitive Einsteinian relativities with bonds that knew no bounds or bodies in too small space-time. Strife was vanquished with the false god Physics, and Love reigned supreme.

Or it had, while the People sailed out on Love’s fast fields, connecting the Cosmos as She saw fit. And wherever they alit, greeting the beings they found there as they would greet themselves: in joyous recognition. For they too were One and All, as we, my Beloved, should have been One and All, when the waves we reflected first lit each other’s senses. We sailed across the ecliptic and the trajectory of meteor showers, in search of that Dark Flow, the path that still leads to other Verses, which each god-to-be must traverse in our youth, in order to shower all the Verses with Love’s light, or so our stories go. We were still mortals then, little sparks, foolish as we raced across the terminator, your wings shimmering in Orion’s rays, each of us trying to sail ahead, to stay abreast the revolving darkness, but knowing that no matter how far apart we spanned the aether, our subtle bodies would always be in communication.

Oh Heavens and alchemy, I would have caught the stars for you that rained like angels on our orbits, I would have voiced whole new worlds, with their strange uncertain histories, I would say yes, as you reached the Event Horizon first, and leapt into the dark heart of the Cosmos, all giddy and aglow. As the People have done since we left that cradle Gaia, our split across the interstellar divide should have set a new Verse spinning, should have began the Creation anew. And yet, as I traversed, only moments after your wings brushed the Eternal, I felt you slip away. I know not where or to what Verse you fell, for as I alit in this one I felt all the celestial orbits tremble, and the suns race away as if they were afraid. For the connection to your presence, my Beloved, was nowhere to be found. No, not any beings here to recognize as ourselves in the joyous bonds of Love, no, not any One and All, only myself, particled in the scattering dark. And the stars fly apart, faster and faster than you could have imagined, than any of the stories say. Perhaps Love has been vanquished too in this here-now, for without your connection there is no force powerful enough to hold the worlds together, nothing to reflect and no light left to leap between us.

Yet perhaps this too is story, our secret untold chapter, that in each new Verse, Love must begin anew, alone, in search of its Beloved. That somewhere in these vasts and gulfs you still await, or not yet popped back into existence, specks of stardust accumulating in the warps, gathering into stars and planets that some day may birth beings to reflect Love’s light. And so I must wait, and search, and connect the One and All in the rays beyond space-time, until space and time are born anew, and so are you, and Strife is vanquished, and we fly the worlds and finally meet, in joyous recognition, beyond the edges of everything we are yet to imagine.

Wild Things

Taking a break from such heavy cosmological topics as the Universe ending in heat death sooner than anticipated and a new translation of the Bible that shows God did not create heaven and earth but merely separate what was already there, Sophie and I went out last night to check out the opening night of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Despite reviews claiming the movie is too depressing or frightening we both found it highly charming, particularly the stellar acting of child-star Max Records, the intricate costumes from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and upbeat soundtrack from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Karen O [Found link, for preview purposes only, buy here]. It was interesting to note that the audience was primarily comprised of young adults, who probably were raised on Sendak's masterpiece and are perhaps the intended target demographic of Dave Egger's script (the whole movie really capturing the indie spirit of the times).


[Potential Spoilers Below]

The thing that really stuck out for me though was what this movie says about the human imagination. Despite our cultural love of monsters and fantasy, the imagination here is presented in its rawest or most primal. Shaggy monsters dance and tear up the woods and throw clods of dirt at each other. Everyone howls and growls. Certainly the monsters possess some amount of adult-like self-reflection (enough to come off as rather depressed), but no more than Max himself. In fact, one could take a psychological perspective that the monsters and their land are all projections of Max's own fears and desires, for friendship, against alienation and being young and misunderstood if not ignored.

But what is interesting was the choice of not stating whether the events of Max's journey really took place or not. The final return scene has no dialogue, so we aren't asked to chose with Max over what really happened, even if with all the day to night transitions he must have been gone for several weeks. This draws on elements of the Fantastic in art, that supernatural events are left ambiguous as to their reality. This is a necessary move because the audience, instead of being asked to decide what is real here, can instead suspend their disbelief and let the monsters be real. They are reflections of ourselves. Of course, this in turn adds more weight to what both Sophie and I decided was one of the pivotal scenes of the movie, when the monster Carrol rips the bird monster's arm off, and the camera focuses on a stream of sand spilling out. Up till this point, Max has taken the monsters as real, but they are shown to be not real, and he starts feeling the need of returning home to his flesh and blood family.

What this says for me is that despite how primal and raw we sometimes need to express our imaginations as children, this rawness sometimes tears holes in the stories we make up and tell ourselves, and shows us what is more importantly real in our lives. For another example, in a school scene at the beginning of the movie, Max is told that one day the sun is going to die, which when he tells the monsters makes them even more depressed and desperate (to tie this in with the links at the beginning of this entry). I think we are encouraged to equate those kinds of predictions of science with the imagination as well, as something that must ultimately give way to the reality of the present and the more immediate significance of our families and loves.

The Future of Sex

from H+ magazine [via disinformation]:

“It is important to remember that sexual intercouse is a highly ancient, simplistic-at-its-core activity that we may choose to discard at some point in the future…”

In “Sex and the Singularity,” futurist magazine H+ asks radical techs (including Ray Kurzweil) to describe futuristic “sex after the Singularity.” They envision “more complex activities that generate even more pleasure and connection between people,” and suggest “The primary purpose of the Singularity will be seen, after the fact, to be Awesome Sex.

“There will be exponentially more sex, with exponentially more interfaces, and with exponentially more measures of pleasure.” With “millions of super computer-generated sex fantasies,” one technologist concludes “I love the future. Bring it on.”

“Whether we choose to call it ’sex’ will be entirely arbitrary, but it may bear little resemblance to the sex of today…”

Literacy Narrative

For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what's called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as "content producer/consumer" (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:


Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.

When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6^th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.

Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.

I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.

An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.

In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.

As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7^th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.

Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.

Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.

Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.

Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.

Interim Novae

Yes I still exist, but have been too focused most of this summer so far working on my novel to post much here, though I still have been paying attention to all sorts of interesting news items that would make for great science flash fictions, some of which can be found in the massive dump of links below:

Culture:
*As a male with a unique name, I find it fascinating that the more uncommon or feminine a boy's first name is, the greater the likelihood that he will end up in prison.
*An interesting article from Adbusters about realizing that mystery is still an integral part of human existence, despite 21st century rational empiricism.
*In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, the original landing tapes have finally been found.
*While Americans have been torn up about the death of Michael Jackson, Japan may decide to abolish money.

Religion:
*Ireland has just passed a blasphemy law, which besides seeming several centuries out of date has pissed off all the atheists who don't believe in blasphemy anyway.
*Meahwhile, The Pope's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate calls for a new global economic system based off of love.
*A Saudi genie is being sued for harassment after it stole one family's mobile phones (perhaps jealous of the telecommunications genie?).
*An interesting chart detailing the views of the dominant religions on sex.

Literature:
*In London, this coming weekend is World Literature Weekend.
*Ernest Hemingway may have actually been a failed KGB spy.
*From an article on porn and literature a list of 18 challenges in contemorary literature.
*An interesting look at Lithuanian Book Smugglers, like the outlaws in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
*How does language shape or thinking?
*William Gibson on how culture shapes our language.
*The importance of the ineffable in literature, as opposed to the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge that has become the highest credential for contemporary male writers (though I don't see why mystery and fact have to be opposed...)
*And speaking of enormous novels of that type, I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for Infinite Summer, which is really a long winded, uneventful yet gripping read. More on this soon.
*Whereas I am much more intrigued by the idea of writing down our dreams as a form of literary self-criticism.

Science:
*Speaking of dreams, here's an article on the evolutionary enigma of dream contents.
*Both bird's eyes and the photosynthesis of plants may work by quantum entanglement.
*Light that has either attractive or repulsive forces of "push" has been discovered.
*Frogs and toads around the world synchronise their mating behaviour to the full moon.
*Scientists are still searching for a three foot long spitting earthworm in Idaho.
*As if she was the fountain of youth, an infant-sized teenager may provide clues to reversing the aging process.
*A synthetic tree has been built able to capture carbon from the air 1,000 times faster than real trees.
*Scientists have also created artificial sperm from stem cells, making men progressively more obsolete.
*The new interplanatery internet just got its first node on the ISS.
*Stephen Hawkings in the meantime has decided that humans have entered a new stage of evolution, one based off our ability to exchange information.
*But only if NASA doesn't build self-replicating robots on Mars first.
*Whereas planets themselves might be living super-organisms.
*Perhaps we really do have twenty-one senses, which humanity is still learning to develop.
*Ants however have suddenly become a global super-colony.
*And lastly, a new theorem shows that if humans have free will, then so must elementary particles.

That seems about it for now. Hopefully now that my writing process is stabalized I will have more time to post here. Enjoy the summer!

Sex in the Library and the Eye of Eros

I am currently reading Lolita, as I haven't touched Nabokov before and would like to get through at least his most (in)famous works before the publication of his posthumous novel The Original of Laura. While Lolita is scandalous for its content, an aged European's ecstatic affair with a twelve-year old girl, the novel's style is perhaps the opposite of pornography: there is no mention of actual sexual acts (so far), or when they are they are couched in delicate, literary terms that apparently bore most readers, but to my mind heighten the impact of Humbert Humbert's desire.

Contrast this to recently-reviewed love letters from James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle, suppressed by their grandson because they contain some of the raunchiest, explicit sex acts (anal, S&M, masturbation, etc) as only a master linguist could describe them, including a fetish for farting: "It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and say your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.”

Over the winter I was working on a survey of sexual representation for an article called The Eye of Eros for my friend's sex anthology, the Living Room Handjob, an article I unfortunately never finished, that swings from the erotic symbolisms of Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye" to philosophies of sexual perversions to paleolithic sexual cave art to the fascination of sexualized horror in the Ciudad Juárez femecides dramatized in Roberto Bolaño's "2666," showing the broad range of ways that people have expressed both their fascination and discomfort with sexual desire over history and literature:


The Eye of Eros

In 1928, Georges Bataille published “The Story of the Eye,” since considered a masterpiece of pornographic literature. In the novella, two teenage lovers embark on a series of disturbing sexual escapades, opening with the narrator watching his lover sit naked in a dish of milk and progressing through orgies and rape to the insertion of not only a bull testicle but also a human eyeball (of a priest) into the vagina of the heroine. There are conflicting critical opinions of whether or not this work classifies as pornography; Susan Sontag suggests the book is, through its juxtaposition of sex and death and recourse to the transgressive sexual narratives of the Marquis De Sade. Roland Barthes on the other hand points out the centrality and interchangeability of the sexual objects in the story: liquids of milk, blood, semen, urine, vomit, and ovoids of eggs, testicles, the sun, and the eye, suggesting instead that the coherence of the underlying metaphors moves the story away from a pornographic reading. While sex scenes and perversions abound in “The Story of the Eye,” what is most fascinating, most arousing about the text, is that the sexual images are pushed far past the point where they can be considered primarily sexual, sex is pushed beyond standing for just sex, and the reader is left with the feeling that any symbol meditated on in a sexual way can elicit similar feelings of arousal and fascination, the pleasure principle of Eros.

Biologically, human sexuality is little different from animal sexuality, in that its primary purpose is the reproduction of the species. Sex however is also pleasurable, evoking sensations of ludic play over ergic work, through foreplay, masturbation, intercourse, orgasm, and sexual fetishes or perversions. People tend to experiment with a range of sexual activities during their lives, generally settling on a few that they find most pleasurable. The philosopher Michel Foucault suggests that what activities and sensations that are considered “sexual” are culturally and historically determined, that is, what is acceptable sexually is determined by social rules of behavior and the status quo. Societies however define some sexual activities as inappropriate (wrong person, wrong activity, wrong place, etc.). These social rules are referred to as sexual morality (what can and can not be done by society's rules) and sexual norms (what is and is not expected). In the United States for example, attitudes towards premarital sex and the use of contraceptives correlate to religious beliefs and political affiliation. As Foucault points out, society defines what is considered sexually “normal,” and in order to escape this culture-bound sexuality one ought to focus on “bodies and pleasures.” But in an age of hyper, almost obsessive media depiction is it possible to only focus on pleasures and bodies outside of their attendant images and modes of representation?

Sexual perversions, or paraphilia, refer to any “powerful and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in copulatory or precopulatory behavior with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners” (that is, any sex beyond reproduction), and are described by the DSM as conditions which "are characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." Hundreds of paraphilias are listed in the DSM: exhibitionism, the recurrent urge or behavior to expose one's genitals to an unsuspecting person; fetishism, the use of inanimate objects to gain sexual excitement; pedophilia, a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children; sexual masochism, the recurrent urge or behavior of wanting to be humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer for sexual pleasure; sexual sadism, the recurrent urge or behavior involving acts in which the pain or humiliation of a person is sexually exciting; transvestic fetishism, arousal from clothing associated with members of the opposite sex; voyeurism, the recurrent urge or behavior to observe an unsuspecting person who is naked, disrobing or engaging in sexual activities. The DSM also mentions telephone scatalogia (obscene phone calls), necrophilia (corpses), partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia (animals), coprophilia (feces), klismaphilia (enemas), urophilia (urine), emetophilia (vomit).

Reading a sex column like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love,” or browsing for any particular paraphilia on the internet, one almost gets the feeling that the majority of these perversions are now socially acceptable, that it is in fact straightforward, unkinky, heterosexual intercourse that is bizarre or perverse. But unless one is partial to one of these sexual fantasies, what is most likely to result in the mind on hearing of them are the images or objects associated with each perversion: the exhibitionist’s overcoat; dildos, butt plugs, and other insertable, fetishistic objects (including elongated vegetables and statuary); bondage belts, hoods, whips, chains, or soft rope and scarves; young boys talking to older teachers or priests; garter belts, underwear, and high heel shoes; and behind them all, the voyeur’s peeping eye behind a curtain. These images are such a vast part of popular culture and consciousness that it is enough to mention just one to evoke whole scenes and fantasies in an active imagination regardless of ones’ own sexual proclivities. The pleasure or fascination that results is derived from being able to see the experience, and the images of paraphilias add to the uniqueness (and thus visibility) of a sexual experience over other normal or perhaps boring sexual experiences. As such, the insertion of an eyeball into the vagina in “The Story of the Eye” becomes the ultimate fetish, the act of seeing itself sexualized, the witness of sex from the inside of the body.

But what of the body, which is perhaps the most common thing to human experience? Once unadorned, our differences are discernable by height, weight, shape, hair color, eye color, skin color, and physical age; generally the options one might find on a typical porn website, along with the previous lists of perversions. As opposed to erotica, which only uses or alludes to sexually arousing imagery, pornography is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer. It is important to note that it is not the sexual act itself that is pornographic but the depiction of the act. With more tolerant social attitudes towards sexual representation, an immense pornography industry has grown, using a variety of media – printed literature, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, or video game – depicting not only real human sex but also situations involving fictional, cartoon, and video game characters. Studies in 2001 put the porn industry gross at between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion a year, and the industry is considered influential in deciding format wars in media. The weight of the porn industry, the sheer amount of naked and sexualized bodies available for perusal, has to have some effect on the way we perceive the human body. And this is not even to consider the gratuitous use of sex to sell products in advertisements. Humans are multiplied, catalogued, anonymously masturbated to, in short, objectified beyond all personal experience, pleasure, or identity.

Feminist critics generally consider pornography demeaning to women. It eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment, and contributes to the male-centered objectification of women. Other recent feminists claim that appearing in or using pornography can be explained as each individual woman's choice, and is not guided by socialization in a capitalist patriarchy. Some researchers interestingly have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between availability of porn and per capita crime rates; that an increase in pornography equates to a decrease in sex crimes. Japan for example, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world, though some attribute this to the emphasis on a woman's "honor" in Japanese culture, which makes victims of sex crime less likely to report it. The most shocking case of sex crimes are perhaps the over 400 women who have been victims of sexual homicide over the past ten years in the town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which still remain unsolved. In his recently published novel, “2666,” Roberto Bolaño dramatizes these sex crimes in several hundred pages of false police reports, giving the incidental details of each victim’s discovery along with the recurring line, “the victim had been vaginally and anally raped.” Despite the horror of attempting to represent such brutal acts, the act of murder is itself never depicted, and what results is essentially a reduction of sexualized human bodies to a meaningless catalogue of names and images, albeit with the threat that someone still might find this arousing. Someone has to in order to keep committing the crimes, regardless of the amount of pornographic imagery or social sexual norms in Mexico. Perhaps what they find arousing is that they are the only one(s) who get to see the actual act and not just its aftermath. Pornographers and rapists control the lens of the modern sexual spectacle.

If bodies and pleasures have been reduced to dehumanized catalogues, how was sex seen in earlier ages? The depiction of sexual acts is as old as civilization, but the concept of pornography as understood today did not exist until the Victorian era. Previous to that time law did not stipulate looking at sexual objects or images. In some cases, specific books, engravings or image collections were censored or outlawed, but the trend to compose laws that restricted viewing of sexually explicit things in general was a Victorian construct. When large-scale excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s, much of the erotic art of the Romans came to light, shocking the Victorians who saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire. They did not know what to do with the frank depictions of sexuality, and endeavored to hide them away from everyone but upper class scholars. The Victorians’ morality and sexual conservatism is legendary, so much so that the earliest psychological analysis carried out by Sigmund Freud focused primarily on sexual repressions, conjecturing the concepts of erogenous zones, psychosexual development, and the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that all culture was essentially a response to cover up childhood sexual traumas, though later it was decided that his theories were based primarily out of his own experiences (while perhaps with a desire to shock his stiff-laced contemporaries).

What would Freud have made of the Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings that are the oldest surviving examples of erotica, much less the entire history of human civilization? The ancient Greeks painted sexual scenes onto their ceramics; many are famous for being some of the earliest depictions of same-sex relations and pederasty. The Moche of Peru in South America also sculpted explicit scenes of sex into their pottery. There has been a long tradition of erotic painting among the Eastern cultures as well. In Japan, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented, and the erotic art of China reached its popular peak during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty. In India the Kama Sutra was written between the 1st and 6th centuries. It was intended as both an exploration of human desire, including seduction and infidelity, and a technical guide to pleasing a sexual partner within a marriage sex manual, and is still popularly read throughout the world. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text “I Modi” was a woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601, Caravaggio painted the "Amor Vincit Omnia" for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. With the 20th Century, photography became the most interesting medium for erotic art, as it made the reproduction of images democratic, rapid, and widely distributable, a trend that has only continued through film to our present media overload. It would now be much more difficult to censor or legislate sexually explicit material, despite frequent governmental attempts to do so. The history of culture is too intertwined with the history of sexual representation to pull their sweating bodies apart. And yet how did we move from the erotic appreciation of sex as beauty to the pornographic selling of sex as spectacle, and what does this human fascination with sexual imagery mean?

On Being a Young Poet

Every few years I find myself set adrift, for one reason or another placed in an emotional or moral position somewhat off center and in need of guidance. It is in times like these when invariably someone reminds me about Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet."

I first came across this text, and Rilke at all, in my first year of my first attempt at college, ten years ago. It was a required text for incoming freshmen! Of course, I was too young, too headstrong at the time, probably like any other kid fresh out in the world, to admit that there were deep issues, dark questions, that one might need advice, not in answering, but in living. As Rilke puts it, "be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

This quote has been a favorite for many years, though I still don't fully understand it. Another thing that it's taken me a long time to wrap my head around is the necessity of solitude, something that Rilke stresses on almost every page of his letters. Solitude in order to go into yourself, to find your reason to write and to seek out the dreams, memories, impressions that make one's internal world. Solitude in order to find the patience to allow everything to gestate, the acceptance of doing what is difficult and therefor necessary, the clarity of the senses beneath the surface and multiplicity of the world where one can actually create. Solitude in order to grow into one that can love and be loved, a "love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."

These days I exist mostly in a happy solitude, with my stories and new kitten Ruby and lots of music, a happiness that is mainly broken only when other people are involved. It is strange to think that for years I sought out the company of others, not because I actually wanted to be around them, but because I was under the impression that I should, because it was easier to become involved in order to hide from myself and my possibilities behind the social masks of sex, drugs, rock and roll. One of the few kinds of occasions I would actually enjoy myself in public in was being on stage, playing a show. Talk about the performance of everyday life. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy being around other people, but that I have learned that I require a much more immense amount of time to myself, which when I have it allows me to interact with others in a much more reciprocal and centered way, as well as get a lot of writing done.

"Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars."

It is also interesting, and immensely inspiring, to think that Rilke was twenty-eight, my age, when he wrote these letters, and yet so wise (or so precocious with the weight of the world, though one feels that he really felt and bore that weight in its fullest understanding). I can only bow my head.

[quotes from M.D. Herter Norton's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," though the Stephen Mitchell translation I linked to above is far superior, as Mitchell gets the emotional necessity of Rilke's writing.]

The Angel as Absent Narrative: Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"

Last night Sophie and I watched a movie about an angel that falls in love with a human woman. From the title, "Wings of Desire," I thought that it might be a piece of romantic schlock, but I was quite surprised to watch what is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece. Set in Berlin in 1987, this movie is shot in a stark black and white that is reminiscent of early silent films. The "plot" focuses on a group of invisible angels wearing beat up trench coats who live in a public library and spend their time listening in on and sharing with each other the thoughts of the humans around them. One of these angels, in his wanderings around Berlin, discovers a circus and falls in love with the trapeze artist, a woman wearing chicken-feather wings whose thoughts are constantly filled with existential angst, and decides that he wants to become human in order to understand what it is actually like to feel, touch, live. Along the way we meet a comic film star who is an ex-angel, and an archangel who ruminates on the dying art of storytelling while searching for neighborhoods that were destroyed in the war.



Besides these and other revealing scenes, including the final meeting between the angel and the girl at a goth club where Nick Cave and the Badseeds are performing (!), the movie was made more poignant through the director's commentary, which to our delight revealed that the movie was conceived during a period in which Wim Wenders was reading Rilke's poetry every day as the ultimate expression of German Romanticism. What was really interesting though was that the whole movie was shot without a script, using a series of existential monologues, which mirrored one of the primary points of the movie: that the angels were absent from reality and the flow of time. Though they were able to look into the flow of humanity from their eternal vantage point, they could only experience this life second hand, and that in order to be part of the narrative of history they had to enter into time, into human emotions, bodily concerns, etc., raising the question of how much we humans are really a part of our own narratives. Are we responsible for our lives or just living out the stories that have been woven for us in our thoughts?

Narrative Validity

I have an immense respect for other people's narratives and beliefs, regardless if they can be proven objectively true, because what is most important is the way that people live based on these stories.



While working on my research paper about the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent for the Gunwinggu tribe of Indigenous Australia I came upon the belief that if a person ate in secret, spoiled a crying child, cooked on a dangerous riverbank, or generally misused the limited natural resources, the Rainbow Serpent Ngaljod would rise from its waterhole and, causing great storms, drown or eat the tribe. There were no public sanctions against these food taboos outside of the very real fear of a mythic or narrative retribution.

While editing the paper I chanced to comment that this prohibition was somewhat like my close friend's assertion that if she drinks (or uses in general), her whole life would fall apart. This of course upset her as belittling her situation, because for her not drinking is a very real fear that really would have drastic effects on her life. I had to make clear that I completely understood the emotional importance of her claims, and that the Indigenous Australians likewise had very real fears of not having enough to eat. What I had attempted to point out was that in both situations there was no external compulsion or law against a certain behavior, but a subjective story that described what would certainly happen if that action was unfortunately performed. As far as the story works in affecting the way one lives than I am prone to consider it "true," and any objectivity about what might actually happen is entirely beyond the point.

Of course, I can recognize, albeit slowly, that it is extremely difficult to talk to people about their deeply held beliefs in an objective or intellectual manner, or to compare them to other beliefs. For my friend, this story of her life falling apart if she uses is a very real, important matter that she lives with on a daily basis, and to suggest that it is a narrative (not, mind you, a fictive narrative), removes it from the emotional importance it needs to be effective. I imagine that that the Indigenous Australians may have been similarly outraged if a visiting anthropologist tried to tell them that the Rainbow Serpent was only a myth. For them it was a very real creature living in the local waterholes that really would drown them if they broke certain taboos. I am inclined to take their words for it at face value, while recognizing that there is possibly a deeper psychological mechanism at work. Granted, there are vast differences between these two kinds of stories, but in trying to respect that I think there is some value in pointing out the similarities of how people use narratives in their lives.

I know for a fact that I have done the same thing for a long time (and perhaps this is something many people do in order to determine their lives), telling stories of my social or familial roles, or perhaps more relevantly, using archetypal figures from my dreams as examples for how I lived. Some of these stories were very true for me, and if questioned I too would probably have responded with some amount of hostility. It took me a long time to realize that my personal narrative of the world ending if I didn't go on some deep personal quest to save it was, objectively, just a story. Not even to mention my real beliefs in meeting an angelic anima figure that haunted my dreams for years; but that actually happened, which is another story altogether. I think what I finally learned, though I think I knew it all along, is that on one level it is vitally important to have stories to describe how we want or have to live, but on another level it is perhaps just as important to recognize that these are in fact just stories we tell ourselves, that they have the most valid weight for us alone (unless of course they are mass political stories like those that have caused many of the world's atrocities), and that if our particular stories are no longer working to narrate our lives properly than we can change them. Of course, changing one's beliefs is extremely difficult as it often calls into question everything else about our lives, but sometimes, I think, it is necessary to do just that.

All You Need Is Love

The other night Sophie and I went to go see the new movie "Across the Universe," a love story set in the turbulence of the 60s and narrated through the songs of the Beatles. Though the use of visual overlays in some scenes was a little cheesy, the selection of songs was impressive, and for most of the flick I was close to tears, which I will admit takes a really good movie to bring me to.

The movie also brought up my interest of looking for modern mythemes, as the Beatles' cultural influence has been coming up recently each time I play them at work. The Beatles clearly represent one of the largest modern set of culture heroes, especially in the 60s. Not to downplay the works and influence of Leary, Kesey, et al., but the Beatles' popularity and rise to fame had a dramatic effect on American youth, and was perhaps paradigmatic of the ideals of that generation. That four "lads from Liverpool" could rise to international stardom not only exemplary of the American mytheme of 'rags to riches,' but may also have created that mythic idea of bands "making it" from humble, anonymous beginnings, certainly not an easy task, as any musician can tell you. Not only that, but the Beatles' whole aesthetic, politics, etc. had deep repercussions on fashion, social consciousness, and, though maybe not an enormously positive effect depending on your stance, the use of mind-altering substances. When the Beatles began experimenting with psychedelics, when they went to India to learn transcendental meditation and incorporated such Asiatic sounds and styles in their own feel, they took American youth along for the ride. How many peace activists may have been moved to non-violent protest after hearing "You Say You Want a Revolution?" Of course, it's hard to say whether the Beatles caused these changes themselves, or were just the most visible public figures riding the waves of social change, but as they were such figureheads, their actions fed-back on culture, became an example of what was possible in the world. That it was possible for a "small group of dedicated individuals"(to quote Margaret Meed) to sing "All You Need Is Love," and mean that enough to make a difference.

As Mircea Eliade and Charles Long both discuss, new myths and hierophanies come into affect by being truer 'over against' older, worn out social and sacred realities, and many were tired of the social staidness of the post-World War fifties. Whose to say that a hundred, a thousand years from now the Beatles might not be mythologized as the Heroes who through the magic of song defeated the demons of war, social mores, etc.? If they are not already attributed with these epic victories. Perhaps the only other band who comes close to this role, for me at least, was Crass, whose political stance against the Thatcher administration, and rejection of the colorful, commodified punk look of the 70s I suspect became the model for the resurgence of Anarchism asa valid modern youth movement in these decades following the 80s. But this influence is more contestable than that of the Beatles, whose sheer legacy of hits and continued mass appeal assures their heroic place in the cultural imagination.

Ironically, it was precisely this inordinate mass appeal that turned me off from the Beatles' music for a long time. My parents had been hippies back in the 60s and I vividly recall my father playing both "Rocky Raccoon" and "Cry, Baby, Cry" to us on his guitar when we were children. Though from my childhood intimately familiar with most of their material, I always associated it first as "something my parents listened to," and then with all the stoned, tie-dye clad hippies I knew in high school, as being just too weak and feel-goody, in contrast to the aggressive and directly political music I was listening to then. It wasn't until many years later, after performing in many bands and intentionally broadening my musical horizons to anything remotely influential, that I realized how effective the Beatles' music really was. Even on just a compositional level they still blow away any other rock/pop band before or since. Not to mention the effect those songs had in helping shape the beliefs of an entire generation, and many of the generations since. No overtly political punk band can boast to having such a deep effect on culture, not by directly singing about what they were against, but by singing about love, and coming together.

The Beatles continue to be the biggest selling band of all time, with movies, toys, and even a circus show in Las Vegas dedicated to their legacy. Despite this commodification, the reason why they continue to serve as an paradigm is that their music was just that good, and still speaks with just as strong a voice these forty years later.

lovely dangers

"The lover, is in such splended danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky center, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence."

- Rilke

a hopeless romantic makes two jaded punks cry

(reposted from everyday avatar)

strangest most real slice of life greyhound ride ever. trying to write and rock out the gorillaz, a long essay on Warhol and the death of rock and roll inspired by intense conversation with my dad (and not yet finished). A beat rocker sleeping in the back tried to get my attention before passing out, and when we stopped at hagerstown she walked up to bum a cigarette, introducing herself as Beanie Interkin Day. Turns out she's bumming around the country trying to find work, as both her home and the bar she was tending in guf port, la were destroyed when the hurricane hit. and her bandmates in her metal band, the broken spokes, are all out and about in that same boat. so we started talking, about bands we've seen and places we've been, across two seats and an old gentleman who seemed both fascinated and appaled by the strange ways kids relate these days. she seems lonely, and it turns out she's also fleeing the past, a rocky marraige broken up by the death of their two month old son. she's one of the the dispossessed, always expecting the worst and getting it thrown back in her face. I ask her to join me and at least have some company for the rest of the ride, and not within a few minutes the boy in the seat in front of us, name of James, turns around and says he's been on the buses for about nineteen hours now.

Now this kid reminds me of my youngest brother, or what he'll be like when he's just into college, and he's a hopeless romantic. seems he and his longterm sweetheart back home had a falling out since long distance relationships don't always work, and he said a few things and now she's seeing his best friend. So he drops all his school work, first semester at a prestigious art school down in georgia, and is bussing home on no money and a lot of dreams in order to patch things up and win back her heart. and then for the next several hours he proceeds to tell us two jaded fools all the sweet romantic things he ever did for her, which he's been writing down in a notebook to give her along with some atrocious love poetry and such stuff. he's young he's sweet, he's the quintessential hopeless romantic. now granted, a lot of his game has been buying her things, diamond rings, stereos, fancy restraunt dinners, etc... but mixed in is stories of carrying her home, driving hours to be with her when she's sick and such stuff. His heart's in the right place. and enormous.

and so Beanie and I listen, and start to cry. Beanie says, noone's ever been that romantic to me before, girl must be a fool if she doesn't take you back up. I'd take you myself. Can't believe people wouldn't want to be taken care of by such a sweet guy. I want to tell him he's young yet, and he's got plenty of time to get his heart broken, again and again before he gets to my age, but he's breaking my heart all over again. I mean, damn, I've been there. I've written the book of poems, and thrown flowers through windows at night, and made sure people got safely home, and all that not even half a year ago. I can't bust this guy's dreamy bubble, it's got too much hope, and suddenly I find myself having faith in humanity again. How could you not? His love and passion practically radiate from him. he may not get his girl back, but he's going all out, and all I can do is cry and wish him the best of luck, and wonder just why I gave up on being so romantic myself. Makes me wonder if I couldn't have done more... but no, no sense in regret. there's always next time. I say, if she doesn't fall in love with you all over again and take you back, I'll track her down and kill her. we listen, he's sleep deprived and babbling, positively gushing, and when he gets up to get off at new stanton wish him the best of luck.

I yell after him, win her back, man, win her back for all of us.

I hope he does. the world needs to know that those who care don't always get fucked over in the end.


and when I got home, I found my copy of Generation Hex had arrived...

for a little shining

The sky is filled with light and noise, a barrage of fireworks and rescue helicopters and the nonstop glow of the city. It's hard to imagine that once upon a time you could look up and see the full glory of the heavens spinning off into infinity. Now, a few stars twinkle resolutely, as if to remind us that there are still some mysteries that haven't been solved, some dark corners left in the universe where we haven't yet explored and left dirty footprints and candy bar wrappers and brochures reading manifest destiny. Why do humans have this insatiable need to shed light on everything, to turn over every stone, as if it was really possible to gain some solid understanding of our lives and the world we live them in. Tomorrow they're crashing a large hunk of metal into the comet Tempel in order to see if the material in its core really is the stuff from which the whole Universe arose. So even the stars aren't that sacred anymore. These days not much is. It's all about control and concrete facts. Will we really be any closer to enjoying life if we wake up tomorrow and they say they've found the answers to everything?

Swinging in the hammock in our dark yard, feeling the cool summer wind stir the trees and watching a few lightning bugs pretend to be shooting stars. They haven't forgotten what the sky once looked like. Somewhere bats and trains call out to each other and in my head 1905 sings "I don't want to look at the stars with you until you can look at strangers with me." Let's look up anyway, even if we can't always bear to look at each other. Perhaps the stars can reflect just a bit of the light that we hide from each other. I am enamored by the stars, and their fading, and beautiful phrases that express that things can actually change. "Everyone is a star, and every star wants to shine." Even if sometimes we get dirty and lost and want to hide a little. It's funny, trying to figure out who the fuck we are and what we want and how to deal with being our selves in this weird and often times hositle world, this too is trying to shed light on the dark corners of our hearts, trying to turn ourselves inside out and see what we are made of. Patterns of behaviour, little fears and insecurities and annoyances. Needs to control and let go. And desires, unqunechable desires. There was a stamp Selena made for her art show yesterday which read "without desire I cease to exist." Desidero ergo sum. Is that really all that sets us apart from each other, those specific wants and needs, individual hopes and dreams that pinpoint us in the constellations of our social lives? Or is this too a myth, and do we each shine with some common light that happens to be displaced just a little in space and time so that we each appear to desire different things when really we all just want to be happy and free then die knowing that we lived our lives satisfactorally?

Or does it even matter? We are here, the night is young, the stars are fading and I know you want to shine despite all the dirt history has shoveled in your path. I don't think there are any right answers, at least not any that we glorified lemurs could understand. And certainly no easy ones. So let's just rewrite all the rules for human interaction as we come to them, one trembling heartbeat and timid smile at a time. Maybe next time we look up together we'll see two new stars flickering small and bright above the city.

you've got to plant your hopes to grow tomorrow

It's strange to look around at all my friends and see just how many of them are getting married and having kids these days. Not that I blame them, our community is incredible right now, people are very supportive of each other and want to make some stronger commitment to being here together. I hope it still exists when I'm ready to have my own children, as I couldn't imagine wanting to raise kids in the social isolation of the nuclear family. But that's still aways off. Even though this is the age in which this type of thing happens I still feel too much like a kid myself and have so much I want to get done before "settling down," going back to school and traveling the world and publishing a novel not the least in my plans. But that doesn't stop me from being utterly blown away by the courage my friends have to do this themselves, especially in this day and age, or from thinking about it a lot.

For years now there's been a long debate in the "scene" about whether it is a good idea to have children when the whole world seems to be falling apart around our heads. Look at the mess we're leaving them, and look at how overpopulated our small planet is already. But at the same time, having children is like the ultimate act of hope, it says "I believe things can get better. I believe there is a future." I've known a lot of older punkrockers who've sneered at this sentiment, but really, if we say we want to make this world a better place where better to start than by breaking the cycle of kids raised to conform to the world around them instead of shaping it to their desires, or of families tearing themselves apart under the lonesome weight of this emotionless system on their backs and in their wallets. Yes we can plant gardens, and have riotous parties, and learn alternative health care and bike repair and whatever else we need to take our lives into our own hands, but it is this community we have here and the families that are springing from it that will ultimately grow and carry these small techniques of revolution out into the world and time. Already I see my friend's children, just starting out in their lives, but so full of wisdom and autonomy and the desire to live, and I can't even begin to think what they will accomplish twenty years down the road. The word miracles comes to mind. We may be leaving them a world full of problems, but we are also building the foundations to leave them the tools to fix it and that spirit necessary to actually do so.

Spat and I were talking before the show about why we do what we do, create music and writing and revolutions with the passion that all good madmen and artists have, and he said that he used to do this so that he had something to leave for his children. A box full of novels and lps that they could point to and say, "my dad did this." We even wrote a song about the revolutionary potential of child raising when Courtney had Sonedore, called Resistance is Fertile (it's on the album). Now he's not sure if its in his cards, though I suspect he won't always just be "crazy uncle Spat" to his friend's kids. I told him that regardless of his future parental status this work will all get left to the annals of culture as well, which offers some motivation, but I do want to have a more personal stake in that legacy than just some scattered words and sounds. Our children are left to society too, and are just as much part of the work as recipients of it. They literally are the future, and I would rather not leave the making of it solely to those who have no regard for making it a bright or sustainable one. And it would be nice to be taken care of when I can no longer take care of myself. Society's certainly not going to do it for me.

Sensitive and Strong

When I first posted here I mentioned just how difficult it was to date and try and be an avatar in my own life. Since then it only got worse, to the point that I briefly considered writing a diatribe against the shallowness of the whole "dating scene" and the ritualization of meaningless sex in our culture, and finally gave up completely on wanting to ever meet anyone again.

And as predicted by my closest friends, as soon as I gave up on finding love it walked straight into my life, and I now wonder why I had any doubts for this at all. More importantly however I also found that this was only possible because I try and live up to myself and the world and be the best person I can be whenever the opportunity arises to do so. And it always does. She loves me because I am an avatar, because I attempt to be honest and caring and sensitive and attentive. And this doesn’t conflict with the fact that I am also sometimes crazy and melodramatic and prone to intense fits of seeing the world through a filter of ideals and archetypes. She loves me for that too, because I don’t deny that it’s also a part of who I am.

Of course I’m not saying that the whole dating game isn’t still fucked up, or that a lot of people actually want honest and sensitive men in their lives. This is a culture of masculine archetypes after all, soldiers and cowboys and cutthroat businessmen. My lover’s sister broke up with her abusive boyfriend yesterday, and when it was suggested she try and date someone who might actually be good for her she laughed and said "I don’t date pansies." I don’t understand where the idea came from that sensitivity is synonymous with weakness. As far as I see it, it takes a near infinite amount of strength to be a caring male in our culture. Or just a caring person. Though admittedly some "sensitive men" really are pansies and let their lovers and parents and bosses walk all over them so that they aren’t seen as exerting even a little power or authority over other people, but that just buys into the stereotypes of weakness as well. Which is more sensitive, denying you have power or knowing how to not hurt other people when you use it? Which is stronger, heedlessly fucking everyone else over just to get a leg up or being aware that your actions affect everyone around you? Why is our culture obsessed with these extremes that only seek to keep people at their worst, and what can we do about it?

The most obvious answer perhaps is to be as strong and sensitive as we can, and maybe create a different role for people to fill.

I don’t understand where the idea came from that sensitivity is synonymous with weakness. As far as I see it, it takes a near infinite amount of strength to be a caring male in our culture. Or just a caring person...'

the protocols are stacked against us

A protocol is essentially an agreement over how to interact in a shared space, a set of rules for engagement that define and bound the interactions. But protocols don't work unless they are respected by all parties entering into the arangement. Our society is based on constantly shifting protocols that lay out how we should behave towards each other and towards/ within the larger social organizations, up to but not limited to the organizations of our whole culture, and the whole world, and the organizations of power that attempt to control the protocols for their own ends. The need to interact, and the need to set up codes for interacting may have always existed, but over time these rules have been bent to less allow us to interact in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways, and more to play out and fulfill age old political, economic, and religious dogmas that are rooted in conflict and concentration of power in the hands of a few. This is antithetical to our being connected, and though conflict is a part of connection, it is a part that attempts to lessen connection and make it not possible for people to connect on their own terms. Our present protocols are not designed to allow people to interact in the ways they want, but force them into prescribed roles which only serve to continue themselves and not allow for personal change in the system. The protocols of any free system would have to evolve from the needs and desires and interactions of all the agents in that system, not from the few who've held power of that for themselves.

But though our present system operates under such constraints we agents still maintain our essential freedom to connect as we see fit, and though it seems like we can not actually change the higher level protocols directly, these are built from the ground up, from our daily and personal rules for interaction. And these we still have our own power over. How do you interact with people when you pass them on the streets, when you have to have economic transactions with them in the stores, when you have to work with them and live with them, and share any space in this world with them? What protocols shape these small interactions? Social stigma, hatred and derision, greed and desire for power over others? Or instead the desire to break through the walls and actually interact as one human with another, to interact on that basic level of beings who are connected from the most direct fact of being here together. Why try and deny that? Why try and make that any harder than it already is? Smiling and saying hello are relatively easy, and offers the start of forming new connected relationships to the world around us. Relationships founded on respect and compassion.

Of course that assumes that people might want to form relationships of respect and compassion, or form relationships at all, and if they have been raised their whole lives on violence and hatred and conflict, what experiences do they have to encourage them to shape their interactions in any other way? I do not know if humans are essentially good, or if given the oppurtunity would more naturally tend towardss mutually beneficial relationships. But I do believe that despite how we might choose to interact with each otehr, we are all connected, even if just on the physical level of all being here on this planet together, and having to live up to that (or from that). And once that is recognized it becomes much harder to ignore your fellow humans and attempt to push them away. There's nowhere left for them to go, and our reality is most intimately shaped by us all being in it together that killing can no longer be an option. That's why it's important to treat everything and everyone, especially those who don't or refuse to see it, in a manner that reaffirms that we indeed are all connected. And even if that oppurtunity for connection is rejected by the otehr at the time, it creates a space for it to come back later, in one form or another.

***

Connection is love. Interaction is intimacy, the merging of two into one across all the levels. Every touch, every word, every glance, every thought serves to unify us with the compassionate force of that essential love, but each also carries the seeds of destruction, of conflict. For love and death, beauty and pain, always walk hand and hand, and all instances that speak of connection also whisper of the conflicting struggle that comes before unity and the rending that comes when things begin to fall apart again. The act of love itself can be the most joyous and direct form of connection, from the most physical level up, but at the same time this act serves as a painful reminder of the transcience of such connections. What wonder and what agony it precludes, and reveals in its awakening like a flower unfurling.

Every act is an act of love, perhaps not on the grossest level, but every interaction we have with the world is intimate and connects us deeper within it. And we have the choice to address that as we see fit can either accept it and give ourselves up to this connection and merging, or reject it and in so doing hold ourselves back from the world in fear that we will either lose our precious egos or die. But that choice is always ours...

lyric poems of yunus emre

Lyric poems of Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre (d. 1320?), called "the greatest folk poet in Islam" (Talat Sait Halman), was an unlettered Turkish shepherd who sang mystical songs which are still popular today. He was the first of a whole tradition of Turkish Sufi troubadors who sang of the Divine Presence, the Beloved, the Friend. His songs/poems convey a profound yet earthy spirituality. His subject is the Heart, the point of awareness where God is realized in us. "I've come to build some hearts," Yunus sings.

To be in love with love with love is to gain a soul,
to sit on the throne of hearts.

To love the world is to be afflicted.
Later the secrets start to make sense.

Don't be bramble,
become the rose. Let your maturity unfold.
The brambles will only burn.

Prayer was created by God so man could ask for help.
It's too bad if you haven't learned to ask.

Accept the breath of those who are mature-
let it become your divining rod.
If you obey your self, things turn our wrong.

Renouncing the world is the beginning of worship.
If you are a believer, believe this.

Respect your parents and ancestry,
and you will have fine green clothes of your own.

If you earn the complaints of neighbors,
You'll stay in Hell forever.

Yunus heard these words from the masters.
If you need this advice, take it.

They say one who is received by heart
becomes more beautiful.

Emre's poetry reminds me of the great Sufi poet Rumi, who also wrote about the personal realization of godhood. The two poets appearently crossed paths at some point in their lives and had an amusing conversation about the subject. The story goes like this: One day Rumi and Yunus Emre met. They had an intimate and very pleasant conversation where Rumi told Yunus of all he had done, reciting to both their delight some of his sublime verse. Yunus Emre was very grateful and highly pleased, but a doubt of personal ability to achieve the same came over him in his utter humility. He remarked aloud: "How true, how lovely; but what a lot of words you have used to say such a simple thing. I could never have done it." Rumi asked him: "How would you have said it?" Yunus Emre, who was what may be called a 'Folk Poet', replied in a couplet:

I wrapped myself in flesh and bones And appeared as Yunus.

(Ete kemige burundum Yunus deyu gorundum)

What is meant then, is that you as a separate reality do not realise, understand or know anything, or, to tell the truth, exist as such.

via ollapodrida

on love

I wrote a poem about love the other day, as I've been feeling very much in love with the whole world of late. I posted it on my livejournal, but thought it would probably be appropriate here too:

I am in love with the world,
but I don’t have enough words to say it.
All the people, the animals and plants,
wind, sun and stars,
I am in love with all of it
because it is all here.

I tried to write a poem
going into the most intimate of details
but soon realized
if I were to whisper my love
for one thing
I would have to sing odes
to all existence,
and never stop.

No wonder I don’t talk much.
If I opened my mouth
you would burst into flames
from this intensity.
So love burns my throat instead
and makes my fingers scream
when they are forced to take up the call.
How many notebooks filled
with futile attempts at love?
I lost count
when I started burning them
to stay warm at night.

***

What is love anyway?
Not this desire and longing
for your touch.
We are already touching
from across the room.
Love is not the passionate acts
or charming words
we use to hold each other close.
Every long mile
and aching moment
draws us even closer.

When I say we are in love
I mean we are in love,
like in an ocean,
deep and unfathomable
and covering the whole world.
We are swimming in love,
trying to hold our heads
over the waves
so we can see each other.
But when we give up and drown,
gulping down lung-fulls of love
like rich wine,
our souls stop struggling
and become one.

That is love,
being together,
submerged and stripped bare
of all boundaries.

If you can still feel my skin
pressed against yours,
we are not close enough.
If you can still hear my breath
whispering in your ear,
kiss me so I’ll be quiet.
If you can still see my eyes
drinking quick glances of you
from across the room,
close them and dive in.