Tuesday, April 30, 2013

"Founding Brothers"

-by Joseph Ellis
2000
If you've always been curious to get beneath the mythologies of our founding fathers, this Pulitzer Prize winner is perhaps the most satisfying, well-written tome you'll find. It delves into the beliefs and conflicts of Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Burr, illuminating their personal lives only so much as is necessary to understand how they informed this grand ideological experiment we call home. More than a couple of them would be stunned (or in Jefferson's case, perhaps horrified) to find the republic still going, over two centuries later. Jefferson had always been my favorite...and while that's probably still ideologically true, Adams is almost certainly the most impressive and forthright among them. Washington couldn't compete with the rest intellectually, but his integrity alone assured that this experiment would survive beyond a single generation. Is Abigail Adams the most influential american female ever, and deserving of a spot on this list? Almost certainly. Were Franklin's charisma and brilliance overshadowed by a lack of substance? Perhaps, or perhaps not - he's the only founding brother to ever come out emphatically against slavery. The centrist Hamilton and the fascinating Burr never got to put their imprint upon the presidency, but that seemed to be the way the wind was blowing even before they shot at each other with murderous (or perhaps not) intent. The book is a bit Madison-light...but otherwise Ellis offers up a concise, flowing deconstruction of what these men strived and fought for. In a time when we've become the epitome of the kind of bloated, imperialist plutocracy they rose up against, it's nice to be reminded of the genuine idealism that started it all.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

love & selfishness

"Love is the extent to which we're willing to indulge someone else's selfishness"
-Dr. Jane Aloysius O'McCorkleschlatt

The preceding quote is true...but not to be confused with a comment on human nature. Such a state of affairs could only happen in a human society which had horribly degraded. Since anyone reading this today lives in just such a society, it behooves us to understand what we're getting into when offering or seeking love.
The quote applies to any sort of love, but is most apparent in affairs of the heart (or other organs). Any understanding of love, any ability to navigate its byways, is contingent upon understanding selfishness, for we live in a fear-driven society. The fears of want, loneliness, aging, ridicule, violence, meaninglessness, death...these fears (and many others) are at the innermost core of our subconscious. We are so fear-driven, that we spend much of our lives with these fears as our CONSCIOUS companions. A creature experiencing fear can think of little other than its own needs. Hence, selfishness is fear's little brother...sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, but always tagging along, close at hand.
The desire for love...to be held, listened to, cared for...touches the most primal center of what it is to be human. Yet we construct our society so that these most basic needs are never a given - never a facet of daily existence we might simply take for granted. We senselessly confine the overwhelming bulk of our meaningful intimacy to the realm of romance, then make romance a commodity to be competed for. So we always live in the fear that our most basic human needs might be taken away from us, by someone younger or richer or smarter or comelier or more fun.
That's for those lucky enough to have love in the first place.
Any understanding of love starts with the awareness that selfishness is an almost inescapable state of being in this society. Yet this is one of the few contexts in which the word "selfish" is not negative. To be human is to exist in a profound state of need - emotional needs, social needs, sexual needs, touch needs. We downplay or deny these needs at extreme peril to our health and sanity.
To ask someone to love us, is to put forth our most basic humanity...the very heart of our most naked vulnerability.
All too often, when we offer ourselves in love, we aren't simply focused on how qualified our intended might be for the task at hand. We don't focus on their emotional strengths or weaknesses. We don't focus on the biological wisdom of our own bodies, which are all too happy to tell us with whom we should be canoodling. We focus on the wrong selfish needs...what kind of material resources someone has, or how closely they might adhere to some "idea" we carry of our life's story, or how people will judge us with this person on our arm.
And too, all too often, we simply take what we can get. But who can resist when love, any love, is offered? What fool even should resist?
There are times when two people's loving, selfish desires align. These times are among the most sacred of our lives. Caught up in hormonal rushes with someone who approximates what we think we "deserve", is a roller coaster ride we never want to get off. Hormones being what they are, more often than not we're rudely tossed from the car. But no matter how painful the fall, we get up and stand by those tracks, waiting for the ride to come barreling by again.
JUMP! JUMP!, our primal needs shout.
Yet no matter how excited we are by the lover strapped in beside us, inevitably (and often sooner rather than later) we realize that profound intimacy can be profoundly annoying. We start making mental checklists of the things we put up with, compared to the benefits we enjoy. On the other side, our beloved has their own ledger.
No loving relationship should ever be forced to endure that kind of scrutiny...but that's the inescapable result of living in an "all your eggs in one basket" world (or all your ovaries...or seeds). And perhaps it was NEVER all peaches and coconut milk. Perhaps going in, you knew that this fool was far from your dreamy ideal. That's where the acceptance of selfishness, yours and others', comes in. How far are you willing to let someone you love be something other than your ideal?
How do you find love in a fear-driven world? By trying to find people (in romance and elsewhere) with whom your selfish desires mutually balance. It ain't romantic, it ain't sexy. A more pragmatic, scientific understanding of human sexuality (and how Disney got basically everything wrong) can also save you from immeasurable worlds of misery.
The ultimate test of love comes on that day when your beloved wishes to change the nature of your loving contract, reducing or even removing certain components of which you may be quite fond. Or simply changing. Can you love someone enough to let them be something you don't approve? Can you love them enough to share their resources or touches? Can you love them enough to let them go?
Most love quickly dies under such strain. And love that dies that kind of death, was probably never really love to begin with.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

A2

WOMEN 74
(a follow-up to WOMEN 57 - http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-post.html)

I kept in happy touch with A and her new family when i moved north. I went back for an extended FL visit three years later, and stayed at their place a good deal. Their child was over two now, and so wonderful - little V cooed like a pigeon. Any memories of my years of being in love with A were out of my consciousness, as i continued to love she and E both as a couple and individually. They talked of getting me to move back. But all was not well - i'd known they'd been having troubles (mostly sexual). It was worse than i knew. One evening i got a call from A, asking me to pick her up. She was in Bonita on foot, having left E and their car. Once i got her, i found out that a lot of the worst behaviors from her horrible romantic past were being enacted anew, most notably physical/emotional violence lubricated by alcohol. I found out they'd even separated a few months back. The next afternoon, when E and V were on the porch and i was inside with her, she told me she'd been thinking about being with me. My spirit suddenly went looping into a space i'd never known. If you'd told me beforehand that a simple handful of words could ever affect me so, i wouldn't have believed you. I felt my being splinter. I'll be eternally glad i was able to respond in an unaffected way (my spirit was in piecemeal tatters for the next few months, living between my love for them and the feelings she had released in me). The next day, she spoke some words that may have been the most resonant of my life. She was talking about massage, asking whether i were still into it. I replied affirmatively. She said that E hated massage, and wished she were rubbing my feet that very moment. Why those words tore me down and left me quivering and alone in the universe, i can't exactly say...but in the months to come, a sentence churned through my spirit over and over, a sentence to her i hadn't been able to finish - "To be the one who gets to rub your feet every night..." I couldn't finish it, my mind wouldn't let me, i couldn't enunciate what i would do to be that person...but i'm sure it was the most profound unfinished sentence of my life. My word choice bothered me, though. Why did it have to be "the one"? In the months and years to come, my mind tried to come up with a solution...perhaps TWO mates for her...she could thrive with two (of course that probably applies to all women, but ridiculously so for A, with her sex drive and paradoxical personality). However, while she'd been saying these massage things, E was right in the room! I'd always been so grateful that he was at peace with my nebulous, quasi-romantic history with her. I knew how rare such acceptance could be. And here she was, blatantly comparing him unfavorably to me, right before his eyes. I cried inside. A had always had a blunt quality, it's one of the things i loved about her most dearly. But her bluntness was sometimes pseudo-intentionally destructive. A few nights later, she was tucking V and i into bed. He was already asleep, and she spoke of sexual desire for me. Such profound inner conflict (in me, but no doubt her too). I also experienced another sensation that was a first in my life - my brain literally scrambling words i was hearing. It happened once in FL, then again later on the phone. A was talking, and my brain just turned her words into a jumbly muck. I could hear the components, but my brain randomized them. Just stunningly bizarre. One of those times, she was talking about how she felt a kind of peace with me she couldn't compare with anyone she'd ever known (or something like that). What she said the other time, my brain fuzzed so well that i can recall no part of it. My reaction to V had been singular too...it was easy to imagine slipping into his life, as a parent figure. Where did THAT come from?? I'd never had a thought like that for any child. I talked with E, commiserating with him and trying to get him to open up. But he couldn't fully do so. A told me he was angry she'd involved me in their problems. There were other moments on that trip...she would share her perceptions on life and living, and once or twice i was just dumbfounded over how some of her views were so like my own wildflower ways. A couple months later, A and V were visiting E's parents in Connecticut, and she invited me. I hopped on a bus. I was determined that, in E's childhood home of all places, i would never do a destructive thing. It was a lovely couple days. A and i had some nice moments, including a freezing, nighttime skinny dip, but neither of us spoke about the things that had passed between us. After my FL visit, i'd sent some e-mails to E and not heard back (but that was typical for him). The worst thing i did in Connecticut was follow her up the stairs one night after she'd gone to bed with V. I stood outside her door. When she'd said goodnight, we stood face to face and had a long few moments of silent soul-sharing. I finally turned around and went back down. A month or so later, i got the sense that she was re-dedicated to E, and sent her my support. I asked for one small favor, on the phone - to let loose my spirit's turmoil, which i'd written down. She listened, and a great load was lifted. The difference between the new feelings she'd stirred in me and the drowning love i'd experienced those years earlier was that, for the first time ever, my spirit rose to a place of possibility where she and i were together...and the beauty of that dream shook my foundations. Dreaming of some improbable three-way marriage, i went back to my lonely life. I knew that her shadow would loom over my spirit (and love life) for a good while.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

the co-mate vows

I call you my co-mate.
I celebrate our love.
I shout to the world my desire...to care for you, to comfort you, to tickle you, to nurture you. To rub you, to hump you, to kiss you, to hug you.
You live in the center of my spirit...but you are not the center of my universe.
I celebrate the lovers you have known. You are their gift to me. They will always be welcome in my heart and home.
I celebrate your lovers to come. They will make you happier, wiser, and more beloved in the world (or at the very least, more popular).
If there are other co-mates in your past, present, or future, i will shower them with gratitude. Hopefully i'll love them too (but one can't be greedy about such things).
My possessions belong to you. But this is as it ever was, as my possessions belong to the world.
If we are co-mates for a lifetime or a day, we will be blessed beyond measure.
I call you my love.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

How is your spirit today?

There are many standard greetings, goodbyes, and other well-worn phrases that pervade language. Over time, the popularity of any phrase waxes and wanes (and once in a rare while, even waxes again). A dedicated linguist can tell you just when a certain conversation took place historically, based upon the phrases employed.
It's time to re-think one of our most well-worn chestnuts - "What did you do today?" Even though we toss off replies to this question almost reflexively, it's time to consider the subconscious process we all go through when confronted with "what did you do today?" In the micro-seconds it takes us to process these things, this is what cycles through the brain..."I don't know. What was i SUPPOSED to do? What did i EXPECT myself to do? What did YOU expect me to do? What did society, my parents, and the ghost of Don Rickles expect me to do? Shit, i'd better come up with something good."
And then presto, in less time than it takes to say "presto", we roll out an answer that will hopefully make our interrogater feel about us the way we want them to feel.
The prevalence of this phrase could only arise in a society that measures people by doing, not being. When we meet someone, we tend to be much more interested in what they've done, what they do, and what they intend to do, than the kind of person they are.
That's an awful lot of weight to be carried by a phrase that passes as a standard greeting.
So let's chuck "what did you do today" onto the scrapheap where it belongs. Let's replace it with something more caring and comforting. What, you know somebody, ANYBODY, who couldn't use more comforting?
Let's replace it with "How's your spirit today?"
Let that wash over your psyche. Doesn't it feel peaceful? Doesn't it feel inviting? Nobody's asking you to justify your life. Nobody's implying that you might not measure up. It feels like the interrogater maybe, just maybe, really wants to know how you are.
So...
How IS your spirit today?

Friday, April 12, 2013

let me stress..?

I've moved!
After the better part of a decade, i no longer call NY, NY home. This is not necessarily a permanent reality...i'll probably return this summer to produce and act in a play. And NYC may be among the most likely places anywhere to find an audience for public readings of my work. So anything's possible.
But for now...
As i sit here writing, i'm no more than twenty feet from the nearest palm tree. I've spent more waking time naked in the past few days than in the previous entire year. If you had an acute sense of smell, you would sit in this chair and know that an ocean is not far off (or in this case, the Gulf of Mexico).
Why am i here? Because New York was literally killing me.
The past few years, partly as literary investigation and partly as a furthering of my spiritual growth, i have been taking apart those walls of rationalization and denial we all construct around our psyches to make living in this dehumanized society possible. This has allowed me to experience emotions more directly and openly, which can be wonderful. But it's also left me with far less protection from the psychological carnage that surrounds us from birth to death. All the cruelty, anger, jealousies, pains, lonelinesses, and fears that emanate from the faces and spirits of every friend and stranger we know, these things seem to pass right through me these days...leaving me bloodied and raw inside. My own walls were so successfully constructed that i'd spent most of my life largely immune from many of the stresses that eat away at us all.
But over the past few years, stress and i have become more intimate than i ever imagined would happen. If this has made me more human, more capable of understanding the daily experience of my fellow travelers on this drifting space rock, then perhaps it's been worth the price.
But too much more of this would have put me in a hospital or worse. It's already possible that permanent damage has been done.
And to think that, even in the worst moments of these past few years, my life was still free from many of the worst stresses of this world. I've removed myself from the pressures of the rat race...alarm clocks, deadlines, and bosses, all wrapped up in a forty-hour (or more) work week that would be deadeningly alien to any healthy human. If you think humans were born to live like that, you have all the scientific awareness of a lump of granite. I've also exempted myself from the life-sucking pressures of parenting, as defined by the two-parent paradigm. Yet even free of those, here are the stress highlights of these past three years:
-A ceiling that leaked for an entire spring and summer, so severe that it deprived me of sleep on any rainy night.
-Jealousy-related hurtfulness or outright hatred from all three humans i've been closest to these past three years.
-A threat of forced homelessness.
-Four months of bedbugs (meaning five months of unsettled, half-sleep).
-A death threat.
-Being the depository of the misplaced aggression that falls on the heads of mediators or peacemakers.
-Spending at least 950 of the past 1000 days completely unsexed and unheld.
Stress manifests differently in each person. For me, it gathers in the stomach. During the most stressful week of my last month in the city, my stomach felt so sickened that it took weeks for the feeling to mostly pass. It would not be idiotic to wonder whether this means i'm well on my way (or well into already) the life of the ulcered.
I was also always a little mystified when people told me that not everyone falls asleep immediately upon going to bed at night, and that many people apparently don't sleep straight through the night. For the better part of the past year however, my sleep has been best-described as interrupted, with occasional bouts of insomnia. How do you people live like this?
So for now, i come to this sunshine state (or THE sunshine state, rather) looking for healing. I've always felt more peaceful and happy around warmth and water. There are some people in this semi-tropical, overdeveloped paradise i enjoy and love very much. And one in particular, of whom loving (and being loved by) might be the most healing thing i've ever known.
I come in search of the healing that babies know, and lose forever in early childhood...the laughing out loud fifty times a day...the being held intimately every single day.
Heck, i'll settle for twenty and most days.
I come in search of our lost humanity.
I love you all.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

"The Medicine Man"

1930
-directed by Scott Pembroke
What an absolutely fascinating slice of cinema history. Jack Benny's first starring film role, in a movie that is perhaps correctly critiqued for not knowing what it wanted to be. As comedy it falls short, as light drama it's too heavy, as drama it's too supercilious. But still, whether through intention or accident, this movie is an entertaining piece of film history and an enthralling piece of social history. Benny plays the emcee of a traveling medicine show. All the cliches are played out...the women he uses and throws away...the locals who fall for the con game...yet these cliches are often turned on their head, as one abandoned woman catches up with the show and outdoes them in the shakedown game, and they are then further shaken down by a sheriff who spares them from the lynch mob (as long as they let him win beaucoup bucks). Fittingly, in this dark comedy, it's hard to root for anyone...but this comes across as far more honest than other films of the era. The only characters you feel sympathy for are the children of a local abusive merchant. The daughter (Betty Bronson - PETER PAN) falls for Benny, and the movie keeps you guessing right up to the end regarding his intentions toward her. The abusive father, starkly portrayed by E. Alyn Warren (TARZAN THE FEARLESS), intends to marry off his daughter to the local butcher. His affirmation of the butcher's right to rape her, and patricarchal attitude in general, are at the core of what makes this film so compelling. All films are "message" films - they only vary in degrees of subtlety. But this film is a ridiculously frank portrayal of the literalness with which children (and daughters in particular) were considered the property of the father. And it's profoundly progressive in its disapproval of that reality. Adapted from a play by Elliot Lester, it's possible that his filmography was short not because of lack of talent, but because he wasn't offering the cookie-cutter fare the studios were looking for. Fascinating.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

corpse babies in the turtle altar

A friend and i came silently and stealthily to an enormous turtle-shaped, ceremonial bathing pool on a rocky shoreline. The pool was one of the key religious altars of our land, and we were part of a revolution against that horrifically repressive religion. Our goddess was very much like Hera or Athena, and we were prepared for any sacrifice to expose her lies. The sun was rising, and as we stirred the water in the pool, bodies became visible. The water was blood red. We knew if we could dump all trace of these murders into the surf below, the power of the goddess's hold on the people would be broken. We pushed several adult corpses into the waves. We found two infant corpses at the bottom of the pool. We knew we had either killed them, or in some way been directly responsible. We accepted that, and carried them unemotionally to the surf below. We began climbing back up. I suddenly realized that my companion was my dear friend Amanda. A wavy, flowing wig had been concealing her identity. We knew that once we climbed back up, we could be taken by the goddesses's acolytes. If that happened, we would probably die. But no violence could be done to anyone at the altar whose appearance was partially concealed. As my hand topped the highest rock level to pull myself back up, i knew we were temporarily untouchable. I suddenly knew that it was Amanda's intent to make love with me before we faced death. We were dangling vertically from the rock ledge, a precarious position. At first she wanted me to turn face-out, while she wrapped herself around me. Even though one of my hands had been able to encircle a rock outcropping above, i knew that we would probably both fall to our deaths were i to try to hold both of us in that position. I nudged her between me and the rocks, face to face. Even in this perilous position, i could feel myself becoming erect as our white altar garments were pulled away...

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

(nOn)marriage vOw

As a member of the concerned citizenry of planet Earth, i hereby aver and avow the following.
I recognize that the institution of marriage is rooted in barbarism most heinous - a "good old-fashioned wedding" in the oldest sense was nothing more than a transfer of living property from father to husband (and treated with all the sentimentality of any other livestock purchase). The degree of servitude has diminished somewhat in the past century, but that in itself would never be enough to prevent outraged womankind from eventually relegating the institution to the scrapheap on which rest the negro slave auction and the DeLorean. So in the 19th century, the notion of romantic love became the "spoonful of sugar" which made the distribution of female kitchen/bedroom slaves go down. This tactic was so preposterously successful that today, women champion marriage more ardently than men(!) Although stunning strides toward women's freedom and equality have been made (at least in certain corners of this planet), marriage is still a roadblock on the journey of human progress and enlightenment. The three cornerstones of the institution are as follows:
(1) HOARDING
Marriage is first and foremost and above all an economic contract. It stipulates who may (and more importantly, implicates who may not) have access to our possessions. This contract is one of the most binding ever devised, generally superceding even the greatest deal-breaker of all - death. However, in a world where only a small minority have enough food, shelter, and health care, hoarding is the greatest human poison of all.
(2) MONOGAMY
Without the idea of monogamy (owning not just a woman, but her children), multi-generational hoarding is inefficient. The resultant attempt to perpetuate the idea that humans are monogamous, even though not a single credible biologist, sociologist, archaeologist, or zoologist IN THE WORLD will support this notion, is the single greatest cause of suffering among all those humans who DO have enough food, shelter, and health care.
(3) LOVE
Realistically, this isn't one of the cornerstones of marriage...but we include it in the discussion to mollify those idiots who will insist on its relevance (and because it's so easily refutable). A simple understanding of the science of sexuality reveals that "falling in love" has nothing to do with poetry and everything to do with hormones. Most people who marry make the colossal blunder of doing so when they are somewhere in the exciting or calming throes of attraction/infatuation/attachment - all three of which stages have a shelf life that falls about a lifetime short of "happily ever after". Any humans bonded in the "attachment" phase will eventually seek anew those exciting brain chemicals of the earlier phases...with anyone but their bonded partner, however. That's how our hormonal cycles work.
THEREFORE, recognizing the dehumanizing threat that marriage as constituted poses, i hereby resolve to avoid the institution.
I resolve to do nothing which will perpetuate its reign as a core institution of our species.
I will attend no wedding now or evermore, as participant or guest. While this may seem extreme, when the soul of the human race is at stake, it is not the time to be quietly polite - it's the time to be quietly impolite.

signed,

-----------------------------
proclaimed on this day
__/__/__