leigh & harriet

Phalli, Vulvae, Thought: Part Finale!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 02:02:00 +0000

A note: I kind of, sort of apologize for all the Greek in this post. But not really. I'm ridiculously proud of myself for figuring out how to enable the correct keyboard, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my efforts at learning some Ancient Greek have enabled me to just barely type some of it without getting a headache. All poems/fragments are from Anne Carson's translation, If not, winter.

I would be lying if I said I was satisfied with what of Sappho I have available to me. But...I sort of thrive on dissatisfaction. I am a poet before most things, and I no more want everything in the world filled out, finished, and explained with perfect clarity than I want to die and actually meet the God with whom I have such a robust, painful, and complicated relationship; meeting one's paramour is so often a disappointment.
Still, what to do with poems who cling to life by the thread of individual words?

175

αὖα          dawn

188

μυθόπλοκος mythweaver

179

γρύτα makeup bag

172

ἀλγεσίδωρος paingiver

But then, things happen in a poem fragmented by time and matter's dissolution:

105A

οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον / ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ' ὔσδῳ,

ἄκρον ἐπ' ἀκροτάτῳ, / λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηες,
οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ', ἀλλ' οὐκ ἐδύναντ' / ἐπίκεσθαι

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch

high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot —
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

I really, really wish I could explicate the poem, and the incarnation we have at our disposal, as well as Carson. But I cannot. Here is what she has to say about it:

"The poem is incomplete, perfectly. There is one sentence, which has no principal verb or principal subject because the sentence never arrives at its main clause. It is one simile, whose point remains elusive since the comparandum never appears. It may be from an epithalamium, but it seems precarious to say so in the absence of the wedding party. If there is a bride, she stays inaccessible. It is her inaccessibility that is present. As the object of comparison suspended in line 1, it exerts a powerful attraction, both grammatical and erotic, on all that follows, but completion is not achieved — grammatical or erotic. Desiring hands close on empty air in the final infinitive, while the apple of their eye dangles perpetually inviolate two lines above." (Carson 1998, 27)

Perhaps the rest of the poem was gorgeous. Perhaps, had it survived intact, it would have altered the course of Western literature. Perhaps I am wrong to celebrate the magic in the interaction between the poem's words and images, and the brokenness of the body which managed to stagger its way out of time.

In Republic, Plato uses three classes of citizen in his ideal state as an analogy for the human soul, where the warrior class stands in for the spirited part of the soul. The part which grows offended when someone has insulted or wronged you and will fight for your dignity as well as your survival. The part of you, in modern parlance, which watches out for your "boundaries."
I don't put the word in quotes because I disparage it. Recognizing where I end and other people begin has been a major part of growing up for me. But then, is it essentially human? In hunter-gatherer societies, as well as in many more traditional horticulturist and/or herding societies, the individuals live in relationships which I think many modern psychologists would define as pathologically enmeshed. In fact, I think an argument could be made that the belief that I end anywhere is related to statism and capitalism: their methods of definition by literal delineation, by finitude.
This conflation of the individual and the state was not Plato's innovation; at the very least, I know that the Pharoahs and the Hittite kings made a similar move in their rhetoric. But I don't know of any previous writer who went in Plato's direction: rather than the individual representing the state/kingdom in miniature, as it were, an entire city state was used to depict the complex of needs, hungers, drives, and dreams of the individual.

The question of boundaries is paramount in erotic literature. Sappho calls Eros, among other things, λυσιμέλης: lusimelēs. Limb-loosener, or melter of limbs.

Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ᾽ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει,
γλυκὐπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον

Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me —
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
(Sappho fr. 130)

πόλλα δὲ ζαφοίταις᾽ἀγάνας ἐπι-
μνάςθεις᾽ Ἄτθιδος ἰμέρωι
λέπταν ποι φρένα κ [ . ] ρ . . . βόρηται

But she goes back and forth remembering
gentle Atthis and in longing
she bites her tender mind
(Sappho fr. 96)

Lobel and Page translate the last two lines "a hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals." Is this being-crossed-into desirable? Certainly, historically, it seems to be the very definition of desire. And when I come across it in my own life, I almost never say no. Is it pathological? Do we want to avoid pathology? And what of happiness? Because Eros seems very, very rarely to lead to happiness. Or at least, not the American version of happiness.

ὄπταις ἄμμε you burn me (fr. 38)

ταῖςι ψῦχρος μὲν ἔγεντο θῦμος their heart grew cold
πὰρ δ᾽ ἴειςι τὰ πτέρα they let their wings down (fr. 42)

Γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔ τοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴςτον
πόθωι δάμειςα παῖδος βραδίναν δι᾽ Ἀφροδίταν

sweet mother I cannot work the loom
I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite
(fr. 92)

The triangle is one of love poetry's most enduring formations. It allows for heightened complexity, heightened desire, but still maintains cohesion, still resists centrifugal disintegration. One of Sappho's most famous poems features a poignant triangle: the speaker*, a man, and a woman he is wooing. Its pleasure lies partly in the classical forces of the formation,** and partly in the way the poem tugs at the edges of the genders, the crosscurrents of identity, erotic lack, and social convention. Sappho paints a picture which is clear and vivid, but which also leaves vast tracts open for the reader/listener to slide in and out of the various characters.

Φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴςος θέοιςιν
ἔμμεν᾽ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάωτιός τοι
ἰςδάνει καὶ πλάςιον ἆδυ φωνεί -
ςας ὐπακούει

καὶ γελαίςας ἰμέροεν, τό μ᾽ ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν ςτήθεςιν ἐπτόαιςεν
ὠς γὰρ <ἔς> ς᾽ ἴδω βρόχε᾽ ὤς με φώνη -
ς᾽ ο᾽θδὲν ἔτ᾽ εἴκει,

ἀλλὰ καμ μὲν γλῶςςα ἔαγε, λέπτον
δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμακεν,
ὀππάτεςςι δ᾽ οὐδὲν ὄρημμ᾽, ἐπιβρό -
μειςι δ᾽ ἄκουαι,

έκαδε μ᾽ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ
παῖςαν ἄγρει, χλωροτ έρα δὲ π οίας
ἔμμι, τεθ νάκην δ᾽ ὀ λίγω ᾽πιδε ύης
φα ίνομ᾽ ἔμ᾽ αὔτ αι.

ἀλλά πάν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ καὶ πένητα

He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
(fr. 31)

________________________________________________________

And for my next trick... I have no idea!! Which is glorious, because I tend to overplan by a mile. I usually have my next five to ten posts arranged in a neat little line in my head, so it's quite pleasant to be at loose ends. I've also been finishing a number of books — Carson's Eros: the Bittersweet, Saxon's Sex at Dusk (a highly satisfying, if somewhat disturbing, rebuttal of the shitty science and psychology of Sex at Dawn), and Alison Stone's An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy — all without starting any new ones. It's so strange to have space open in my head.
I suspect there will be some more posts on poetry, simply because I've been in the mood lately, but I'm also trying to leave some openings for what I'll be studying in my upcoming classes. This month I start on prerequisites to go to grad school for psychology (with a heavy dose of theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis), so I expect to have a lot of pleasurable thoughts colliding and exploding in my head in the near future. We'll just have to wait and see what makes its way in here.

* The tendency is to read the speaker as Sappho herself. This is in fact how I read the poem. With the exception of the very tiny fragments (which is actually most of her work), I feel like it is fairly easy to tell when Sappho is taking a "higher" tone — i.e., is composing for a wedding or other such occasion, and is therefore speaking with a persona which may be very different from her own — and when she is speaks from her own heart. I may very well be being presumptuous.

** My favorite triangle of all time being I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

Phalli, Vulvae, Thought: Part 5

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 23:31:00 +0000

It would be disingenuous of me — writing a couple of posts about Sappho at the end of a series on homosexuality/homoeroticism in Ancient Greece — to try to deny the power of the questions around Sappho's sexuality. Was she, or wasn't she? We want to know. After all, this is the woman who originates the term lesbian, a term which has no correlate amongst gay men.
But these are troubled waters. Often when a minority or disempowered group claims someone as their own — a move which they are not only entitled to, but which may also be vital to the psychological survival of some of their members — that someone gets relegated. That someone gets reduced. So DuBois wrote about Black people. De Beauvoir was a lady philosopher. And Wilde* was just so flamboyant, we can't expect what he said to apply to normal people. We titter, or assume that what they said has no bearing for those of us outside of that group. Descartes, though. Bertrand fucking Russell. Now those were Philosophers. They were after universal truths.
One strategy — often employed by well-meaning folk who fit more comfortably into the audience intended by those real Philosophers — is to pretend to ignore the difference. Or maybe sometimes the well-meaners do succeed, though I would argue they do so by eliding the difference subconsciously. But perhaps writers and professors are right to simply say, for example, that Hannah Arendt was one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. Perhaps they are right to ignore that she was a woman, to pretend that this doesn't mark her as extraordinary, to avoid at all costs the suggestion that her gender may have even shaped her philosophy.
I want to first say that I completely understand why people employ this strategy. We are living in times highly charged by rhetoric debating sexuality, gender, race, and any number of markers of outsider status. I understand why men often look unsure, when we are locked in a philosophical debate, as to whether gender and its implications for philosophy are up for discussion. If I bring up my work as a doula in a conversation on embodiment, it seems downright silly to pretend that gender doesn't shape us as philosophers. But if not, and I voice an opinion about, say, Picketty's book, is it sexist to ask if my opinions are shaped by my experience as a woman? I see the wheels turning, and I completely sympathize, because the same wheels are screaming through my mind when I talk philosophy or politics or economics or even a goddamned cookie recipe with a person of color.
But here's the thing. Let's return to Arendt for a moment. Because Hannah Arendt was also a Jew. And in the US in general, and the Northwest and Northeast in particular, being Jewish has become so normalized that now we openly discuss the ways that Jewishness has shaped people. My best friend is hands down one of the best debaters I've ever come across. When asked about his rhetorical abilities, he will often mention that his mother was Jewish, his grandfather a Jewish attorney and judge, and that he marinated in the culture of analysis and vigorous debate as a kid. This is just as normal as me talking about growing up Calvinist, or someone else mentioning the ways that Catholicism shaped their worldview.
We're not just talking about the easy potshots here, like Woody Allen and Philip Roth; these are artists who declare their Jewishness from the rooftops.** We can now respectfully talk about how Freud and Spinoza were shaped, and how their thinking shows this novel perspective, or offers that unique contribution. We can talk about it because in our clearer moments we see how we are all shaped, how no one is "neutral," no one is "unflavored," while the rest of the world is somehow just like us but with added flourishes.
I don't want to deny the reality of anti-Semitism, which is real and even thriving in some quarters. But I do think that in some regions of the world, a line has been crossed, and being Jewish — and owning the shaping power of that — is no different than being raised Catholic.***
I couldn't speak for LGBTQ people and say they are to that point. It feels like that point is just around the corner, but considering that hate violence is still very real — and a particularly real threat for non-white LGBTQ individuals — I don't want to ring their victory bells for them.
But in considering the problem of Sappho's sexuality, here are my hopes.
I am hoping we have reached a point where we admit that she was most likely, at the very least, not straight (as we know it). And that we can avoid turning her queerness into her entire identity.
I am hoping that we can see the beauty and innocence of a feminine sexuality allowed to thrive in its own pathways. That we can revel in the sensuality of her poetry, at the absolutely brilliant prosody, and acknowledge that her sexual desires and choices undoubtedly shaped her creative and intellectual impulses and development, the same way Socrates' sexuality, his ugliness, his wealth, and his physical power shaped his.
We — and by "we" here I very much mean educated, upper-class, white folk — we typically don't read Shakespeare and think, "Well, but this is for such a small percentage of the world! Straight White Dudes only! Most of the world isn't Straight White Dudes, so this must be too narrow to be relevant." No. We defend it. We argue for a quotient of universality. We argue for the value of the craftsmanship. We argue for all we're worth the preciousness of the facets of the human psyche that Shakespeare managed to reveal.
Anyone who considers herself a thinker, a serious reader, a lover of human culture and its artifacts, should be willing to do no less for Manjhan than she would for Plato; no less for Adrienne Rich than she would for John Milton; no less for Langston Hughes than she would Dante Alighieri; no less for Yvonne Rainer than she would for George Balanchine.

A few words about Sappho and her work: if you haven't read Sappho yet, you don't yet know the language of desire. I mean it. Go buy this and this. The first is Anne Carson's translation of Sappho's fragments, and the second is basically a short book-length meditation by Carson on Sappho's poetry. Carson gets Sappho. Everything about sex and love and the gods and moonlight and weddings and beauty and abandonment and ecstasy and basically everything ever will be explained. Seriously. She might be better than the Song of Solomon. Also, for what it's worth, I don't actually buy that Sappho was a lesbian (as we know the term). I read her as bisexual. She's just so damned affectionate and appreciating of both male and female beauty. Most of the overtly erotic poems do seem to be about women, but I sense desire in her words about men as well. I could be wrong, obviously. But that's the vibe I catch.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Sappho lived well before Socrates. Interestingly, she lived right around the time democracy was becoming a thing in Athens, but there's a very important point to keep in mind here: Sappho was from Lesbos. Lesbos is, by ancient standards, nowhere's near Athens. In fact, it's much closer to modern day Turkey. I know I really belabored this in the earlier posts, but it's important to not accidentally turn "Ancient Greece" into a monolithic culture it never was. Athens was mind-bogglingly repressive towards women, even by ancient standards. Lesbos had a reputation for having women who were as enthusiastic about going down on women as they were about blow jobs; obviously, this could have been, er, tongue in cheek, but the main point I want to make is that Sappho doesn't seem to have felt the difference that we see when we look at her as a "lesbian" or "queer" or "bi" writer. She seems to have just fallen in love, a lot, and been really enthusiastic about it. I know I may be idealizing a bit, but that's about all I can extrapolate from her poetry. There's not a lot of angst. There's not a lot of, "But what if they find out??!" In fact, I can't see any of that. I can't see any fear. Which opens up intriguing possibilities.
Sarah B. Pomeroy, the best authority I've been able to find on the topic of women in the Ancient World, writes this about Sappho:

Many modern scholars have vehemently denied that Sappho's sentiments occasioned overt erotic activity. The Greeks certainly realized that Sappho wrote about the sexual activities of women. Few fragments survive from this portion of her work: on one papyrus fragment the first five letters of olisbos (leather phallus) may be read with near certainty. Part of another poem preserved on parchment relates: "on a soft bed you satisfied your desire." "You" in Greek can be masculine or feminine, but Sappho is not known to have written erotic poems to men. In Greek literature generally, references to the women of Lesbos connoted unusually intense eroticism, both homosexual and heterosexual. Anacreon, writing in the generation after Sappho, complained that the girl from Lesbos whom he desired "gapes after some other woman." The homosexual reputation of Lesbian women was the theme of Lucians fifth "Dialogue of the Courtesans," written in the second century A.D. On the other hand, in Athenian comedy the verbs lesbiazein and lesbizein ("to play the Lesbian") and other references to the women of Lesbos connote enthusiasm for all sorts of sexual experiences and "whorish behavior." (Pomeroy 1975, 54)

So my next post will be focused on Sappho, and also on Carson's work interpreting her. Then I will be starting on prerequisites for a graduate degree in psychology, which means my infrequent posts may become even more infrequent. But alas. I am human, and I move at a human pace.

Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Shocken Books, 1975. Print.

* Well...*ahem* Wilde was. A bit.
** Though this stage may be a necessary part of the process.
*** I am, I know, grossly oversimplifying and glossing over an enormous problem, which I call the Problem of the Table. Those with the most privilege — namely, white people, and especially white, straight men — tend to think of ending the problems of prejudice as being a problem of just getting everyone to The Table. The Table being their table. They want to share. I think their hearts are often in the right place. But what I am more and more hearing from less privileged folk — and especially Black and LGBTQ activists — is that they are building their own tables, and they would like to stop having people steal from their tables. They would prefer their tables not get burned down, thank you, and they'd like it if we didn't hog all the fucking wood. In other words, our table isn't the only one, and in fact, lots of people don't even want to sit with us, we're that lame. Most frighteningly, most people might eventually decide our table is the lame table. Or something. It's a sloppy metaphor, but it's the image that keeps coming to mind these days. It could be argued that all that happened to Jews — and to Catholics, for that matter — is they got officially brought to our nice White Table. I'm not currently equipped to have that conversation. Part of me doesn't buy it, but another part of me has to admit that in the hundred years or so that we've seen the position of Jews change significantly, we haven't welcomed in a new world order. This problem — of White straight people trying to make social justice a problem of just getting everyone to our relatively unchanged table — is an absolutely massive problem.

Phalli, Vulvae, Thought: Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 03:28:00 +0000

The Name of a Thing that Isn't

Plato's Symposium gives us the only Classical Attic reference to female homosexuality. Dover explains it a bit:

Classical Attic literature refers once, and once only, to female homosexuality: 'Aristophanes' in Pl. Smp. 191e derives hetairistriai from that category of original double beings who were all female. The word is not attested elsewhere, any more than its masculine analogue hetairistēs...it clearly means a woman who stands in a relationship to another woman comparable to a male relationship of hetairēsis. (Dover 1978, 172)

Dover here is referring to the following story. I've chosen to summarize Plato's version, as it is a bit long, but it's well worth reading if you ever choose to grab a copy of Symposium. Which, obviously, ever Westerner in the world should do:

"In the beginning," so to speak, there were three genders. Male, female, and a combined gender. (Admittedly this still sounds like two, but bear with me.) Humans were actually round, with their backs and sides forming the outside of the circle, and with their genitals also on the outside. They had four hands, four legs, and two identical faces on a single head.
They were incredibly powerful, so much so that they were able to threaten the seat of the gods. Zeus and the other Olympian gods met in council and decided on a solution: Zeus would split every human into two parts, thereby weakening them, while simultaneously doubling the number of beings offering sacrifices to the gods. Win-win!!
And as he spoke, so he did. Zeus split all the humans into halves. He instructed Apollo to twist their faces 'round to the other side, so they could see the site of their woundedness, of their loss. Apollo also healed their wounds by pulling the skin together from the rest of their bodies, over onto what we call the stomach, much as a purse might be cinched up. He smoothed out most of their wrinkles, but left a few around the stomach and navel, to remind them of what had happened to them in the past.
But alas, each half missed its other half so much, they longed only to be re-unified. Their essence had been split. They embraced and proceeded to do absolutely nothing but grasp one another desperately. They began to starve to death. After all, the loss of one half of one's own self begs the question: what is left to live for in such a barren existence?
Humanity began to die out. But Zeus felt pity for the pathetic creatures, and came up with some solutions. First, he moved their genitals around to the front. Previously, procreation had been unrelated to sexual intercourse; their genitals were on the outside of their bodies, and they had intercourse with the ground in order to produce offspring. By moving the genitals and introducing intercourse, Zeus gave humans a pleasurable way to spend their time. When they embraced, sex would provide a temporary release of all their pent up longing for their other half. This would allow them to get back to work, and get back to those sacrifices of course.
And so this is where homosexual men and women came from, as well as heterosexuals. Men and women who are descended from the combined gender are heterosexual. Men who descend from the male gender are attracted to men; and women descended from the female gender are attracted to women.

And so here we are. Onto the second half of a series of posts I've been writing on homoerotic desire in Ancient Greece. The first half were on male homosexuality.* So now, of course, the second half will be on female homosexuality.
And yet, something felt off as I read and re-read the story. And unfortunately, my summary masks the details I think are important here.
In Plato's account, Aristophanes** explains the reasons for the relocation of the male genitalia in the m-m gender; describes some of the virtues and benefits of male homosexuality; and even develops an idea about the mechanism of male homosexual love and desire:

His reasons for doing this were to ensure that, when couples embraced, as well as male-female relationships leading to procreation and offspring, male-male relationships would at least involve sexual satisfaction, so that people would relax, get on with their work and take care of other aspects of life. (Symposium 191c)

And any men who are offcuts from the male gender go for boys...These boys are the ones who are outstanding in their childhood and youth, because they're inherently more manly than others. I know they sometimes get called immoral, but that's wrong: their actions aren't prompted by immorality, but by courage, manliness, and masculinity. They incline towards their own characteristics in others. There's good evidence for their quality: as adults, they're the only men who end up in government. (Symposium 191e-192a)

No such explanation is given for female homosexuals. I want to first make the point that there seems to be little malice for such women; it could easily be argued that Aristophanes is describing one side of the story, and that it simply is obvious that the inverse is true for women.
But there is where I located my problem: women are the inverse of men. Because, in the manner of Jung's absurd Electra complex, the treatment lesbian desire is given amounts to something like, "Oh, um, yes. Women. Well, the women are, ah...just the reverse of the men." In fact, even my thinking in writing this series betrays a bit of the same drive towards symmetry. For that it what the lesbians in Aristophanes story are for: to keep the tale balanced. To keep it symmetrical.
Now, the parallels between lesbian desire and gay male desire are not lost upon me; it would be foolish to deny this. But there is one more detail to Aristophanes' story that makes me feel not quite friendly towards his description of women. From his description of the combined gender:

There was also a third [gender], which was a combination of both the other two. Its name has survived, but the gender itself has died out. In those days, there was a distinct type of androgynous person, not just the word, though like the word the gender too combined male and female; nowadays, however, only the word remains, and that counts as an insult. (Symposium 189e)

The word androgyne "counts as an insult." Specifically, an androgyne was a man — the representative of a human, a person, a someone — who was effeminate, in a bad way. An androgyne was not someone who's biological sex and/or gender was ambiguous. It was an insult for cowardly — i.e., too-much-like-women — men.
This side comment of Aristophanes captures the entire story's slant perfectly: males are normal. Males are the norm. Male desire is the norm. Male bodies are the norm. Women are a kinda shitty variation on this.
I know I have mentioned Kenneth Dover's book Greek Homosexuality here. It is an excellent text, and the first place I would point someone interested in the subject. However, even Sir Dover is limited by the sheer lack of material:

That female homosexuality and the attitude of women to male homosexuality can both be discussed within one part of one chapter reflects the paucity of women writers and artists in the Greek world and the virtual silence of male writers on these topics. (Dover 1978, 171)

And this, unfortunately, sums up the topic pretty well. There is simply very little to be said, because everything was being said by men, and they seem to have either ignored the psychological experience of being a lesbian, or to have downright despised them. Asclepiades mentions two Samian women who

are not willing to enter upon the (sc. practice?) of Aphrodite according to her rules, but desert to other things which are not seemly. Mistress Aphrodite, be an enemy to these fugitives from the couch in your domain!

And this comes from a man who boasts of the strength of his desire for young men.
Another clue pointing to the vacuum comes from Aphrodite, Eros, and some of the terms for sex. Dover points out that in Hellenistic literature (remembering, of course, that this was much later than Attic Greece), there was a belief that Aphrodite inspired heterosexual passion, Eros inspired homosexual male passion, and....absolutely no one inspired homosexual female passion because, presumably, they don't have any. Or they don't exist. You can kind of take your pick here.
From Aphrodite's name we also have the word aphrodīsia, which denotes copulation. Paidika aphrodīsia being the term for homosexual male intercourse, and "child-begetting aphrodīsia being heterosexual intercourse. Again, there is nothing for lesbians.
For me, the saving factor in all of this is that little detail. It fascinates me, though, in a rather more poetic way. While the Ancient Greeks were careful to distinguish between men fucking men, and men fucking women — while they were enthusiastic about sex involving men, and ready to be disciplined in their moral and litigious structures for it — there is no word for lesbian sex. Which means that whenever it happened — and of course it happened — this was a thing happening as far outside of Plato's carefully analyzed and articulated world as can be imagined. It's almost like...two women having sex is like...I don't know, God or something. It's like it's so far outside of verbalized, conscious reality, it's a living void. I may be romanticizing it. I have a deeply held belief — which lesbians can choose to either chuckle at or be irritated by — that I would be a markedly better poet and philosopher if I were a lesbian. There is something about the radical outside-ness of female homosexuality that I've always suspected would give me a clarity and distinction of vision that I simply can't claim, being as interpolated as I am into heterosexual — and very-male-dominated — sexuality and desire.
Again, I know I may be romanticizing this. And certainly I would never suggest that just doing something sexually deviant would give you some kind of profound knowledge. It would probably teach you something; but whether that knowledge would prove to be helpful — to say nothing of being precious, which is the unreasonably high standard I try to hold my desired knowledge up to — seems dubious. But I do think that having an identity which sets someone outside of the norm gives them a unique angle from which to view life. Witness the contributions of Jewish, Black, and Queer philosophers over just the past 50-100 years.
I'm only going to put up one more entry in this series, and that, thankfully, will be almost entirely about Sappho. I have included virtually all I could glean from four books on the subject of female homosexuality in Ancient Greece in this one post, and anyway, we could all use a little more Sappho in our lives.
Cheers!

* Note that I have here moved to using the term "homosexuality," or "homosexual" as opposed to "homoeroticism" or "homoerotic". At the beginning of this series of posts, I explained why I was using "homoerotic". The reasons that actual homosexuality — i.e., something closer to "being gay" — are at play seems fairly obvious given Plato's account. The term genetic doesn't seem entirely appropriate when discussing the ancients; perhaps innate, native, or indwelling would be more appropriate. But the modern term would probably be genetic. Aristophanes is describing something like sexual orientation or identity.

** Not the playwright.

Dover, K. J. Greek Homosexuality. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Print.

Phalli, Vulvae, Thought: Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 25 Apr 2015 00:19:00 +0000

I would apologize for the break. Except I've been enjoying it very much.
Part 3 of however many, with diversions also forthcoming.

Relation of Sex to Power

Older Man/Younger Man

As I mentioned in the last entry, the starting point for a discussion of homoeroticism in Ancient Greece is still Sir Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality, originally published in 1978. There, Dover argues for a relatively codified framework for sexual relations between men. And as I also mentioned, Hubbard argues that a strict formation — the erastai-erōmenos pair — was not ubiquitous.

Hubbard makes a fair point that we have ample evidence, both literary and visual, that romantic and sexual relationships between men who were close in age did occur. On the one hand, I can appreciate his point: we still don't have scholarly consensus on what homoeroticism would have looked like, across whatever spectrum it undoubtedly displayed itself in.

However, Hubbard goes a step too far and, I think, shows his hand. First he points out that not all same sex relationships between men adhered to the erastai-erōmenos structure. But he then goes on to argue that even when an older man was in love with a younger man, we shouldn't be too quick to read the erastai as being in the position of power:

To the extent that literary texts display a power differential, it is rather to emphasize the powerlessness and even emotional helplessness of the lover and a privileged position of control occupied by the beloved youth... Even poems in which a lover congratulates himself on becoming free of a youth's tyranny...or admonishes the youth to beware of the future...reflect a sense of desperation on the part of an unsuccessful lover. (Hubbard 2003, 11)

I just... I just don't even know where to begin. Hubbard's blindness here took my breath away when I read the above passage. "A privileged position of control"? The issues I have with Hubbard here are several:

  a) First, in considering any individual pair of men, we would have to distinguish between slaves and freeborn Athenian boys, as well as consider the propertied (or not) status of the beloveds in question. The authors and artists who so lavishly declared their passion often fail to give us this information. For their purposes, it hardly mattered of course, but for the lives of the young beloveds, the questions of property and citizen status were paramount.

  b) Even for a freeborn citizen erōmenos, we must remember the pedagogical aspect of the relationship. The whole argument for why the relationship was advantageous for him was based on the fact that the older man had access to political connections, power, and resources which the younger man lacked.

  c) For a slave who was being sexually pursued by a landed aristocrat, Hubbard's argument reads as a blatant insult. For a freeborn citizen erōmenos, who could plan on inheriting from his own family, the consequences of rejection were not (necessarily) dire. For a slave, retaining the affection of the older lover could very well be a matter of survival.

For the purposes of my humble blog, I mostly wanted to point out two things. Firstly, even an extremely intelligent modern scholar can have blind spots, and Hubbard's here is glaring. Only a person in a position of power could ever look at someone they are lusting after* and think the object of desire actually possesses more power than they do.
And secondly, we as modern readers of Ancient Greek history, literature, and philosophy should never forget that power was just as real — and just as life-shaping — as it is now. In patriarchy/kyriarchy/hierarchy/what-have-you-archy, power is distributed unevenly. It just is. Things like monetary and property resources, political connections, race, gender, language/accent, familial ties, religious affiliation... all contribute to place people in a ranking system.

Power Consolidation/Distribution

In considering how male homoeroticism would have impacted women, the reader is, as with almost all things Ancient Greek, confronted with the problem of documentation. For reasons which may or may not be causally linked, Athens had a flourishing literary scene and was highly litigious and it generally sucked for women. Which means we have the best documentation of what life was like for women in Ancient Athens, as opposed to other contemporary cities. Maybe life was much better as a Corinthian woman, or a Theban; maybe not. If you were ever interested in reading a book on the situation of women in the Ancient world, I strongly recommend Sarah B. Pomeroy's book Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. In fact, if you just feel like reading an actually measured study of something to do with women, I would be hard pressed to think of another suggestion. Pomeroy is well aware of the inherent sexism of academia, but she is also conscious of the ways that feminism can find the things it wants to. (I myself am certainly guilty of this flaw.) In the book, Pomeroy over and over again says possibly the sexiest thing a scholar can say: "Well, we know fragment X, and fragment Y, but we can't really make any conclusive statements based on so little." Be still my heart.**
Pomeroy, while reminding us how little we know about women in the Ancient Greek city states in general, has done a good deal of research on Athens and Sparta in particular. Spartans weren't big on writing things down, but their fellow Ancient Hellenes were quite keen on talking about the Spartans. (If I'd lived in the time of Leonidas, I would, too.)
As I was reading about Athens' manifestations of (male) homoerotic relationships, a thought kept popping into my head. Something along the lines of, "Barely disguised misogyny." Because rather than stopping to consider whether their under-education of women — not to mention their under-nourishment, which was a big surprise to me — might be the reason the women weren't their intellectual equals — and rather than questioning a system which consistently paired men with girl-wives who were literally young enough to be their daughters — the ancient Athenians simply affirmed to themselves that women were dumb. The occasional woman who wasn't, such as the odd Aspasia or two, was perceived as an aberration. (Note that Aspasia wasn't from, nor was she educated in, Athens.) Athenian men wanted, as I would assume most normal humans do, equals in mind and thought. Sexual relationships with educated, well-fed young men, who were not only permitted to exercise but were encouraged to do so, were a shortcut to such relationships of equality. Meanwhile, upper class women were rationed less food, forbidden from public exercise, and educated only in the activities and needs of the home; hardly a recipe for female intellectuals. Lower class women were in roughly the same position — as far as the real or potential erastai was concerned — as a male slave. That is, available sexually, but not someone to whom anything was socially or politically owed.
Such were my thoughts both as I read Hubbard's collection, and as I started Pomeroy's book. One potential outcome of the pedagogical pederasty in Athens was an even more radical consolidation of power than I previously realized. By denying women the ability to interact with men, and solidly establishing homoerotic relationships as a norm amongst men, even aristocratic women were largely shut out from the circles of power. One can condone or condemn the historic use of sex as a tool to gain access to power, but either way, it is a time-honored method for women to get what they want. Having this tool's effectiveness curtailed means that even the women we would expect to see doing moderately well — that is, the freeborn, aristocratic women — remain almost entirely silent in Athens.
Sparta, though, seems to have potentially had a different outcome to their own practice of pedagogical pederasty. Because of how Spartan society was set up — with young Spartan men living in their syssitia, even remaining for several years after they married, and Spartan women having property rights and education — the effect of pedagogical pederasty may very well have been to free up the women. Spartan women were literate and numerate, and were (in)famous amongst contemporaneous Hellenes for speaking their minds. Spartan men were frequently away on military campaigns, while the citizen women stayed home and ran the city state. Because Spartan society assumed that the healthier and better educated the women were, the better off the newborns would be, Spartan women had the resources to do something with the freedom that pederasty gave them. And with less concern about rivals threatening their access to resources, the women may have enjoyed an effective distribution of power.

Slavery

Because I believe the pervasiveness of chattel slavery, "the glory that was Greece," and hierarchy in general are not entirely unrelated, I want to spend a moment dwelling upon this before I'm done with the subject of male homoeroticism.

I believe I mentioned this in the first entry on this subject, but my interest here is slightly prejudiced: I notice, over and over again, that modern Americans and Europeans frequently smirk comically, and possibly even wistfully, when the subject of sexual relations between men in Ancient Athens and Greece in general comes up.

A young boy who is owned by a pimp, and leased out to be fucked on the ground by men with the resources to gratify themselves, hardly represents a symbol of sexual freedom and the generous spirit of love. A slave who serves wine to wealthy assholes — like, say, Plato himself —at Symposia, where the men famously got raucously drunk, and has to submit to whatever sexual desires the citizens may have that night... not him either.

On the one hand, it would be overly simplistic to assume that all homoerotic relationships were characterized by an enormous power differential, or were by their nature abusive. I want very much to believe — and in fact I do believe — that a tiny handful of human beings throughout time have lucked out enough to both fall in love, and to have that love sanctioned, no matter the genders concerned. Some Ancient Greek citizens consistently felt attracted to men, were able to enjoy their sexuality, and even to form satisfying long-term relationships with their lovers. This has, in my opinion, not been the case for enough non-heteronormative people. But the portrait that emerges when one digs even a fraction of an inch under the pseudo-liberal idealization of Athens is one of coercion and the blindness of privilege; not free love and a celebration of erotic pleasure.

Ancient Greece's advances were made possible by leisure; a leisure that would not have been possible without the extensive use of slaves. The same power dynamics that enabled people like Plato and Socrates and Solon and Herodotus to sit around contemplating, processing, and forming innovative ideas radically disenfranchised boys and young men.*** Some would get lucky enough to possibly get together enough money to purchase their own freedom, although we don't have a good sense of how prevalent that eventuality was. The only question this leaves me with, before I do move on to women's sexuality in the Ancient Greek world, is to what extent such a power differential is still the case. I am currently typing away on what, from a global-historical perspective, is a very expensive device. Only I didn't pay what it's probably actually worth, because it was assembled by Chinese workers whose lives seem to have sucked pretty bad. And I promise you the money I paid for my clothes didn't get evenly distributed amongst the people who actually made it, and the designers who drew it.

* And realistically, any older lover who threatens a younger person with punishment for not returning their love is in the throes of lust and not love. This is a frequent cry of the "enslaved" older lover in Attic poetry.

** My generation is so facetious, I never know how my odd little statements come across. I'm not being sarcastic. Pretty much the way to my heart is to say things like, "Nothing is so impossible as a conclusive statement."

*** Obviously women were also completely, radically disenfranchised, but I read so much feminist literature, I'm never in danger of forgetting it. I do think that sometimes feminism forgets the abuses men suffer.

Phalli, Vulvae, Thought: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 19:54:00 +0000

Dear Interwebs:

I finished this post almost a month ago, but recent events in my life have disrupted my interest in writing in an online environment. I'm still planning on finishing this series, and I will probably write at least one blog post giving some explanation if I do decide to take an actual break. But for now, here is part two of Phalli, Vulvae, Thought.

Attitudes Over Time

Pedagogical Pederasty and δημοκρατία

The most commonly discussed homoerotic relational structure in Archaic Greece is that of pedagogical pederasty. Waterfield's introduction to Symposium provides a basic outline of the pederastic relationship:

Typically, the objects of male homoerotic desires were young boys in their teens, between the ages of puberty and growth of a proper beard. A good-looking boy could expect to have a number of older erastai (lovers, or literally men feeling erōs for him). They would each pursue him, and try to persuade him to consummate a sexual affair, while he was expected to be coy and to resist their blandishments. The boy might, of course, eventually be won over by one of his lovers, but even then there was no equality of desire. He was expected to be merely passive, to let the man have his way, to 'gratify' the lover (as the Greeks tended rather delicately to put it): the lover would achieve the enjoyment at least of conquest and of sexual release, while the boy might at the most reciprocate with philia (loyal affection or friendship), which would be due for the lover's patronage (for future political advancement, perhaps), rather than for his sexual attentions. That is why only the older man is a 'lover', while the boy is merely an erōmenos — an object of the lover's erōs. (Waterfield 1994, xvi)

Waterfield's explanation doesn't get at the pedagogical aspect of the relationship, however, and it should not be minimized. Many scholars locate the origin of pederastic relationships in initiatory rituals, which implies that they were seen as conducive to the maturation of the young men who would one day be leading and defending their various city states. The social and political introductions and connections the erastai provided could prove vitally important; they may have even, in some instances, lasted well into the future, long after the sexual aspects of the relationship had (probably) ended.

It should be noted that Waterfield has based his explanation on the work of Sir Kenneth Dover. Dover's book Greek Homosexuality is considered one of the essential scholarly works on the topic, and one of the first to attempt an objective study. However, there is still no scholarly consensus on exactly what form homoerotic relationships took. While Dover and Waterfield emphasize the older man/erastai-pubescent boy/erōmenos structure, Hubbard points out that we have a good deal of literary and artistic evidence for other expressions of (male) desire:

It is often assumed that same-gender relationships followed a stereotypical pattern and set of protocols in ancient society: in classical Greece this would take the form of pedagogical pederasty associating a man (usually before the age of marriage) and a freeborn boy... The texts, however, reveal a much wider diversity of relationships in terms of both age and status. While these "non-normative" relationships are sometimes attacked in the texts as eccentric or inappropriate, even the "normative" forms of same-gender involvement are treated with hostility by certain sources. What the evidence establishes is that a variety of behaviors occurred with sufficient frequency to be worthy of notice, even if disapprobatory.

Green homosexual activity, despite popular misconceptions, was not restricted to man-boy pairs. Vase-painting shows numerous scenes where there is little or no apparent difference in age between the young wooer and his object of courtship...as well as graphic scenes of sexual experimentation between youths. Early poets such as Theognis and Pindar make it clear that youths were attracted to and slept with other youths of the same age...

The youths named as men's favorites in Athenian oratory are all meirakia, a term generally used of those in the eighteen to twenty-one age-group. Philosophers, in fact, preferred older youths, who were capable of a higher level of intellectual engagement; the early Stoics thought that a suitable beloved could be as old as twenty-eight. Aristotle claims that relationships based on love of character often continued after the loss of the beloved's youthful beauty. Xenophon reports that Menon, a Thessalian general, had a bearded beloved; similarly, Philostratus praises his beloved's beard. (Hubbard 2003, 4-5)

So we do see some diversity in the types of homoerotic pairings in Archaic and Classical Greece. One factor, however, appears to remain consistent: the social sanctioning of any same-gender relationships was a feature of the aristocracy. In the Classical period, in particular, we have Aristophanes to give voice to the popular opinion of homosexuality. It is not a positive one, to say the least.

But why?

This leads me to one of the details that caught me off guard in my research: because homoerotic relationships of any kind were almost exclusively associated with the upper classes, the more democracy took hold, the less sanctioned were same-gender sexual pairings. Vase paintings depicting pederastic courtship scenes and sexual experimentation remain common until about 460 BCE, which parallels the celebration of pederastic relationships in poetry. After this time, the vase paintings and poetry become much more sedate.

Which brings me to my awful little timeline. Let us pause a moment before we officially move on to Awful Little Timeline. This fucker took me a long time to figure out. I would apologize for it, except I can't imagine how long it would take to do a better job creating digitally (this is digital, right?) something that is so fucking easy to do by hand. I particularly like how the guestimate of Homer's life (spanning roughly 250 years) gets only one notch on the whole line. And needless to say, Ephialtes and Socrates should overlap, as should Solon and Sappho, but I have no idea how to make that happen. Everything is equidistant below, so try to imagine spacing things out more appropriately:

Homer		Solon (beginnings of democracy in Athens)		Socrates
1100 BCE - 850 BCE		640 BCE - 560 BCE		470 BCE - 400 BCE

	730 BCE - 650 BCE		630 BCE - 570 BCE		460 BCE
	First textual evidence for homoeroticism		Sappho		Ephialtes severely curtails Areopagus

I think I have been guilty of this as well, but it is a misnomer to think that there was a heroic revolution in Ancient Athens, followed by a peaceful, egalitarian epoch of self-governance. Democracy (δημοκρατία) — much like, I believe, all political changes that stick — took time to develop. Important moments in the development of democracy in Athens include:

Solon opened the position of Archon to all citizens of Athens, with property ownership restrictions, and sets up the 400 member Boule as a counterweight to the Areopagus (which was entirely aristocratic) in the early 6th century
In the mid-6th century, Peisistratos seizes power three separate times, overthrowing the still young democracy
In 508 BCE Cleisthenes abolishes the traditional four tribe system by which the Athenians were divided for government purposes, and replaces it with the 10 "tribe" system, based on demes, or geographical divisions of the city
Around 462/1, Ephialtes reduces the powers of the Areopagus; around the same time, the membership was extended to the lowest levels of propertied citizens

I'm not going to go further into the historical details, but the Wikipedia page on the subject offers a decent summary. (And just FYI, I really am someday going to talk about women in Ancient Greece, which is why Sappho is on there.)
So why was it that as democracy took more and more of a hold of Athenian society, pederasty — and homoerotic relationships in general — become less and less popular? It seems to have been predominantly an issue of association. Because pederastic relationships were associated with the upper classes of Athenian aristocracy, they smacked too much of privilege for the rest of the Athenian populace to continue tolerating them. Hubbard also makes the argument that only the upper classes had the time and energy for such dalliances, but I find that difficult to believe. It honestly doesn't take that much time to have sex, and I for one don't buy that homoerotic desire never arose in any lower class Athenian individuals or communities. Still, in terms of visibility, any kind of homoerotic relationships existed only amongst the aristocracy.* It was, as it sometimes still is, perceived as a vice of the wealthy and leisured classes and as such, an aspirational Athenian democrat could only hope that its existence would be stamped out. Also, given that homosexual relations do not produce children — and given that it does appear that copulation and procreation are at the very least strongly linked — labeling homoerotic desire as "unnatural" was as common and easy a way of demonizing it as it often is today, and popular playwrights like Aristophanes exploited this to the fullest extent. Hubbard offers a summary of a scene from Clouds:

One of the denizens of Socrates' Thinkery, named "Better Argument," describes at length the archaic ideal of modest, orderly, muscular, athletic boys who defer to their elders. "Worse Argument" counters him by justifying a life of dissolution and adultery; even if one should be punished, as adulterers sometimes were, by having radishes or other foreign objects rammed up one's anus, one would be none the worse for it, since most of Athens' intellectual and political elite are already "wide-assed" due to having engaged in pederastic relations as boys. Better Argument admits defeat in the debate, as he too belongs among this group. The implication is that having been penetrated as a boy changes one's anatomy (and character) for life, and that even active pederasts like Better Argument have never really ceased being "wide-assed" passives. (Hubbard 2003, 87)

The term "passives," of course, is one created by humans who like penetrating things with their penises for those humans who like being penetrated with penises. I myself have never found the activity to be all that "passive," but perhaps I am verging off point.
The question of penetration is vitally important to the Ancient Greeks. While it was awful to be a young man who quietly submitted to penetration by an older lover, it was downright perverted for an adult man to continue to play the, as Hubbard puts it, "passive role." Even the pederast, or as Dover calls it, the erastai, receives censure because it could be assumed that he would have submitted to penetration in his youth. This is a point that I will come back to somewhat in my next post, so it is simply worth noting here that the disgust accrues to the partner being penetrated, not even to the act of penetrating another man anally, or even of enjoying the pederastic role. Presumably, some adult men might continue to enjoy anal penetration well past their youth, and this, to the Ancient Greeks, was disgusting and demeaning.
All the details of pedagogical pederasty — the pederastic courtship rituals; the association between pederasty and the gymnasium (an upper class venue); the gift-giving and lavish banquets thrown by an erastai for his erōmenos; even the pedagogical aspect, which was obviously only a real option and help to the aristocracy — everything contributed to an overall rejection by the lower classes of pederastic relationships. With every step of ground gained by the new democracy, homosexuality came in for more and more ridicule and moral judgment.
In my next post I am going to (I think) mostly focus on the questions that all of this raises for me, specifically in relation to the development of Western philosophy generally and even of historiography. For now, I will close with a brief interpretation of an important story in Athenian mythology, that of Aristogeiton and Harmodius, or the Tyrannicides, as they became known. If you're unfamiliar with the story, the Wikipedia article provides a basic outline:

One common story pattern is of pederastic couples whose love and desire to impress one another led them to sacrifice themselves courageously in assassinating, or attempting to assassinate, a tyrant. The paradigm here, of course, is the Athenian story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, whose actions were popularly supposed to have resulted in the overthrow of the Peisistratid tyrants in the late sixth century. However, Thucydides and Aristotle...both offer consciously demythologizing accounts of the incident that demonstrate its relative unimportance in the ultimate overthrow of the tyranny; as Thucydides notes, the tyrant Hippias' cruelty actually grew worse after the assassination of his brother. What is significant, therefore, is not the incident itself, but the fact that it was interpreted so widely to have a greater significance than it did: one can perhaps see an attempt by mainly upper-class enthusiasts of pederasty (whose sympathies might otherwise be suspected of being undemocratic) to contextualize their practices as integral with Athens' developing democratic constitution by granting pederasty a prominent place in the democracy's foundational mythology. (Hubbard 2003, 56)

* This should not be taken to ignore the widespread sexual exploitation of disenfranchised, young male slaves. While such practices were also widespread, I would not constitute such exploitation as a relationship. I am here primarily dealing with (at least ostensibly) voluntary relationships entered into by two individuals who could do otherwise without risk to their material needs and survival.

Waterfield, Robin. Introduction. Symposium. By Plato. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print.

Hubbard, Thomas K., Ed. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: a Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Print.

Phalli, Vulvae, Thought: Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 01:05:00 +0000

I tried my damnedest to just write a short, succinct post. Or rather, I've been trying for weeks to write a short succinct post. Which of course means it has blown up into a multi-part piece. Hopefully someone else out there is as fascinated by sex as I am.

What?! You are!!?! No way!!

An Introduction

How does sexuality shape our minds? Certainly, we can see a link between the typical gender binary, and binary thinking in general, though the question perhaps remains open as to which comes first.
But beyond the obvious uses of simplified labeling — good/bad; black/white; on/off; no/yes — what aspects of sexuality — what currents of desire or, conversely, harbors of stillwater, where the libido rests, cool and safe — erode, deposit into, and smooth the minds of a society to conform with the given norms? How does desire relate to power? To perception? To knowledge?
It seems to be widely known that homoerotic relationships played a huge role in shaping the culture of the Classical period of Greece. This is the time period that gave us much of what we think of as "Ancient Greece," though not all. I have noticed time and again that even Americans with very little historical education know about homosexual/homoerotic relationships in this epoch.
But what role(s) did homoeroticism play in the development of philosophy, theology, literature, and politics? And how did homoerotic desire speak itself in the various milieux of Classical Antiquity? For we must guard against the lazy assumption that social institutions, expressions, or ideologies we have labeled with familiar-sounding terms, in radically different times and places, will look like the institutions, expressions, etc., currently going by those same names in our own time and place. In the Introduction to his translation of Plato's Symposium, Robin Waterfield opts to not even call what we are talking about "homosexuality":

I use the less familiar term 'homoeroticism' because not many Athenians were actually homosexual in the sense of being inclined to love only members of their own sex: Pausanias and Agathon in our dialogue, with their lifelong affair, were exceptions rather than the rule. More commonly, the same people were sexually inclined towards members of both sexes. (Waterfield 1994, xv)

You may have noticed that I have adopted Waterfield's convention, and I will attempt to stick to it throughout. Also, I want to note that this post, and probably the next one as well, are going to deal exclusively with male homoeroticism. The evidence regarding lesbianism is different (and much more scarce) than that for male homoerotic relationships, and I think that lesbian relationships are interesting in a very different way. I could go on a very long diatribe here about what I perceive as the fallacy of conflating woman-to-woman sexual intimacy with man-to-man sexual intimacy under one classification, but I shall refrain for the moment. What was started as a one-post project has evolved into something much bigger, so I intend to work several different threads.
But first, because I have already been dancing around chronology terms a bit, some clarifications on the historical period in question.

Attitudes Over Time

"Ancient Greece"

First, a confession: I am as guilty as anyone of linguistic sloppiness when it comes to old Mediterranean stuffs. In defense of the sloppiness, I will say that the term most often used — that is, the term in question: "Ancient Greece" — does cover a period of specific developments in poetry, theater, philosophy, and mathematics. Homer and Plutarch may well have been separated by as much as 1200 years, but what we generally understand as the referent of the term is the birth of Western civilization. While very good arguments exist for the vast influence of North African and Mesopotamian thinkers and artists, I do believe we see, in the vast swath of time and place we call Ancient Greece, the first layers of what would become the European psyche.
So that is all to say: yes, the term is sloppy, but I believe there is a there there, and that most Westerners still grasp the broad strokes of it.
My confession and defense aside, in order to discuss sexuality in the epoch in question, greater specificity will be required. My apologies for how awkwardly the timeline below sits, but I can't stand tiny lettering:

"Ancient Greece." Wikipedia.

I am here almost exclusively interested in looking at the top bar, that is, the historical periods. In particular, the Greek Dark Ages, the Archaic Period, and the Classical Period.
To begin, I'd like to clarify where two of our major data points fit in on the timeline above. Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, is placed variously at around 1100 BCE and 850 BCE. That is a pretty broad range, but it does place him well into the Greek Dark Ages. Plato lived from about 430 BCE to 350 BCE, which places him in the Classical Period.
The book I will be drawing on most heavily throughout this essay is an amazing anthology: Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: a Sourcebook of Basic Documents, edited by Thomas K. Hubbard. It includes everything from fragments of poems and plays to ancient graffiti and court documents. In the introduction, regarding the changes over time, Hubbard says this:

Most previous discussions of Greek and Roman homosexuality, although distinguishing between the two cultures, tend to treat each culture synchronically, as if attitudes and practices were relatively uniform over time. However, reflection on the various social practices of homosexuality and swings in public attitudes toward it in Western societies just in the second half of the twentieth century should caution us against such static assumptions in the case of ancient societies, which bore witness to many equally wrenching social and political transformations. (Hubbard 2003, 14)

Starting in the further reaches of our timeline, in the Greek Dark Ages, I want to first deal with what I believe to be a misconception regarding Homer and dating the rise of established homoerotic relationships. Specifically, regarding Achilles and Patroclus in The Iliad.
I know, I know. We moderns like to smirk knowingly at Achilles and Patroclus. I myself have never been convinced that their relationship was sexual. All you have to do is travel outside of the US and Europe to see how much more comfortable the rest of the world's humans are with expressing same-sex — but non-sexual — affection. Achilles and Patroclus clearly, genuinely loved one another. But to assume that that love was sexual/romantic in nature is, I believe, to project our own prudishness back onto them.
This point will be relevant over and over to this discussion, but I should acknowledge that a lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. In other words, it is of course entirely possible that homoerotic love was a common practice amongst Greeks in the Homeric period, and that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, and we just have lost all the texts that would make that seem more plausible. But almost as soon as we do start to see textual evidence of it (much later than Homer), there is a corresponding opprobrium of said sexual activity; contrary to popular opinion, homosexuality was not universally accepted and celebrated. Given this, in order to continue to argue that Achilles and Patroclus are lovers, we would probably have to argue that their homoerotic relationship was so culturally normative in the earlier time period — in Homer's time period — that no specific information about the relationship is needed; everyone just knew they were lovers, and it wasn't until later that Greek culture began to judge the behavior as immoral. However, given the liberal way in which men describe the beauty and physical attractions of the women they rape, kidnap, and murder, it seems implausible to me that Homer would remain so silent on the subject of Patroclus' sexual attractiveness to Achilles, or vice versa, if homoerotic relationships were so normal.
Another possible line to take is that Achilles and Patroclus are lovers, but the author needed to code their relationship very carefully for fear of censure. But then, this still flies in the face of the common modern assumption that homosexual relationships were normative and enjoyed broad acceptance. Also — and this is perhaps just a snobby, privileged lady talking here — I get a little tired of casual retroactive projection. That is, pick someone you don't like. Gay people, you say? Oh, well, Hitler was totally gay. Oh, wait, no; you like gay people?? Oh. Whoops! Hitler was super straight. I meant Shakespeare. Yeah! Shakespeare was totally gay! Anyone you don't like? Liberals? Oh, my friend, such a deal I have for you! Fucking Stalin. No, seriously. He was a Socialist! Like Obama!! Obama is like Stalin's Muslim nephew or something!
My larger point is that we can find absolutely anything we want if we look hard enough. Sure, it can be fun. And people can absolutely miss things because of the frame of reference from which they are reading a past culture. But if Achilles and Patroclus are lovers that are carefully coded to protect the delicate ears of Ancient Greeks, I am next going to be asked to believe that The Iliad is also somehow anti-racist and anti-authoritarian. Which is bullshit.

Moving along chronologically, we have textual evidence from Plutarch that such relationships occurred around 735-730 BCE, but Plutarch lived several hundred years after the fact. There is also a well-known figurine from Crete, a sketch of which you can see here; it depicts two ithyphallic hunters or warriors, and is dated to the seventh century BCE. Again, the lack of evidence is not itself evidence for a lack of sexual activity. But various ancient sources, such as Xenophon and Aristotle, attest that homoerotic relationships began to be a social custom sometime around the seventh century, as well; Aristotle specified that it was undertaken as part of an effort at population control, though of course we cannot be sure. Which is all to say, some time in the Archaic Period.

Setting aside questions of when exactly homoerotic relationships may or may not have first been approved of in Ancient Greece, we have unequivocal evidence for such relations in the Archaic Period. Archilochus, who lived from approximately 680 to 645 BCE, conveniently gave us this little fragment, in case we needed it spelled out for us:

...man's nature is not the same,
But each man delights his heart in something different.
...cock pleases Melesander,
...pleases the shepherd Phalangius.
No prophet other than I tells this to you.
(Archilochus, fragment 25.1-5 West)

And Theognis of Megara presents us with all kinds of good information. First, from Hubbard's introduction:

[The Theognid collection] is considered by many critics not to be the work of a single poet, but to represent several generations of wisdom poetry gathered together at Megara and attributed to the name of "Theognis," who may or may not have been an actual poet of the sixth century. What can be said about this corpus is that it presents a unified persona and set of attitudes, particularly in regard to the pederastic theme: cynical, quarrelsome, resentful, ever ready to accuse, but nevertheless helplessly devoted. Most of th poems in the corpus are not specifically amatory, but are social, political, or ethical precepts transmitted to Cyrnus as part of his formation into an adult Megarian aristocrat in Theognis' own image. Theognis' ever-gnawing suspicion of Cyrnus' promiscuous flirtations with less worthy men may function as an allegory for his anxiety that the Megarian body politic has deserted aristocrats like himself in favor of an endless succession of "new men," whose wealth is based on trade and commerce. The pederastic, pedagogical, and political levels are all mutually imbricated in this collection. (Hubbard 2003, 23)

There is so much here! For starters, "imbricated." When do you get to use that word?! I know, right? Imbricated. Just lovely.
Oh, right. Theognis. Dates for Theognis' life are very sketchy, but he is placed anywhere between the seventh to fifth centuries BCE.* Also, Megara could very well refer to a city on the mainland of the Greek peninsula, or it could refer to at least one other city, but now I'm just getting distracted:

Theognis 1243-44
"Let's love long." Then go be with others.
You are a trickster, fidelity's antitype.

Theognis 1245-46
Water and fire will never mix. And we shall never be
True to each other and kind.

Theognis 1249-52
Boy, you're like a horse. Just now sated with seed,
You've come back to my stable,
Yearning for a good rider, fine meadow,
An icy spring, shady groves.

Theognis 1259-62
Boy, you were born good-looking, but your head
Is crowned with stupidity.
In your brain is lodged the character of a kite, always veering,
Bending to the words of other men.

Theognis 1279-82
I won't mistreat you even if the deathless gods
Would treat me better, pretty boy.
And I don't sit in judgment on petty errors.
Pretty boys get away with doing wrong. (Hubbard 2003, 40-43)

Taking Theognis, along with many, many other writers, we can say with assurance that homoerotic relationships were normative enough in the Archaic Period for an aristocrat to be writing so openly about them.
The point I want to drive home at this point is that we have ample evidence that attitudes shifted over time. Because of the sloppiness I mentioned early — lumping everything from Homer to Strato under the term Ancient Greece — and because of all those — *ahem* — vases:

That seems...like a lot of dudes with hard-ons.** Which is to say, I think we can safely assume that homoerotic relationships were normalized enough if they made it into popular media.

Hubbard summarizes the historical shift in the evidence for institutionalized homosexual practices:

Ancient texts variously credit the Spartans or Cretans with a special role as early practitioners, particularly in what may be initiatory contexts. Some lyric texts and the Thera graffiti may support an initiatory interpretation. The earliest artistic evidence*** is Cretan and suggests a partnership of younger and older warriors. Aristotle connects the introduction of the practice with overpopulation and the desire for a lower birthrate, possibly through delayed marriage. Our earliest textual evidence is from the early seventh century, although Plutarch relates an incident that, if historical, must have occurred around 735-730 BCE. There is no clear evidence for homosexuality in the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod, which could support a thesis of seventh-century origins, possibly in response to population issues. (Hubbard 2003, 14-15)

Again, this is specifically in reference to institutionalized practices. In the next post I'll talk about what exactly pedagogical pederasty was, but it should be noted that, as in our own time, it was only specific practices which Ancient Greek society tolerated. As we shall see later, even something as simple as being a man old enough to grow a beard, who enjoyed being penetrated by a man the same age, could set one up for ridicule at the least, and political trouble in other cases. Homoerotic desire was by no means given free rein, and perhaps just as importantly, hierarchy — or a word I'm now toying with, kyriarchy — shaped all of the underlying structures of longing and terror, just the same as it does today.

Next up will be something along the lines of a discussion of pedagogical pederasty, and the relationship between said institution and democracy in Athens. Which will segue nicely into discussing further the relationships between desire and power.

* A note on tossing around terms like "seventh century BCE." Such a phrase certainly sounds like it should mean things like "751 BCE," and "789 BCE was a great year!" It all seems perfectly logical, until you think about counting centuries from zero. So here I mean that Theognis could have lived anywhere from the 600s to the early 400s. And of course, "early 400s" means things like "490" and "480." It's awful, I know, but there you are.

** Full disclosure on the dating of these vases, though: I couldn't find them on any reputable sites — in other words, they weren't on museum pages with the estimated dates neatly printed below. They were all on overly-simplistic pro-gay websites, or puritanical, anti-gay sites, with no mention of where they were from or what time period. My apologies for not being savvy enough to track them down, because I'm sure it must be do-able. All the more trustworthy sources I can find attribute all of these kinds of vases to either the Archaic or the Classical Period.

*** This is the same figurine I referenced above. In case you didn't get to see it...

Waterfield, Robin. Introduction. Symposium. By Plato. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print.

Archilochus. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: a Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Ed. Thomas K. Hubbard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Print.
Theognis. ibid.

A Lesson in Spotting Rhetoric

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 04:40:00 +0000

I started this conversation last week by discussing Plato's anti-rhetoric stance. Ostensibly I was writing about Phaedrus, but I mostly used it as a jumping-off point. To be clear, in the Phaedrus, his position does seem more complicated than in some other dialogues like Gorgias. His message in Phaedrus seems to be that he himself is having a hard time determining whether philosophy can ever be done without any rhetoric at all, while imploring us all to be very, very careful about how we allow rhetoric into our minds and lives.
An easy way to learn to spot rhetoric is to look at the pro-/anti- propaganda for something that feels obvious. (Er...one hopes.) For example, take a look at some of the posters supporting and opposing women's suffrage.
The message of the first three is fairly simple: women are supposed to be doing their work in the home, and giving them the right to vote will up-end that. Suddenly, men will be saddled with all the baby feedings and the cleaning and so on. I must admit, I rather like the second one; a pity having the right to vote doesn't mean I get to sit around eating chocolate and playing cards with my friends all the time!

One of the things that feels obvious about these now — and that I think this next one particularly well illustrates — is that now the images feel grotesque in their literal role reversal. The crude, almost oafish simplicity of the reversal makes you uncomfortable when you realize how natural the reverse of the images felt to the audience. In other words, it felt totally appropriate to the anti-women's suffrage movement to simply place one of the women in the other room doing the washing, while there were three men sitting around playing cards. (Presumably drinking beer rather than eating chocolate. Beer if very masculine.) I particularly enjoy "Husband's Working Hours 3 A.M. to 12 P.M." Because those actually are most mothers' working hours.

The message of all three is: don't mess with the natural order of things. If you do, women may very well take their revenge for all those years of oppression.

This last one is interesting to me because of how complicated it is. I think it's a valid point how many roles in society women were considered fit to serve in, while the vote was still denied to them. And I like that "Mother" is included with "Doctor or Teacher." On the other hand, the list of things "a Man may have been, & yet not lose the Vote" seems problematic. "Unfit for Service"??? Seriously? Because a guy is born with a congenital birth defect, or he's been injured in adulthood, his right to vote seemed questionable to these folks?

And the one that says "Proprietor of white Slaves"...that one's interesting because it links up to a moral panic about "white slavery" — i.e., the kidnapping and forced prostitution of white women. As it turns out, the panic was largely overwrought; there really weren't hundreds of women a year being forcibly dragged into prostitution. The situation was tragic, but in a much different way. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of young women moving to cities with no idea how to conduct themselves in a romantic or sexual relationship in a supposedly Brave New World. Their parents were terrified a Jew or an Italian would seduce them into slavery, which was a red herring; what might have been useful was an actual education for young women on how to handle modern relationships. But of course, their parents had no more knowledge about such things than they did.

The scare over white slavery seems to have contributed to women getting the vote. Suffragettes — many of them being mothers — were understandably scared about what they were hearing about their daughters in the cities. They believed that getting the vote would empower them to put issues concerning sexual exploitation on the dockets of politicians. It's interesting that a hysteria surrounding an only sort-of-real problem is part of what led to women's suffrage.

The funny thing about a lot of the pro-women's suffrage propaganda is that it appeals to the same norms that are held up in the anti-women's suffrage propaganda. They proclaim: women want to do nothing but clean and make babies. It's just that, politics do actually impact how we do those things, so we should get a say in politics. The first two below actually affirm the proper place of women, and what kinds of work we should expect from them. The message seems to be: don't worry. It won't be that bad. Women will still take care of your kids!

Of course it is true that politics do impact things related to women's work — everything from the ingredients in laundry detergent to breastfeeding in public to gun control laws — but because most of us feel like the statement "WOMAN'S JOB IS THE HOME!" is out of joint with our current time, the appeal feels off.

The image below alludes to the white slavery panic I mentioned above. It also uses a great image of a central female figure. Yes, she's pushing for the right to vote, and that may seem to question the normal division of labor according to gender. On the other hand, the figure, which is called "Womanhood," resembles a goddess or statue of an abstracted value — Liberty, say, or Justice — which is an interesting strategy. It doesn't follow the lead of the above propaganda, which says, "Don't worry! Women really want to stay home and have babies! They just also want to vote." It also doesn't suggest a wholly new way of looking at women (which would seem inappropriate; as voting wasn't new, agitating for women's suffrage was hardly a radical notion). Instead, it reminds people that there are other narratives/images/archetypes for women within the context of the history of the West.

This last one is just delightful. Because they've simply adopted the rhetoric of the anti-women's suffrage movement to create a parody. It does a nice job of showing how you can use language to argue just about anything. Which is, again, Socrates'/Plato's definition of rhetoric.

My particular favorite is number four: "Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums."

Abso-fuckin'-lutely. I might add soccer in there. Or would that qualify under uniforms?

Plato's "Phaedrus," Rhetoric, and a Dash of Russell Brand

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 19:47:00 +0000

What comes to mind when you hear the word "rhetoric"?
For me, it sounds dry. It sounds like it should come prefaced by the word "empty" or "overblown". I think, instantly, of politicians and talking heads.
I am guessing the word calls up similarly dull images in the minds of others. There are certainly good reasons for this; it is genuinely difficult for me to understand why much of what politicians and talking heads talk about has anything to do with my life.
But here's the problem: the term "rhetoric," somewhere along the line, took on negative tones, and so when we hear it, we always think it's the politicians arguing against our position that are using rhetoric. Because of course, anything negative is most comfortably perceived as external.
It's always the far-right blogger I'm reading who's using rhetoric (say it with a hiss to get it right).
It's the white person arguing against the existence of white privilege that's using rhetoric.
It's the bigoted Evangelical on Youtube who's arguing that homosexuals are going to hell that's using fear-mongering rhetoric.
That nice, liberal Marxist, though? Oh, no, that's just fucking true. The pro-union workers? Absolutely right on! And Russell Brand?
Certainly no rhetoric there.*
You see my point?
Two things might help when thinking about rhetoric, though. One is, well, Youtube. And as Simon Critchley mentions in his excellent summary and analysis of Phaedrus, Ted Talks. If you have internet access (presumable, given the medium), chances are good that you are regularly inundated with rhetoric from celebrities, politicians, and talking heads you either strongly agree with, or are so far on the other side you get to enjoy the bliss of rage and self-righteousness. Then, once every six months or so, you re-watch Steve Jobs' commencement speech or Brené Brown's Ted Talk on vulnerability to get you revved up a bit so you can stomach the nightmare of consumerism awhile longer. Rhetoric is, whether we realize it or not, absolutely everywhere in the public sphere.
A second thing that might help wrap one's head around rhetoric is to think of people with charisma. Charisma tends to catch you off guard, because almost by definition, when a person has it, they sweep you up in their energy so thoroughly you get enmeshed in their ego. It's a lovely experience — I'm a lady who likes the charmers — but, shockingly, doesn't often lead to lasting happiness and well-being.
Rhetoric is one of the main foci in Plato's dialogue, Phaedrus. And I say "one of the main foci" because the dialogue tends to sprawl a bit. Enough so that several articles I've read now all say different things as far as what the dialogue is "about". ("Aboutness" being a very, very important concept in a world full of so much information no one can rationally expect you to read much of anything first-hand.) In the introduction to my translation, Robin Waterfield argues that Phaedrus is about education. In the aforementioned NY Times article, Critchley argues that it is about both rhetoric and eros. I know this might seem like an easy out, but I think all three are true, and that when you combine them you get philosophy itself, which is my nominee for the "about" category of Phaedrus.
And that lovely experience I'm talking about — where you meet someone who talks good and talks fast and instantly convinces you that they are brilliant and that they will somehow grant you the privilege of being their best friend or lover? — that is exactly what Socrates is concerned about when he discusses rhetoric. Not just in Phaedrus. Plato/Socrates/somebody-or-other discusses rhetoric in Republic and Gorgias as well. He worries about rhetoric a good deal because it can often be difficult to tell when someone is sliding from philosophy to rhetoric and back again. In Gorgias and Republic, the contrast is unfortunately caricaturized. Plato portrays the sophists/rhetoricians as men who believe in the value of being able to argue anyone into believing anything. Men who actually come out and say it: "my value is in convincing people of anything, whether true or not."
But of course, you don't often meet someone who says that, do you? And if you do, you probably run the other way. Because it's fucking creepy. But what about when you're talking to someone you really like because they just have this thing about them, and they say with just the right amount of agonized deliberation: "You know, I used to think it sounded so crazy, too. But then I realized I needed to be open-minded and hear out the arguments on both sides, and I realized that...and I mean, I hate to say this...but I realized that it really is possible that the Holocaust was just completely fabricated. For example, there's the question of the gas chambers..."
I have been in that exact conversation. With a fabulously gorgeous and charming man who had read a lot of books and internet articles. He'd probably never met even the extended family of anyone impacted by the Holocaust. He lived far away from the locations of the concentration camps and ghettos (this was in Lisbon). He had, quite literally, nothing to go on except the assurances of his state-financed education and the moral indignation of some of the people he met and floated his theories past. Which, frankly, isn't a lot. Hell, I really can't give you a great reason for my belief that humans walked on the moon. He was questioning something he had just as little evidence to believe in. I just so happened to have seen enough tattoos on wrinkled old arms, and talked to the ancient, quiet Jewish man who hung out at the coffee shop I worked at on Mercer Island, to never have had my doubts.
My point here — and I want to make this very, very clear — is that to a certain extent this man I was talking to in Lisbon may have been doing philosophy in his initial questioning of the narrative of the Holocaust. He began by asking questions. He was saying, "Hey, wait. Why am I supposed to believe this? When I see absolutely no evidence for it around me? And isn't there some evidence that state-financed information is often fallacious?"
I chose the Holocaust because I want to make it almost grotesquely obvious how much the question of rhetoric matters. It matters, and it can be hard to spot. In this case, it only feels obvious if you, like me, believe that the Holocaust really happened. It makes it easy for me to notice how starting with that opening — "You know, I used to think it sounded so crazy, too..." — is so disarming when used well. The call to be open-minded. The reluctance to accept the possibility (...and I mean, I hate to say this...), followed by evidence generated by invisible names of authority; so-and-so, who is a professor at such-and-such university, who did a something-or-other test on the concrete of the walls at Treblinka. And so-and-so-number-two, who has probably been horribly persecuted in some way or other for exposing how the world is secretly run by a Jewish cabal.**
The catch to all of this is that whether or not he was doing philosophy when he began asking these questions is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to tell from an external view. Because — and I truly believe this is Plato's primary concern in all of his various wonderings about rhetoric versus philosophy — the attitude of the questioner decides. The attitude of the questioner decides because underneath the attitude are all the various human strengths and weaknesses — the racism virtually all white people struggle with; the bigotry all humans live with; the fear of displacement Westerners, and Europeans in particular, feel right now; the deep-seated mistrust we should probably all have of our state-funded educations — and the particular mix of those strengths and weaknesses will determine the course of the questioning. Rhetoric is the thing the questioner will have to turn to almost immediately to shore up a position they were effectively brought to by their own prejudices.
Philosophy is much, much harder to do, and much slower and more painful. Philosophy, in this particular example, would be what happens when a person starts by questioning their state-funded education and what it says about something like the Holocaust, then realizes they have deeply personal reasons for wanting the Holocaust to have not happened. It would be the beginning of consciousness of the fear under the questions. And philosophy doesn't stop there. It leads into what feels like an even more terrifying place where you realize there aren't easy answers; there may not even be answers at all. There isn't a simple thing that any person of color can say to me that will make me feel safer about my position in the world. There isn't a phrase or a concept that will make the chasm between me and them vanish, and there isn't a thing I can do to get rid of my paralyzing and useless white guilt.***
This is a much more uncomfortable and much less workable position than to simply state emphatically, "The Holocaust did not happen." It's even worse than simply stopping with "The Holocaust did happen." Such a statement is an easy way-station for most of us. And as easy as rhetoric is to get swept up in, philosophy is just as difficult to slog on with.
Just for shits and giggles, my next post will actually just look at some comfortably glaring instances of rhetoric. Propaganda for a cause that feels like an obvious ethical position at this point — for instance, women's suffrage — is a nice way to train the eye to spot these things. Then maybe I could work up the courage to turn the same eye on some of my own weak spots. Like...oh, I don't know...whether or not the obvious kyriarchy of the church really is compatible with all my smash--hierarchy ideals?

* Of course, Marx, the unions, and Brand are all correct.
** Sorry. My ability to feign tolerance for discussions that skirt anti-Semitism only goes so far.
*** Just to be clear, it also isn't the job of any person of color to make me feel safer, or to make the chasm vanish.

Two Books

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 23:52:00 +0000

regram @wordlessdictionary

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Aug 8, 2014 at 6:28pm PDT

Two books, very different. Though both were crafted replies to other writers.
The first — first in chronology as well as psychic weight — is Beltenebros, or the Beautiful Obscure. This is my first book of poetry, and it was released by Seattle's Babel/Salvage at the end of August. Beltenebros is a (short) book-length poem. It was written in direct response to Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha; I think of it as sort of "talking back" (albeit with a great deal of affection) to the novel(s).*

The book finally got finished! #papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:10pm PST

The second, though it got finished around the same time, is quite different. It is a very small, handmade object. Each page contains "memorabilia" from either Lemuel Gulliver's journeys in Jonathan Swift's 18th-century novel, or from my own journeys, or some of each. It took much longer than I'd expected, but I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. There are a couple of pictures in this post, but if you click through to my Instagram account, you can find images of all the pages.

_______________________________________________________

I wish I could remember more clearly. Like most children, I did various art projects when I was little. And I'm sure that, also like other children, some of my experiments prompted my mother and other grown-ups to say, with a mix of pride and puzzlement, "What is it?"
I wish I could remember exactly how I felt about that question. I suspect it doesn't bother kids as much as most adults worry it does. I vaguely remember feeling pleasure. Not because of their interest, but because, in realizing the adult didn't recognize what my picture was an image of, I could tell them whatever I wanted. A dog could suddenly be claimed as a giraffe. A tree could become a boat.
I like the adult version much less. Now people say, "What is it about?"
In the last few months, each time I have told a person that my first book was published, or that I made a handmade book/art-ish object, I have heard the question, "What is it about?"
I can think of two appropriate responses. I could launch into a long analysis of all of the themes and shapes and recurring images and all the layered meanings in Beltenebros. I could talk about memory and materialism and my highly clichéd but nonetheless thriving romance with the sea in the Gulliver's Travels book. That's one way of responding that seems as least reasonable.
Or I could shrug my shoulders and say, "I have no idea." This seems most honest.
But I am just as socially assimilated as the next schmuck, so I politely say something like, "It's an homage to Don Quixote/Gulliver's Travels." Blatant relief sweeps across their face as they realize A) it's not sexual, and B) the fact that it is "about" books they haven't read lets them off the hook from having to feign interest. They (equally politely) reply, "Oh, I haven't read it."

#papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:15pm PST

The reason I think all of this matters is simple: I caught myself. I caught myself being more proud of having had Beltenebros published than I was of finishing the handmade book. And if I dig under that pride a bit, I realize that my pride in having a book published stems from a sense of validation. Having someone — anyone — choose your poem or novel or essay collection to send off to a printer's and slap an ISBN on it feels like "someone" — that conveniently vague notion of the rational capitalist at the back of everything — has put their stamp of approval on my work. Receiving that stamp of approval permits others to grant theirs as well.
But...really??? Have you seen some of the books to get published recently? I know I'm showing some of my elitist colors here, but "getting published" (and the passivity of that phrase should probably bug you) says nothing of the artistic value of a, um...book. What it tells you is something about its capitalist value; that Babel/Salvage and many, many publishing houses like it are so clearly labors of love, doesn't change that fact.
For the time being, I'm not going after this so much as an attack on capitalism "out there," so to speak, as I am concerned about the ways capitalism and consumerism have clearly shaped my own mind. I care deeply about human creativity, and any ideology that fucks with the underlying structures of our individual minds and the consciousness of our larger societies to such an extent that we value the approval of the market more highly than our own inner compass should disturb me. It should disturb me often enough to actually do something about it. Maybe I could start with being proud of having written the damned thing.

_______________________________________________________

As I mentioned in my last post, the move to Portland has been tumultuous, and I can't currently locate my copy of Don Q. But in the next couple of weeks I should be able to put up a couple of posts that show some of what I did in working with Cervantes' text. If you're curious, you can search for "quixote" in the upper left-hand corner to see a couple of short excerpts, as well as some of my thoughts on the novel and my process in general.
As always, feel free to comment, and thanks for the patience in my transition to Portlandia!

* Today if you go to your local bookstore (my favorites being Elliott Bay in Seattle and Portland's Powell's on Hawthorne), you will find the single book Don Quixote de la Mancha. I only think it worth mentioning that it was actually two separate books written by Cervantes because the two are quite different, and writing the second book probably contributed to Cervantes' decline in health. He worked his ass off to get the book out partially because so many copycats had published spurious second volumes to his original, and he wanted to set the records straight.

Well.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 02:55:00 +0000

That really, really sucked. In fact, much, much more so than I'd anticipated.
For those who may be reading who don't know me live and in person— and my stats insist that some folks in Germany and Russia just keep on trucking, so hello there — I just moved. I had planned to write a big, long, self-important essay on personal transformation, and the necessity of occasionally injecting severe discomfort into one's life, and especially on the importance of women being financially self-sufficient. I was going to write about how big of a deal it is to me to finally be living away from where I was born, raised, and have spent all of my 34 years on this earth. I was going to write about the direction(s) I want to take in terms of both "career" (i.e., that awful thing capitalism forces me into) and writing (the thing I keep trying to cut away from capitalism, though I'm sure ineffectually).
Specifically, I moved from Seattle, Washington to Portland, Oregon. Which, if you know the area, you probably realize isn't all that impressive. But wait! I would have moved somewhere more impressive if I could have found somewhere else that had absolutely everything I insisted on:

midwifery school
solid doula community
friendly (enough) relationship between natural birth and medical communities
artsy-friendly
craploads of yoga studios and options
queer-friendly (I'm about as un-queer as they come myself, but my patience with homophobia and its ilk have deteriorated rapidly as I've aged.)
politically left
great massage school
decent community colleges that won't charge me an arm and a leg for being from out of state

I wasn't really being all that open-minded, was I? This is perhaps a bit specific. And of course it begs the question: why leave Seattle? Seattle has all of these things, in even greater abundance than Portland.

Well, that was going to be my post. Why leave Seattle? Lots of reasons! Let me tell you some!

........................

Instead, the move went less than smoothly. First, I didn't check before I left — because who knew that an upper-class, over-educated white girl could ever NOT be able to find housing???? — but Portland's housing market is, to put it politely, fucked. The vacancy rates are incredibly low, and the prices have skyrocketed so quickly that you can now rent a modern box/studio with that neon accent shit that developers love so much right now FOR $1500. For your viewing pleasure, it will be lodged (bizarrely) between beautiful, 100-year-old houses that were vacated by the black families we just forced out of the neighborhood. Thank you, Dwell magazine, for your loathsome influence. You have successfully convinced rich white people that their homes are a fashionable expression of their innate quirkiness and good taste. Of themselves. Also, you're damn good at whispering "simplicity," a gentle sigh of relief now that the heavy shackles of income restriction and human-centered architecture have been removed. You're so good, no one notices that your rooms are actually designed for suicide.

But the housing market really is bad in Portland. Places were going within hours of being posted online. I kept calling one place after another, minutes after it was posted, only to hear, "Yeah, sorry, I've already got three people in front of you." Places were consistently being rented sight-unseen, which I couldn't bring myself to do. And some of the really tiny, crappy places that I could have barely afforded just made me angry; I couldn't stomach $900 a month on a 290 sq. ft. studio, on the ground floor of a loud street. And 99% of what I found that was genuinely affordable was, at minimum, a 45-minute walk from the nearest grocery store. I don't have a car, so that freaked me out.
So, if you thought Portland was the land of starving artists, it might be. But these days they're starving for very different reasons than they were ten years ago.
It got way worse, though I'd rather not go into the gory details; I talked to enough folks who were recent transplants to know my experiences were not isolated. Suffice to say, I moved here officially at the end of August, but I will only be moving into my long-term place at the end of this month.
But then — Glory be! Stability!! — things should calm down. I've obviously never been a really frequent poster, and my writing process insists on staying as slow as it ever was. Also, I'm working on certification as both a birth and postpartum doula, as well as working full time, so I've got a lot on my plate. Still, I look forward to getting back to philosophy and poetry once the dust has settled, and hopefully some posts on women's bodies, pregnancy, and childbirth will be forthcoming as well. Lord knows I've got to do something with all the Heidegger and Ina May rattling around in my head.

5 Options for Artists that Aren't Really

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 03:57:00 +0000

Lists are popular.
“10 Best Pick-Up Lines Ever!”
“8 Reasons Your Marriage is Already Failing!”
“5 Ways Parents Can Stop Insulting their Childless Friends!”
I am super into being popular, so I thought I’d create a list, too. Well, actually, it’s just to get some things off my chest. I am working on a post on vocation and profession, and I kept getting bogged down responding to all of the old men who, over the course of my life, have felt it incumbent upon them to offer me unsolicited life advice. Honestly, though, these things still get said, both to me and to some of my artist friends. Typically in a much more well-meaning way than they used to be offered, but without exception they come from folks who are not artists themselves.
So in the interests of clearing my throat before I get to my post on vocation, and because these points bring up REALLY important issues around capitalism, here are my

5 Things Non-Artists Need to Stop Saying to Artists

1. Oh, you’re a poet! Have you thought about being a professional writer? Like, advertising copy, or journalism, or something?

So I’ve used poetry and writing as my examples, but the same goes for all art forms: an actor doing TV commercials; a musician playing for a recording studio; a painter doing video game illustration. The thing non-artists do not seem to get is that your passion, and the skill you acquire expressing that passion, are two separate things. Using the skill you’ve acquired does not satisfy the passion. Not one tiny bit. If I do journalism — and I have, as it so happens — it is no closer to writing poetry or my own essays than is cleaning toilets (which I have also done, and found far easier on my creative side than the supposed creativity of paid writing).
Also, there’s money in journalism? Are you fucking kidding me?

2. There are jobs for artists. You could be a college professor! (Or any type of teacher. Acting, painting, photography, composition, etc.)

Actually, now that I think of it, this one has a similar problem to #1. Namely, teaching is a completely different job. It is not satisfying to creative urges to teach artistic skills when what you want to be doing is painting giant abstracted oil paintings inspired by Victorian novels.
Also — and this is important to the quality of our art, folks — as a professor, I would spend over half my time reading poetry written by 18- to 22-year-olds. I know what I wrote between the ages of 18 and 22. I promise you: reading it would not make you a good artist, of any stripe. So professors are forced into filling their heads with incredibly heartfelt drivel.
For another thing, in order to get a job at the college level, you have to be willing to move pretty much anywhere in the country. So, you know, just don’t fall in love with anyone or ever, ever want to settle down and have a family. (Seriously on this one. I’ve known people who speak multiple languages, who’ve been moving around the country or the world for over ten years, trying to get tenure.) Also, going along with that one, 76.4%. That’s the percentage of professors, across all institutional types, that are adjunct and not tenured or tenure-track. That means no guarantee of a job next year, and most likely no benefits, and now (and where are those insane tuitions going??!!) most are reported by a recent study to be living below the poverty line.
And finally… There are no jobs! Not even crappy ones in the middle of nowhere! Our parents’ generation is holding onto their tenured jobs for dear life, and there has been such a massive explosion of 30- and 40-somethings with graduate degrees in the humanities that some of my professor friends have told me they are seeing upwards of 100 to 300 applications for every ONE job that comes available.

3. You're making excuses. There are people out there living their dream. You could be one of them! You just gotta be committed!

You wanna know my dream? It’s so, so simple: permanent American expat, traveling from one gorgeous, fascinating place to another (Paris! Lagos! Kuala Lumpur! Istanbul!), spending my days writing poetry and essays, painting with media I don't even know the names of, and my nights drinking with other fabulous expats and going to operas, ballets, musical performances, and art openings, and sleeping with so many gorgeous men I finally lose count in a blissed-out, orgasmic haze. That’s all! And you know what, the non-artists are right about one thing. If I was more committed — say, committed enough to marry some rich prick who wanted a tall, blonde trophy — I could totally finance my dream. So why am I so lazy?

4. Well, but look at [insert famous person with buckets of money]! He/she certainly seems to have figured it out.

Okay, just for clarity’s sake: Rick Steves is not an artist. Neither is Heather Graham. Neither is Mandy Moore, nor Dan Brown, nor Thomas Kinkade. Neither are a hell of a lot of other people that Wikipedia will happily label “writer,” “actor,” or “artist.” They are entertainers. Pure and simple. They make crap, so we can all stop thinking for a few minutes. Nothing against not thinking. I’m a regular meditator. It’s just, if you’re going to try to turn your brain off, don’t call it art. Now, that being said, there are artists, across all disciplines, who to all appearances support themselves financially by making wicked art. Tilda Swinton is a goddess. Rose Wylie. Philip Glass. Arvo Pärt (be still my heart). Lupita Nyong’o. Michelle Ndegeocello. Adrienne Rich. Anna Netrebko (*sigh*). Lang Lang. They are out there. But here’s the thing: most had money at their back, and if not money, artistic parents. No American ever wants to admit this to themselves, but the pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps myth is largely that. And for the one in a billion artists who do manage to do that? Can you not tell that I am far too much of a pessimist to be that one? Did you read the above article I linked to? Read it.

5. (In response to an artist voicing concern over balancing art with marriage and kids.) Sure you can have it all! Lots of artists have homes and families!

I saved this one for last because this is tough for me to address. Not because I have a stance against it. Lots of talented artists do purchase homes and have transportation and get married (and stay married!) and have kids who don’t hate them or kill people. It’s not that it’s technically impossible. It’s tough because how to balance art-making with family life is a legitimate problem for a lot of people. It's a question of priorities and sacrifice, and I find that generally, non-artists whip this one out way too casually.
When you have a child, you understand responsibility in a whole new way. Your very identity gets changed. But the problem is, it probably won’t be 100% changed. So an artist may suddenly see their old, artistically active self as selfish and focused on petty things, and simultaneously resent their children for keeping them from their old selves. As a woman, I tend to hear more about this from the perspective of moms rather than dads, but I can tell you: there are some moms out there who both desperately want to hold their babies, and desperately want to throw them across the room and run off to somewhere, anywhere, where they can be their artist selves again. Somewhere they can not be a mother anymore.
These are not “bad women.” They are not necessarily bad mothers. Any responsible adult can and should figure out how to deal with their own disappointment once they’ve brought a child into this world, and buck the fuck up. Most (that I have seen, anyway) do just that. But at what cost? How many ways can a human be split? And is it such a great thing?
The major advantage I see to encouraging everyone to do everything is productivity. Yes, my life would look much more impressive if I published books, made art, studied philosophy, and bought a house and had babies. So? Why the obsession with production? Oh! Right! Capitalism! I always forget. Right, totally need to get on board with capitalism, and its fixation on making more and more, so we can consume more and more. Return to Go.
And this is the meat of the matter. Americans want to believe the aforementioned pieces of advice can work because we really, REALLY want to believe that capitalism can be done in such a way that it doesn’t hopelessly contort each and every soul it touches. I am showing my so-far-left-I-don’t-know-where-the-leftists-went colors here, but yes, capitalism distorts and taints everything. Everything. And everyone. This is why Beyoncé — whom I instinctively want to fall down and worship — is still a problem. This is why we should never, ever indulge in regretful surprise when we hear what the pace and demands of capitalism do to creators (click here for one example out of thousands). Americans want to believe that it is possible to be the most authentic version of themselves possible, within this system. I assert that it is not. It is not possible.I speak mainly as a poet here, but there is no way to slice the cake that doesn’t hurt me and my creativity. The solution I have arrived at — and I make no claims that this is the best solution, only that it is no worse than any of the others — is to protect the space my creative urges come from as much as possible. For me, this means never, ever placing responsibility for things like food and shelter on their very fragile shoulders. (Huh. My creative urges ended up with shoulders. Metaphors are weird.)
I could go further and get all Žižekian, but as I mentioned earlier, this is mostly a throat-clearing exercise. Of course, there are probably at least five more silly pieces of advice I could come up with, but these are the main ones that continue to re-assert themselves. And there are real potential pitfalls to the option I’ve chosen. For one thing, I think it’s awfully easy for folks like me who choose to (attempt to) keep their art and money as far from one another as possible to get awfully self-righteous (a particular talent of mine). We can fool ourselves into believing that somehow we manage to accomplish what everyone else fails at; namely, that we somehow stay free from capitalism’s dirty fingers. We do not. Also, there’s a scary psychological potential here, which is that if not one dime ever comes to me via my art, given that I have a psyche shaped by the belief that money is the primary marker of value, it’s often (read: always) difficult to remember that I am in fact an artist. This one hurts, and it's a constant problem for me, but again, that's part of my point: there isn't a solution within capitalism. Which means that the solution is... (Raises eyebrows...) Yes...???

Meno, and too little too soon?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 19:48:00 +0000

Commentators on Plato like to have a one-word "This is what X is about," where "X" is Phaedrus, Gorgias, Theaetetus, etc. Granted, Plato generally does a good job of maintaining his focus within a piece (far better than I do, anyway), but once you combine the oversimplification of "Plato's Republic is about justice," with the problems and complexities of translation, the statements start to feel more and more meaningless.
So: Plato's Meno. Wikipedia-the-all-knowing says it's about virtue.
Firstly — and I will try to be brief, because this is something of a side note — the Meno is not about anything anyone in the Anglophone world would ever call "virtue." I touched on it here, but virtue is an unfortunate translation of the Greek arête. To give an idea of what an ancient Greek might have thought of when they heard the word arête, we need only ask Meno himself, as Socrates did:

SOCRATES: But Meno, by the gods, what do you yourself say that virtue is?...

MENO: It is not hard to tell you, Socrates. First, if you want the virtue of a man, it is easy to say that a man's virtue consists of being able to manage public affairs and in so doing to benefit his friends and harm his enemies and to be careful that no harm comes to himself; if you want the virtue of a woman, it is not difficult to describe: she must manage the home well, preserve its possessions, and be submissive to her husband. (Meno, 71d-72a)

Meno goes on to talk about the virtue of a child, an elderly man, and a slave.
While I will grant that we have another, less morally-tuned, use of the word "virtue" (we speak of "the virtues of diplomacy," "the virtues of sound urban planning," etc), for one thing, it's not a use you hear too often anymore. And for another, it still wouldn't work in this context. The "virtues of" use speaks as though virtues were benefits, or good things about the practices in question. Meno is clearly speaking not of practices, but of people, and the people are subjects acting out their arête; it is not something about them, the way their robes might have been blue.
So from the first pages of the dialogue, the use of the word virtue to translate arête — when virtue, in my ears, sounds something like moral goodness or righteousness — seems dubious at best.
Philip Vassallo in Philosophy Now* suggests that a better word might be "valor." I would agree if arête only applied to men. But as Meno himself demonstrates, it does not. (While I may personally love the notion of a valorous housewife, it sounds too comic. And a valorous slave, who would presumably demonstrate his or her valor by submitting to whatever work or punishments meted out to them with all appropriate resignation, sounds awful.)
Another possible translation of arête is excellence, and I think this is decent. It allows us the flexibility to use arête in a manner in line with what Meno — in this dialogue, the representative of the classic/Homeric understanding of social values — points towards: the most perfect expression of carrying out one's life's work. This also allows us to hear/read Meno's definitions of the arêtes/excellences/ways of excellence in a way that avoids reading him as a prefigure of Nietzsche, or as simply another Thrasymachus.
Okay. Side note over.
Back to this question: what is Plato's Meno about?
And then this: what responses present themselves?
As for the first question, I do not think the dialogue centers on arête — no matter how we translate that word — at all. The central questions (according to Terra Leigh), in the order in which they are discussed, are the following:

Can excellence be taught?
What is excellence?
Meno's paradox: how can one search for what one does not know, as it will (presumably) be unrecognizable since you haven't yet found it or known it?
Is excellence a kind of knowledge?
Can excellence be taught? Part II

Each section dealing with these questions of course brings up many others (How do we learn? Why do some kinds of knowledge seem to be "discovered," as though they had always been lying about somewhere in the recesses of our brains?), but these are the big umbrella topics. In terms of sheer time spent on each, the question of "What is excellence/arête?" gets about eleven pages in my copy. The question the dialogue opens with, however — "Can excellence/arête be taught?" — gets double that.

Obviously it would behoove one to know what X is when discussing whether or not X is teach-able. Socrates/Plato know this, and so spend a respectable amount of time discussing what the hell arête even is. And Socrates' conclusion — that virtue may be more like a kind of divine inspiration that some lucky folk receive from the gods — whether ironic or not, is a way of circumventing the question of how to know what arête is.

But my larger point is this: Plato, here, seems primarily concerned with whether or not arête/human excellence can be taught. He is trying to get at how to pass on individual qualities which will benefit both the individuals concerned and the larger society.

When I first realized how much of his time he spends thinking about the teachability of excellence, initially I thought he was barking up the wrong tree. Because Plato seems to think of teaching as what Socrates does: one person, who has more wisdom, and another, who has less, conversing, while knowledge is either passed between them or "awoken" by the activity of dialogue. While I think this can be a decent method for informational transfer, I do not think it works too well for moral transfer. And when I say "moral," I don't mean something like "ethical behavior," or "knowledge of ethics." I mean it in the old sense of character, temperament, or possibly even mood. I mean something like the shape and texture of human persons or souls. The shape and texture of a person — not some quantity of informational material — will determine what choices they make in life, and in a sense will determine how much or how little they achieve arête. And the shape and texture of a person will be influenced and generated primarily by their entire environment, not some one individual.

It may well be that Plato does believe, in writing the Meno, that if arête is teach-able, its teaching will happen in the kind of scenario he presents Socrates in. I do not mean that Plato — or Socrates for that matter — believed that Socrates had a lot of really good information to pass on, kind of like knowledge of geometric theorems, and that teaching arête or hosion or dike or whatever would transpire the same way teaching Chvátal's Art Gallery Theorem would transpire. Because of course, that isn't what Socrates is doing. Still, Plato does seem to place a lot of faith in Socrates' methods, and I for one think they would do fuck-all for a society trying to teach its young arête or any number of moral sentiments. In this particular dialogue, I get the distinct impression that Plato believes that if arête is teach-able, then Socrates' methods would be the ones to achieve that.
One can ask "Can arête be taught?" But while, in the Meno, Socrates does realize this begs the question, "What is arête/excellence?" he doesn't seem to realize it begs the question, "What is teaching?" This is a central problem for Plato's entire project.
Like so many of the dialogues, this one ends in aporia. I.e., there isn't a satisfactory answer, unless you consider this satisfying: "Can excellence be taught?" "Umm... I'm not sure. I guess not...?" But upon finishing Meno, and feeling frustrated because Plato's notion of what teaching excellence would look like, I suddenly realized something. Plato himself accounted for the generation and shaping influence of environment in his later work, Republic.
I'm not sure whether I will ever write a full blog post on Republic. It's crazy long and I'm not exactly in love with it. I think the most interesting aspect of it is its psychology, which is possibly the main point anyway, but it's hard to not read Republic as a political treatise since that is both how it is traditionally read and what is floating around on the surface and easy to catch. Also, there are enough books and articles and probably now blog posts on it to make me feel less an intrepid explorer, and more an unpaid intern.
But perhaps I can avoid the question of whether or not to write a blog post focusing exclusively on Republic by discussing it here. In Republic — which most scholars agree to be a later dialogue than Meno — Plato argues that in order for an entire society to function well, and in order for all of the members to be as perfectly just and good as is possible, all of the various groups and parts of the system must accept their proper roles and perform them to the best of their ability. While it could well be argued that such a proposal is a neat and tidy way of keeping the lower classes from getting too uppity and too big for their britches, so to speak, it is at the very least an acknowledgment that all humans live in an ecology of ethics and that if the ecosystem is sick, so will their individual systems (i.e., people) and sub-group systems. And, in turn, if individual systems are sick, such persons cannot help but affect the entire system by pulling unduly in some areas, while going slack in others that need tension.
I think it bears pointing out here that while Plato's central concern in Republic, which is justice or even righteousness, these can not be equated to what he is after in Meno. Again, read any translation of Meno I've ever come across and arête will be translated virtue. This may sound like "justice," but I do want to clarify that Plato is technically talking about the nurturance of two different qualities. Just for accuracy's sake.
Still, I would at least put excellence and justice in the category of moral character. And in Republic, Plato seems to taken into account the ecology and complexity of influences on human development, and how systemic the influences upon the development of moral character are. One may not be able to tell another person "How to be moral/good/just/pious/whatever" in the same way one could teach them to grow bacterial cultures or knit a blanket. But if we can take into account the whole system in which humans grow, we may be at least able to have a meaningful conversation about whether or not arête can in fact be taught.

* I have refrained from including the link above because I see that the article is now available to subscribers only (an honor which I cannot claim, as $32 comes dearly these days). But if you would like to look at the delectable teaser, which I'm sure will lead you to locate an extra $32 in your budget this month**, you can see it here: Aren't Philosophers Rich Enough Already Why Do They Need My $32?

** I have recently discovered that, as a person who religiously keeps a budget and knows exactly how much I spend on everything every single month, I am part of a group constituting less than 10% of the American population. Which is to say, if you are, as seems likely, part of the 90% of normal people, you could simply spend the $32 and it would probably come off just fine.***

*** I apologize (but not really, of course) for all the dependent clauses. I have just finished yet another British murder mystery, and Albert Campion is loping through my head.

All the various pieces are finished...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 05:22:00 +0000

...and so now they begin to be assembled.

Which is fitting, since my very first book of poetry will be published next month. I truly did not intend to have my first little art book get finished around the same time as Beltenebros, or the Beautiful Obscure, but I confess to being the teensiest bit pleased.

So these top two — the elephant and camel postcards — are going to be the covers. I picked them out of a collection of vintage-ish postcards I have, mostly because the map behind the animals is of India. For those who don't already know, the theme of this little art book is roughly "Gulliver (and Terra Leigh's) Travels." Places Mister Gulliver went, places I've gone, and the slight overlap between.

The one above I'm particularly proud of. Mostly because it took more diligence than I normally display. The paper itself is from the journal I kept while in Spain in 2006, and the journal entry to the left is an actual journal entry I wrote on May 19 of 2006 while sitting on my first real, live topless beach. The journal entry to the right is from Lemuel Gulliver's retelling of how he began to learn the language of the Houyhnhnms.

And above, of course, we have Laputa, the floating island (i.e., England), hovering over Balnibarbi, threatening to block out the sun for the inhabitants below (i.e., Ireland).

And this is quite simply one of the most time-consuming projects I have ever undertaken, having mistakenly believed it would be "super quick and easy." Not so. Nonetheless, I am happy with the results.

Now comes the easy part! Please, please dear God, let it be easy...

on Social Contract Theory, in which nothing is said of Plato

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 05:09:00 +0000

In order to start my head working on the questions around social contract theory, I put it to several of the members of my philosophy group. I asked some specific questions which, as first questions often do, led down some rabbit holes. Most of the folks in my philosophy group are at the very least slightly opposed to the notion of government at all. This is not an uncommon phenomenon amongst predominantly young, male, childless human beings, but I also don't want to knock it on those grounds alone. The theme that kept coming to the surface was that "the" social contract (the exclusivity is a problem in itself) infringed upon freedoms to pursue one's desires. This is the key word here: desire. It should also be noted that most of these young men are most decidedly not the kinds of anarchists you would worry about running around raping and pillaging. While this is a common perception of anarchists, I can safely say that most of these young men are, frankly, some of the most trustworthy individuals you could meet. They exemplify Brother Thomas's ethical anarchist, who I believe is borrowed from Robert Nozick.
On the one hand, I take desire very seriously, because desire is not always and only an expression of "I want the candy bar." Desire is also often an expression of "I don't want to give you my food because I'm hungry," "I want to have sex with the people I choose," or (for full dramatic feminist effect) "I don't want to have sex with you at all." Even apparently frivolous desires — for example, let's take a child who is whining, "I want the candy bar" — have at their roots profound terrors and neediness. The child in this instance, after millions of years of evolutionary programming, craves high-carbohydrate foods. We all know this feeling; think of the last time you tried to stop shoveling cookies or potato chips into your face. The prefrontal cortex and its worries about sexual attractiveness in the blip of modern life we find ourselves in has got nothing on the appetite. So here's a kid, acting like the little animal that he is, that we all are, and we have the audacity to forget our own rampant appetites and declare his desire to be petty. Or, to add another layer, we fail to note that the last time we were at the grocery store, his baby brother did get a candy bar when he asked for it, so now the terrified creature is checking to see if the importance of his nutritional requests still rate as highly as those of his chubby-cheeked usurper. Again, we are the ones who minimize the importance of this desire. We are the ones who fail to take it seriously. Desire should always be taken seriously.*
And this is just a child asking for a candy bar. Never mind that critics of social contract theory are asking why they must have money they earned** taken from them to finance things they may very well not want to finance. Myself, I would prefer my tax dollars not be used to kill children. And yet, that's one place they go. Many people may not even want to finance the building of roads, or other things most of us consider essential, specifically because the money was taken without their consent. The point, for an anti-statist, is not necessarily the specific places tax dollars go, but the fact that they are taken without consent.
But these are, frankly, the predictable responses to questions about social contract theory. And the truth is, they get mired pretty quickly in discussions around that one word: consent. Did I consent to this or not? Is there such a thing as implicit consent? How is consent obtained/arrived at? Is it unethical for a group of humans to choose an action when even one member of the group dissents?
The truth is, my eyes start to glaze over it when a conversation turns towards consent. Consent, especially to Americans, is so bound up in notions of individualism and freedom as to make it nigh on impossible to have a conversation about it with any American (yes, even the supposedly free-thinking ones). Consent means something far, far too simplistic and also tends to require that it be explicit. I.e., I have to sign my name on a piece of paper in order for my demands to be taken seriously. I have to say, "Yes, you can take that percentage of my income to finance things like welfare programs and road construction." The other, nastier side to this coin, though, is that a person also has to explicitly say "No" in order for undesired sexual intimacy to be considered rape. Once we put pressure on anyone in discussing consent, it quickly becomes obvious they would prefer to never even recognize the existence of implicit consent (or lack thereof).
We are obsessed with this notion of consent because we believe in a fundamentally atomist conception of humans. We genuinely think of ourselves as a bunch of Robinson fucking Crusoes, on our own little islands, engaging or not engaging in social and economic activities with other Robinson Crusoes. We believe that we are individual, liberal (in the Enlightenment sense, not the current sense), rational creatures that, given the freedom to do so, will go around making the best decisions for ourselves while allowing others to do the same.

Bull-fucking-shit. In the words of the immortal Tyler Durden, "You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."

So this is where I was stalled for quite some time. There are the Enlightenment ideas of social contract theories, and these modern critiques of social contracts. But the critiques are based in a notion of individualism and free will I don't subscribe to. More egregiously, in my opinion, they keep you skating around on the surface.
There are two fundamental problems I see with social contract theories. The first is in Brother Thomas's aforementioned essay: personification of the state. (Note that he calls it "personation," but as this is a technical term for a type of voter fraud, I'm changing it slightly.) The state, or as we tend to put it when being honest in our conversations about politics, "the government" is very much perceived as an individual with which we must contend. We see this all the time in discussions of international conflict: nations are discussed as though they were individuals. "Iraq" and "Britain" and "the United States" and "China" all say and do things just as though they were real live people. "They" form treaties. "They" fight with each other. The degree to which we do this is repeatedly demonstrated by the way minority ethnic groups are forever breaking off and insisting on having their own nation states. I may not like the way Israel treats the Palestinians, but the Jews got something that the rest of us seem slow to acknowledge: modern humans only respect a group of people as being culturally distinct and deserving of basic respect if they have a nation state they can point to as home. The Kurds caught on long ago, but the Entente wouldn't let them have their own nation state after World War I because it didn't serve their (the Entente's) interests. Luckily for the Kurds (and unluckily for the Arabs in Syria and northern Iraq), ISIL may very well create that new boundary for them.
The most obvious examples of how this happens are of course the actual personifications of nations. In the U.S., we have Uncle Sam. In Britain there's John Bull, in France there's Marianne, and in Russia there's the slightly unoriginal Mother Russia. But these images simply embody the psycho-social process that already occurred: imagining countries to be individuals.
This seems to be at the heart of social contract theory, and in fact teases out what I think is a certain ambivalence/confusion in social contracts. Namely, who the hell is the contract with? Sometimes we speak as though it is with our peers. Sometimes as through it was with "the government." When we speak in the latter form, we are employing this personification; as though "the government" were not simply a group of individuals employed by us to make our lives easier. But we forget this. We forget it when we let "the government" send people to jail for getting beat up by the cops. I forget it when a cop issues a silly order for no reason other than that he likes to watch people obey him, and I have to fight my own impulse to do as he says.
We forget it for good reason. Seattle City Light, the monopoly with which we must do business in order to have electricity in our homes, recently got a gigantic pay bump approved after Seattleites pretty well made themselves heard in saying it should NOT pass. It turns out that representative democracy combined with rampant capitalism and consumerism doesn't make for high levels of citizen invitation/involvement. Hence, our alienation and propensity for talking about governments as though they were their own little personages.
But while we may forget for good reason — and certainly the causes and problems listed above, along with a host of others, are not about to go away — it remains not the case that a nation state is a person. It's not. Did you notice that? It's NOT. So you can't very well have an agreement with "it" at all, because it isn't really an it. This, as we all know, is the reason for that joyous experience of having one branch of the government — say, DSHS — tell you that yes, you will get to purchase groceries while unemployed, while another part — I don't know, let's say the Employment Security Department — declares that you now owe them back-money because you failed to cross a t. If an individual person behaved so bizarrely, you'd wonder about their sanity. My point is, nation states are not people, and social contract theories (or some versions told from some angles) depend upon this notion of personhood.
But there is a second absurdity in social contract theories: cartography. I had a hard time getting my hands on this one until I realized something: part of the reason social contract theory emerged was to find out what justified governing people at all, in lieu of divine right. So the old school way was to say that God had granted a king some kind of special juju, and that was why he got to shoot you if he didn't like you. Then some more progressive philosophers came along and tried to both explain why he got to shoot you, and try to create some basic constraints so that most of the time he couldn't (at least not and get away with it). In other words, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (but especially the latter two) were trying to come up with an explanation for the justice of government that wasn't a simple "might makes right."
If we look at cartography, on a first, simple level there is the question of the arbitrariness of drawing a boundary and saying that one set of agreements ends there, and another begins with another group of people. It's possible (and in fact likely) that the Europeans who initially generated their versions of the social contract — namely, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau — didn't see the contracts as ending at the boundaries between nations. Because after all, Spain and France were both civilized, Christian nations, so most of the same rules applied. That is, according to forward-thinking Europeans of the Enlightenment, the validity of government itself stemmed from its roots being in the consent of the governed. This was true for all civilized people, i.e., all Europeans.
Where these same rules did NOT apply was outside of Europe. So a group of white dudes could go into the Americas, take over a bunch of land (we will look over for a moment the wholesale slaughter this entailed), even sign a treaty with a local tribe, and then when some new resource was discovered over on the tribe's land — the tribe's land which had been granted as their land by the contracts created by the white dudes themselves — the borders would simply be moved.
So imagine, if you will, Land X, where social agreement Set X applied. Say, property and wealth are patrilineal; the folks in Land X are English. X=patrilineal. Then there's Land Y, where social agreement Set Y applied. In this example, property and wealth are matrilineal. I happen to be thinking of the Sioux, but this is just for thought experiment's sake. Y=matrilineal. According to the very social contract philosophy conceived of by the white dudes and their ancestors, the very social contract theory they would insist is what makes them civilized, the set of agreements is formed by the people in that society, in that space. The Sioux, in this example, have their way of doing things. They've agreed on it. Hell, they may even have a few anarchist dissenters who want to do the whole thing patrilineally. But they've decided, as a group, within these boundaries arbitrarily drawn up for them by the white dudes, that for them, it's matrilineal. Those patrilineal dissenters have tacitly agreed to matrilineal descent by living in these boundaries. By using even one of the tribe's blankets to keep warm at night. The validity of matrilineal descent is generated by the Sioux people themselves, again, according to the Europeans' own ideologies. But now that the new resource has been discovered, suddenly Set X's rules spill into Land Y.
I do realize that there's precedent for this. It's called "conquering." Except that the treatment of the Native Americans, along with millions of other people unfortunate enough to be colonized by Europeans, wasn't even good old fashioned conquering. (In my example, it wasn't conquering. There was also lots of conquering.) When Europeans violated agreements and treaties and boundaries with the Native Americans, they were mocking their own social contract philosophy with every lie, every theft, every violated contract.
"Well, we've found these borders don't work for us anymore, so we're going to move you into... Wait, where are we moving them? Oh, that's right! The desert!" Notice that: "We're going to move you." In other words, fuck all of our own proffered enlightenment thinking about the validity of government growing up out of the consent of the governed. The Sioux may have consented to their own governance just fine. But in truth, the validity of government comes down to one simple thing: force. Power. Might makes right. The very principle that thinkers like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau were trying to take apart.
This of course doesn't disprove the validity of all variations of social contract formation. It's even possible that might does make right. I mean, anything's possible, right? My point is that the same folks who developed theory that said might does NOT make right, that power was not the principle upon which government/governance was formed, ended by shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Well, I guess might does make right." Might, and cartography.
One could argue that they just didn't live out the philosophy the right way. I get this line of reasoning. I find myself using it with painful frequency whenever I hear about terrible human abuses within religious institutions. It's a dance that compassionate Christians and Muslims know all too well: "No, no! The religion itself is about love and acceptance and community! Not sin and death and judgment! We swear!" But as people of color throughout history have probably thought many a time to themselves, "You keep saying that white civilization and history aren't intrinsically oppressive, but if it always, always, always plays out that way..."

* It should go without saying, but of course "taken seriously" does not equate to "gratified."

** Just my little anti-capitalist side-note: I'm not totally into this notion of "earning money." Our entire economic system is so abstracted and inhuman, it's difficult for me to believe I should take it seriously in a concrete and human world. Obviously, to some extent, I do take it seriously by participating. But I'd just like to reserve the right to believe I'm participating in bullshit.

Social Contract Theory: a Primer

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:07:00 +0000

So I'm writing a post on Plato's Crito and how it pertains to social contract theory. Or rather, I'm writing a post on social contract theory in general, using Crito as a jumping off point. When it dawned on me that, given my levels of ignorance on the subject prior to researching this, probably a lot of folks don't know exactly what social contract theory encompasses. Before I post my real, live thoughts on the subject, I thought I'd commend a few resources to your perusal.
The first is the entry on social contract theory over at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's basic and covers all the bases, but if you're genuinely interested in the subject, I'd recommend reading the entire thing, fairly carefully. As I have been discovering, there is not "the" definitive social contract; there are many ideas of what a social contract is, and it's worth clarifying the options before critiquing a theory in its entirety.
The second is a short and sweet article by an Episcopal friar who managed to have me thinking the whole time that he was anti-anarchy and pro-social contract theory, only to (pleasantly) surprise me at the end and confirm, once again, that good thinkers aren't bound by polarities.

And then, just because it's my new favorite blog, you should read the summary of Plato's Crito over at Philosophy Bro. Though if you don't make it over to this last site, it's really okay; I'll be quoting liberally from it in my post. Phrases like this one — "Goddamn it, I hate it when you're right, Socrates. Fuck. So that's it, then, huh?" — really shouldn't go to waste.

I swear I'm still doing things! Fantastic things!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 00:09:00 +0000

So partly because I'm excited that I've figure out what the inter webs meant when it said I could simply "embed an instagram code into my blog's html," and partly because I really am working on things that don't necessarily have to do with words, I thought I'd share some pictures.
Basically, some time ago I got the idea to make a book. I like coming up with some type of creative response to all the old, ruddy-duddy classics, but I wasn't entirely sure what to do with Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Until I realized a fun little detail about that book.
Most of the places that Lemuel Gulliver travels over the course of the novel are imagined locations: Laputa, Brobdingnag, the land of the Houyhnhnms, and perhaps most famously, Lilliput. But interestingly, he also goes to Japan. As in, you know, Japan. The country/place.
Having been to Japan once several years ago, I found it funny to think about my travels and Gulliver's travels having overlapped.
And so, the book.
Just to be clear, this isn't THE book, as my first book of poetry to be published this summer. That's called Beltenebros, or the Beautiful Obscure, and it's very much a book of poetry and prose; i.e., Art with a capital "A." This little project is very much craft/art with a lower-case "a," which means it's been a lot of fun and much less angsty. These are just a few pictures, and it's still not quite finished, but it's getting very close.

As a side note, I am working on my next post on Plato. This time it will be on his Crito. Just in case you're interested, and if you'd like to have not only an idea of the points of Crito, but also a good laugh, you can check out a highly irreverent and superficial summary at Philosophy Bro, which might be my new favorite blog.
Cheers!

So this white boat was actually just a prototype. For the boat above I just used the template and instructions from Robert Sabuda's website. Which has lots of fun little projects on it that would be awesome for littles, if you have any.

The boat for my book is modeled on this one, but significantly smaller, and much more colorful.

This is just a mash-up of some pretty pictures from magazines, but according to +CyanSlowly, the middle one may be Aran Island. For reasons I cannot explain, I feel like the one on the far right is the Caribbean/Atlantic, and the one on the far left is the Pacific.

Seriously. Iris Murdoch. Philosopher, novelist, and all-around fascinating lady.

Blind contour, that somehow didn't turn out so bad, so I re-drew the lines and kept it.

You know Brobdingnag. Just to the west of us here in Washington.

Gestation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 20:54:00 +0000

Ever since I was around 18 to 20 years old — that is, ever since I consciously committed to being a writer, since I began to conceive of writing as a craft I could hone, and not just an outlet for obsessing over sex and convoluted theological questions — I have had a deep fear seeded in my mind. I have worried about whether or not the inspiration would suddenly, one day, dry up.
This isn't terribly unique. Like a lot of artistically and intellectually inclined teenagers, I was miserable. I had few friends in high school, and I appeared to terrify boys (emotionally fragile, abnormally tall women are much more popular later in life). I had little self-confidence and — possibly more importantly — I lacked the knowledge of how to work the system of college applications and scholarships, so I didn't even fit in with the nerdy overachievers. By and large, my peers rejected me and, as such is a very good recipe for a self-destruction I was trying desperately to avoid, I fought back with a well-known weapon: "The problem is that I'm so unique and different. It's because I'm a poet. No one gets me. They're just too boring and normal."
All well and good. Except...
I'd never asked to be a poet, and a poem had never, ever come when I'd asked it to. Inspiration struck, whenever it chose. And if it was, as I always experienced it, a cluster of words, images, and sensations that arrived of their own accord, it seemed plausible they could just stop coming of their own accord.
Fast-forward ten years. Ten years during which I sometimes wrote with passion and commitment, but mostly, um, not. Mostly, I wondered whether I was any good, and defended my choices to every gray-haired dude who got a fucking CD or latte from me and thought I needed a talking-to about growing up and getting ahold of some money so I could do the all-important/inevitable HAVE A FAMILY. It sucked. I was in pain, and on edge. Because contrary to what many people think, a young woman who wants to make art instead of babies will not be consoled by children. She will be bitter, and resent the helpless creatures she brought into the world just to feel like a not-crazy-person.
So I was not inspired, and I was angry. Mostly at myself. Nothing was happening. I wrote two decent poems over the space of four years, and I was a wreck.
Unfortunately, an overly anxious sense of imminent personal failure doesn't encourage good creative work. Though God knows I've tried to make it work that way. I had always scorned self-helpy, warm-fuzzy approaches. And with some justification: such things hadn't been necessary to making me a writer, so why now? Then, when I came across Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way at Elliott Bay, people I did not consider Artists with a capital "A" had spoken so highly of it to me, I was dubious.
But I was also desperate, and had begun to notice that my method — sit down at the desk at the scheduled time, insist that the poems show up, and then shred every vague notion I had before even bothering to write it down — well...did I mention only two poems in four years?
My obsession with scheduling and productivity, combined with a pretty violent perfectionism, had failed. So really, Cameron's book seemed to be, at the very worst, a waste of time. At best, maybe a slight improvement.

The twelfth week of The Artist's Way is called "Recovering a Sense of Faith." Now, caveat: that "faith" makes me squeamish. Cameron uses it in the same foggily dangerous way most folks do these days; which is to say, it's code for "stop thinking and believe what I'm telling you." But she discusses faith so she can get to talking about mystery. On the subject of mystery, she says this:

"Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: 'And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!' It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary" (Cameron, 194).

I can think of at least two ways of interpreting a dark time in creative work. One could look at a dark period as one where little excites the maker — nothing too thrilling is emerging from the æther — but the writer/artist/creator continues to arrive at the desk/table/easel/whatever and dabble. This is a time-honored approach, and I definitely don't mean to insult it. The only limitation is that someone will always have to do some kind of filtering, and this approach will most likely mean the filtering will be done by the reader(s). Mary Oliver — who has turned out some supremely gorgeous and deeply meaningful poems — seems to operate according to this method. Also William Yeats and Ted what's-his-face (Sylvia Plath's husband, who I am assured was a Great Poet). My greatest aversion to it is that reading through a lot of mediocrity doesn't increase one's faith that the truly brilliant pieces really are as brilliant as you think. One of its greatest strengths, however, lies in the openness it affords the writer. He or she makes a commitment, follows through, and probably remains fully aware of the fact that the majority of art will not be masterpieces. He or she also, presumably, chooses to not be deterred by such concerns. In other words, there's a lot of sanity available in this approach.
Another way of looking at dark periods is, admittedly, more melodramatic. Also, I vaguely feel, more European (though God knows no one could get Voltaire to shut up). It involves simply not working — not one tiny bit — through an uninspired time. No poems, no sculptures, no music, no nothin'. Paul Valéry and T.S. Eliot worked this way, as did Rimbaud. Er, except that Arthur Rimbaud just quit writing altogether after realizing that writing some of the most important poetry of the 19th century had left him miserable. So, possibly a shitty example. Or possibly not if you take seriously the notion that there isn't any point in making art if it isn't inspired. Coming from this perspective, as I tend to, there is one great advantage, and one heartbreaking disadvantage. On the plus side, you get the self-righteous satisfaction of thinking that your consistently productive and hardworking compatriots are mostly trying to recapture the inspiration that got them into art-making int he first place, to no avail.* On the down side, you spend extensive periods doing fuckall, and this is where Cameron's warm fuzzies get it wrong. Because yes, you really can not do art again. You might be able to do creative work — anything from crafting to happy doodling to genuinely creative parenting — but the head-swimming sensations of inspiration that get many of is into art-making often don't persist into adulthood and responsibility-hood.
If it isn't obvious from what I've said above, I have begun to tend towards the latter approach. Or rather, I now aim for the latter approach. The former — doing the work when I promised myself I'd do the work, and waiting for a giddy, fluttering heart be damned — didn't actually result in much sanity for me. Honestly, I was probably doing it wrong. But I don't think my personality will let me get it right — I'm too stuck up to be able to "just do the work" and let it be what it is — so I'm going for downtimes.
One final thought on the benefits of waiting: if a person can make the room later in life, one can simply not create at all until the space and resources are available. A number of very talented writers did highly uncreative things before starting to write their own work. I'm thinking of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and George Eliot, though I'm sure there are examples in other creative fields. Craft is a real skill, and I don't mean to imply that someone can just pick up their tool of choice whenever they feel like it and succeed brilliantly. But I do mean to imply that breaks in creative work do not inexorably lead to never working again.

But what I hope that I would take away from the various experiences I've had with creative work, as well as what I've read/observed from other artistic types — and yes, also from what I learned from two times through The Artist's Way — is that we are all waiting on something that remains out of our control. Thankfully, "waiting on" someone or something means a couple of different things. I can take it to mean what I've experienced, which is that my creative work flows best when I simply wait for inspiration to arrive. But one can also wait on a person the way a lady-in-waiting or a personal butler used to attend to a woman or man. One can attend to one's creativity. No decent lady-in-waiting would do what I do, waiting around for my lady to conk me over the head and insist I pay attention. A good attendant just hangs around and does the day-in and day-out work they've committed to. Every once in awhile, the lady will charm and delight. Most of the time she'll ignore the attendant's very existence, and from time to time she'll be a bitch and give you raw beans to eat because she thinks your pathetic dependence upon her is funny.

This is my last post on Cameron's Artist's Way. The process of writing these twelve essays has helped me to figure out what's worth keeping, and what's not. Several times I've felt guilty, because my thoughts on certain chapters have been more critical than in praise of — in particular, chapters two and three — and what I've said in this post mostly serves to develop earlier thoughts. But thinking through Cameron's process, and openly dissecting the bits I find silly or useless, has also helped me to clarify which parts were genuinely helpful, and worth carrying forward.
It also just so happens that I've quit one of my jobs in order to make room for creative work. I've been sort of painfully interested in a few projects that I can only dip my toes into with a 40-hour-per-week schedule, and so I've opted to chance financial ruin. Only joking. (Sort of.) I've also quit the one job in order to make room for doula studies and work, so fingers crossed that the universe wasn't promising me chocolate cake, and is about to deliver raw beans.
Hopefully some of the better lessons will bear fruit in the future, and I REALLY hope that some folks have found these posts useful. As always, feel free to share your thoughts with me, either in the comments section here, or in the real world. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter, where I mostly repost all the articles I read that make me wish I'd been born a boy. *sigh*

Well, cheerio!!

*Hey, don't knock it; self-satisfied gloating fuels a hell of a lot of artists.

A system, which is to say, an embrace

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 21:11:00 +0000

The plant is its cellulose, its own plasmalemmas, its epidermis, its plasmodesmata. The plant's cells both make and are the plant. It takes sunlight, and makes it into food. It takes its own flowers, and they become fruit. The vine is all of these things, the various bits muting and swelling into one another. But also it is the oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen; one moment they are within the epidermis, the next transformed and exchanged.

In responding to my last post, John mentioned an old roommate who believed "there was no choice of any kind, ever, for any of us. We were just organisms reacting to stimuli." I think the image of an organism reacting to stimuli depicts a common perception; it also just so happens to illustrate the kind of "anti-free-will" stance I am not taking. It seems, in common parlance anyway, that we are always talking about individual organisms, and they are either:

A) free, in the sense of being a locus of origination, whether of desire or action or both; or

B) determined, in the sense of being poked and prodded from "without," and compelled to do/feel/think various things.
Both seem to be based on a concept of individuality which, at the very least, I would like to see defended well before using it as a basis upon which to build other ideas.

___________________________________________

"Now, changeless within the limits of great bonds,
[What-is] is without beginning and without end, since birth and perishing
Have been driven far off, and true trust has cast them away.
It stays in the same state and in the same place, lying by itself,
And so it stays firmly as it is, for mighty Necessity
Holds it in the bonds of a limit which restrains it all about,
Because it is not lawful for what-is to be incomplete.
For there is no lack in it; if there were, it would lack everything"
(Parmenides, fr. 8).

This quote is where all of my puzzling over free will began. All with that little, tiny segment which declares that "mighty Necessity/Holds [what-is] in the bonds of a limit which restrains it all about."
Ananke — or Necessity — might sloppily be translated as fate, but I would resist such a translation precisely because of the issues I raised above: when people talk about "fate vs. free will," they talk about it like they are an individual atom of the universe, being pushed and prodded by an external force which they call fate. But I think Roberto Calasso's ramblings about Ananke — which are extremely beautiful, but also long enough that I won't include all of them here — actually point in a more helpful direction:

"In the late pagan era we can still find this in Macrobius: 'amor osculo significatur, necessitas nodo': 'love is represented with a kiss, necessity with a knot.' Two circular images, the mouth and the noose, embrace everything that is. Eros, 'born when Ananke was lord and everything bowed before her gloomy will,' once boasted that he had gained possession of the 'Ogygian scepter,' primordial as the waters of the Styx itself. He could now force 'his own decrees upon the gods.' But Eros said nothing of Ananke, who had come before him. There is a hostility between Eros and Ananke, a hostility that springs from an obscure likeness, as between the kiss and the knot" (Calasso, 99).

And this:

"Of the two, [the gods] prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke. And cover in the literal sense: Ananke's inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way. But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her 'many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside: tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.' Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world" (Calasso, 100).

__________________________________________

The term "system" feels off somehow when I try to explain why I don't align with either free-will or deterministic camps. But a system does denote the myriad tugs and pokes along the way, the interconnectedness of human experience.
The question remains as to whether there is something unique within certain beings which is an origin point of any kind. The experience of artistic creation seems to both support and belie that possibility. When I create a poem, I experience it both as something which, to all appearances, emerged almost ex nihilo. But then again, I also experience it as coming from outside of me, and therefore to not be entirely under even my control. Also, we start to get into very interesting territory, because if we were going to claim the existence of a spark of origination, I would adamantly defend the right of all mammals (at the very least) to get to be in this category. The more we learn about animal consciousness, the more we discover that the supposedly uniquely human attributes aren't so uniquely human.
But yes, the term system still feels off. Embrace. Bond. A girdle, tightly binding two atoms in the universe to one another. Another pair, more loosely.

____________________________________________

a vine that grows up trees

(Sappho, 349)

And this:

when all night long

it pulls them down

(Sappho, 301)

_____________________________________________

Well, this is it. All my thoughts on free will from the last three months. I'm sort of shocked by how much the Parmenides fragment sent my head spinning, and how little I now have to say. The gist of it seems to have been that I have become aware of a gigantic gap between what makes sense if we spend any time talking about it sensibly, and how we think about ourselves unconsciously on a daily basis. I suspect that American culture is particularly "free-will-ish," which gives me more cause to doubt the usefulness of our bloated adolescent of a nation. Come to think of it, Dudley Dursley seems like a nice embodiment of American-ness.
If any readers are curious, there are some good basic articles on free will on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm particularly interested in Strawson's "Reactive Attitudes" theory, which is towards the very bottom of the page. There's another good basic page on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as well.

Sappho. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Trans. Anne Carson. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. Print.

Parmenides. Trans. Robin Waterfield, First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Trans. Tim Parks. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Print.

A highly biased, anecdotal, and personal framing of why I think free will is bullshit

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 02:37:00 +0000

When I was in kindergarten, a little boy sat across from me who, I now realize, was Black. But for whatever reasons — probably mostly to do with lack of contact — it didn’t actually register to me that he “was” anything other than a little boy. I was definitely aware of his skin (the term rapturously gorgeouscomes to mind). But other than his darker skin tone (and skin tone is a big hang-up, but it is not the sum of the notion of race), I didn’t see him as being anything other than a friend. In fact, I think if someone — some wise grown-up — had tried to explain to me that we were different, I genuinely wouldn’t have understood what they were trying to say. (Cue heart-warming “innocence of childhood” music.)

But then I got older, and somewhere along the line it changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the moment I remember noting the change was when I was fourteen years old, and my mom had brought me to my new high school, in a different neighborhood of a city that was entirely new to my family. The memory goes like this: “Every single kid on the front lawn of the school is Black.* <pause> Holy fuck.” I was, to be perfectly honest, terrified. I was so, so scared. Everyone dressed differently than I did, they talked differently, they were listening to different music, they even had a distinct language of gesture and movement. Even the volume of speech felt intimidating.

Now, if someone — another wise grown-up (all grown-ups seem so sure they’re wise, this could be just about anyone) — had stepped in and tried to explain to me that those Black kids and my uptight White ass were, in fact, not really different at all… That all the things I was getting hung up on were surface-only, I would have looked at them with all the pity that misguided grown-up deserved: Of course we’re different! Can’t you see how much has changed?!

All of this is about perception. When I was five, I genuinely did not perceive race in the little boy across from me. When I was fourteen, I most certainly did. Race. Not color. Race is a whole package of stuff, and it had taken root.

Now if just perception — just the ability to see what there is in front of you, and then to interpret it, and to make evaluations about its relationship to your own existence — if just perception can be so deeply and subconsciously infiltrated and shaped, I can see no way forward to accept an idea of “freedom” which isn’t so heavily curtailed by chronology, geography, religion, race, gender, able-bodiedness, class, etc., as to become a moot point.

I should note that in the grown-up world of philosophy, there are much better, more subtle responses to questions about free will. I think my favorite so far is what's called the reasons-responsive view. But the reasons-responsive view is so sensitive to the forces at work around and within an individual, I actually think it significantly deviates from what most people are talking about when they insist that they have free will. Most people who like the idea of free will seem to conceive of themselves as origin points, where new energy and direction is generated ex nihilo, and they make "rational" "decisions"***. They evaluate things. They look at the world with open eyes and minds, see what's there, see their options, and form opinions based on reality.

Even the examples used to illustrate choices on websites like the IEP show these sorts of blind spots. Allison is considering taking her dog for a walk. Will she choose to do so, or choose to stay inside and take it easy where it's warm and dry? In the kinds of examples used by every philosophy textbook and internet explanation-generator I've ever seen, no account is taken of the complex of childhood, self-definition, fear, hope, laziness, self-loathing, and vague qualia-of-the-moment that is any given human being in a given instant. If we take into account all of these factors, and take into account that these shaping/directing factors are in fact part of the agent in question and not somehow external to her, the question of whether or not her decision-making process is free begins to feel a bit silly.

I guess I'm harping on about this because I genuinely think that there are still a lot of people out there — granted, probably mostly White dudes, but those White dudes still hold a lot of sway — who think that this is how they and their fellow humans work. And this, frankly, worries me.

* This is a memory which, I now know, must be edited. There were huge contingents of Latino, Filipino, and Afghani kids, and even a significant minority of white kids. My brain, either in the moment or later on, filled in what were non-black faces (but also non-white, and so confusing to a simple this-versus-that racialized brain) with the scary faces that I at least felt I "knew" what to expect from. My experience with — and indoctrination about — kids from Latin America, the Philippines, and Afghanistan was so limited, my guess is that my brain just used them as a blank canvas to paint something on.**

** Yuck. This "being honest" shtick is making me look bad.

*** Hmmm... I quite like putting decision in quotes.

I did mean to leave Facebook...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 01:34:00 +0000

...but I didn't intend to take such a long break from the blog. Wow. I apologize for the almost-two-month-long break. In my defense, it happened because I wanted my next post to be about free will, and I was fairly certain that I could wrap that up in about two weeks.
But it turns out free will is a very complicated topic! Who knew?
And so, two months later, I still don't have the essay to end all essays on free will. I am drafting something, but I also came across a bizarre little fun fact about the history of philosophy, so I thought I would share that with you for now.

Free will is officially filed under the term "metaphysics," at least that's according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Which I guess makes sense. Free will and its questions — whether or not we have it, and what it might even be — seem like they have to do with what we are, and the qualities of various things which exist in the world: what is a human as distinct from, say, a squirrel, and why does it sound true to say that I as a human have free will, while the dainty-fingered squirrel does not? Metaphysics is one category amongst several others within the domain of academic philosophy. Others are epistemology (theories of knowledge and knowing), ethics, aesthetics, and various political and socioeconomic philosophical topics.
When I was at university, it was in vogue to refer to self-conscious art pieces as "Meta." As in, "Fellini is so Meta." If anyone had bothered to ask me what the hell I meant, I would have said that "'Meta' is Ancient Greek for 'over, or above,' or something like that," and Meta art was art where the creator was reflecting on themselves qua artists. So, taking Fellini as an example, when Guido is suffering from artist's block and keeps reflecting on memories that sound an awful lot like Fellini's own personal autobiography, it's Meta. We could call Meta self-consciousness, though that term has an unfortunately negative connotation; it sounds like Fellini was shy over a bad hair day or something. Other great film examples are Adaptation and Barton Fink.

So we went with Meta.

μετάφυσικά

: metaphysics

Only I have just discovered that I have been using the prefix "meta" wrong this whole time.

Meta (μετά), as with many words in many languages, can mean several different things. According to Wikipedia, it can mean "beyond," "upon," or "after." If you just type "translate μετά" into Google, you get "after."

Enter the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
One day I was just minding own business reading an essay on Plato's Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology, when I came across the following:

"In a collection of [Aristotle's] works, the most detailed treatise on the general topic of things that are comes after a treatise on natural things, ta phusika (from which English derives 'physics'). Since the Greek for 'after' is meta, this treatise is titled 'Metaphysics'."

Did you catch that? The "meta" in "metaphysics" doesn't modify "physics" in the almost spatial sense I meant it in. It's a purely historical/chronological sense. It seems to me that my friends and I were using the term to mean "beyond" or "upon." "Meta" as Aristotle's editor used it could be re-applied to mean something like Metacolonialism: "All the world is living after colonialism." Or my new coinage, "Metabach." As in, "We're all just living after Bach." 'Cause we are.
I confess to having been the teensiest bit upset by this. I like words, and I take a certain amount of pride in using them with a higher-than-average accuracy rate. The salvation of my wounded ego, however, comes in the form of ambiguity. Turns out, everyone uses the word confusedly! The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has this to say in their article on metaphysics:

The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up “Aristotle's Metaphysics.” Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle's death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) entitled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”—“the after the physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”—, the “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now call Aristotle's Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotle's philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered “the physical ones,” the books about nature or the natural world—that is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world.

So there you are. Your fun history of philosophy fact for the day. If you now realize that you have also been using the term "Meta" inappropriately, I think we may all console ourselves thusly: nothing in Fellini or Joyce could have possibly come before a bloody thing. But then again, neither could anything. (Sooo deep, I know.)
Happy Valentine's Day!

Interwebbing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 02:55:00 +0000

Yes, it's official: I am leaving Facebook. The reasons are most likely obvious. Everyone I talk to about it sighs, nods their head knowingly, and says something like, "That's great. Good for you. I wish I would do that." Note that there is never even a smidgen of sarcasm.
We are tired of Facebook. Granted. But Facebook is certainly not the entire internet. Why, for example, do I not feel a comparable need to leave any of the other online time-sucks, which include...

Google+
Twitter
StumbleUpon
Instagram/6tag
Tumblr (mostly for following other people; I don't blog there)
Anthropologie website (shopping; by which I mean lusting)
J. Crew website (ditto)
Kate Spade Saturday website (*sigh*)
Blogger (reading other people's blogs)
And bouncing around the internet, trying to stay roughly appraised of the happenings (and discussions) in pop-culture-land.

So, first off, I should totally stop going to websites like Anthropologie and Boden and tormenting myself with all the shit 1) I can't afford, and 2) I don't need. This one will never, ever be good for my sanity. On the plus side, I just threw away years' worth of fashion magazines and catalogues because it finally felt like an organic, "I'm ready to be done with this now" kind of moment. On the down side...well, Anthropologie just keeps making gorgeous stuff!

But there is something different about all the other social forums. This may be just me, but for some reason, I feel the distance in the other formats much more clearly. In other words, no part of my brain (no part of which I'm conscious, at least) thinks I'm genuinely connecting with other human beings when I'm on Twitter or Instagram. But every once in awhile I'll get a serious personal message from a friend on Facebook, and most of the people on there started out as friends. Friends. Not "Friends." Remember those? Friends were people I saw, on a regular basis, and formed genuine connections with. People I may even hug when I see them. I realize I may be in the minority on this, but I still follow a basic rule on Facebook: I do not "friend" someone unless they are someone I would want to have coffee with. I think my stand-offishness is weird to a lot of people, but "a lot of people" also insist that smiling pleasantly is a reasonable response to strangers asking me how I am. (Hint: They're wrong!)

My point is, when I'm on Google+, Instagram, Twitter, etc., I am there thinking, "I am incredibly smart and talented. I have a blog. I love my blog. I think people should read my blog. I want to read other blogs, and participate in their conversations. How do I keep my readers, join in the discussion, and find more people who would enjoy my writing?" I've even started just creating usernames like @leighandharriet, because frankly, Terra Leigh Bell — the human being, who goes by that name, reads lots of books, and agonizes over her hair color — that person is not on the internet. Because — and I really don't mean to sound bitchy, just pointing out something that seems to get lost — the internet isn't exactly something I or any other material being can be on. It's not a material object. I can't stand on it. Or in it. I am a physical being with mass. The internet, not so much. It's a gigantic, almost spiritual entity created only by connections. It exists in connections. One could argue that, as humans are relational, we also exist in connections. But throw a person in solitary confinement, and while you will certainly break them, you will still have a body in front of you. Cut all the computers of the world off from each other...well, then I guess I could stand on a computer?

Facebook, for me, elides these distinctions in a very uncomfortable way. Sometimes I'm on Facebook as Terra Leigh Bell, Friend. Here's how that looks: I bop around, see if any friends have changed their relationship status (because I'm clearly SO connected to them if I find out they've gone through a breakup that way, right?), look at my funny friends' status updates, marvel at how little of anyone's humor I understand, click on friends' links to read several articles written by left-wingers ranting about how incredibly stupid everyone on the right is (and in the terribly-written, politically-simplified, ideologically-bent, gramatically-butchered process, convincing me that the authors are just as bad), get angry at the world, bounce back to a friend's page, say something friendly, and finally turn on some Beyoncé and go to Anthropologie.com to calm myself down and fantasize about the life I will never have (and would find fault with if ever I did).

Awesome.

Then, sometimes I go to Facebook as Terra Leigh Bell, the Pseudo-Activist. This is when I get on my high horse about the things I genuinely care about — animal rights, statism, religious bullshit, military bullshit, police bullshit, and women-specific issues — and go to Facebook just to post links and read other people's links, and "like" pages in the hopes that by clicking on my little laptop I will get all the captive sea mammals of the world miraculously released and left alone by our loathsome species.

Tilikum is still in his nightmare, and probably will be until he dies. I'm thinking more concrete action might be required.

And then sometimes I go to Facebook as Terra Leigh Bell, the Writer's Agent. It's a little hard to explain the difference here. I think a lot of writers and artists have a hard time promoting themselves, and I do get that difficulty. I guess the way I'd explain it is to say that I really stop being myself. I start being my own agent. Because I genuinely think I'm talented, and a good thinker and writer, and I REALLY want people to read my work, I'm pretty happy to post links to my blog, and talk about my forthcoming book from Babel/Salvage. But I have to step out of myself a little bit to do this, and frankly, it feels icky to step out of myself in a forum where moments earlier I might have been pm-ing a friend about some serious parenting issues or arguing about the role of religion in feminism. Those are personal matters with which I feel intimately and passionately connected.

Promoting my blog requires me to step one or two paces away from myself, and for whatever reason, I am always one or two paces away on all other internet channels. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's a sign of something being wrong with me (though I doubt it). Maybe I will hurt someone's feelings by saying this (though I also doubt that). Whatever the reasons, I don't like the weird in-between space that is Facebook. I don't like noticing that a friend has suddenly removed all photos of their (now former?) partner, and then looking at an ad for Amazon. It makes me a little sick.

For awhile, I thought I would stay on Facebook and just try to take those steps back there as well. After all, it is a major mode of communication these days, for everything from a running group I recently joined, to doula and midwifery organizations. And it's not that I don't want to be in touch with these people. It's just that I want to actually be in touch with them. As in, we see each other in the flesh occasionally.
Recently, I had a bit of a realization: the final evidence that Facebook is not functioning as a genuine social connection (for me at least). I suddenly realized that I never talk about my boyfriend on Facebook. Some of my friends that I don't see very often may not even realize I have a boyfriend. And I suddenly noticed that I wasn't mentioning him on Facebook because it felt gross. Like I was dragging this beautiful, precious thing in my life into some kind of advertising-mixed-with-aching-human-loneliness muck. Which made me realize — Facebook is a muck of advertising-mixed-with-aching-human-loneliness. Sometimes it's disguised as hipster irony, sometimes as intellectualized distance. It's still aching, and it's still alienated as hell in the modern world, and why did I ever think Facebook didn't contribute to the alienation again?
So for those of you who didn't know, yes, I have a boyfriend. His name is Michael, and he's awesome. He's also Jewish, and an Atheist, so Christmas was interesting. And he is such a gorgeous gift in my life right now, I have no desire to drag him into that muck.
And for those who follow my blog, thank you for reading, and I will continue to post links to new posts on Google+ and Twitter; feel free to follow me in either of those spots. Also, you can subscribe right on the homepage (I think the link is in the right-hand margin). It says "subscribe in a reader," but you can also just subscribe via e-mail. The official Salvation from Facebook day is probably either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. I'll keep posting reminders until then. I definitely don't want to lose readers (and so far, the vast majority of my traffic comes from Facebook, so this is something of a scary move for me), so I'll do whatever I can to take readers with me.

Socrates' Defense

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 22:55:00 +0000

For the first third of the movie, the parent ignores and turns away from their child because of a committment to work, high causes, etc. For the latter part of the movie, said parent insists their child be kept away from them while they are in jail because (supposedly) it is too hard for the child to see them in such a place. Though it is clear the adult in question is simply embarrassed and doesn't know how to deal with the nightmare of parenthood behind bars.

Then, finally, the parent — a mother as it so happens — gets to have her big moment to put everyone who's judging her in their place:

"A man leaves his family to go to jail to protect a principle, and they name a holiday after him. A man leaves his children to go fight in a war, and they erect a monument to him. A woman does the same thing, and she's a monster."

Nothing but the Truth is by no means a great film, but it was overall an entertaining one. The mother in question is a journalist named Rachel Armstrong, who goes to jail to protect a source. The source, Armstrong says, was promised absolute confidentiality. The federal government wants her source, as they revealed to Armstrong the identity of an undercover CIA agent.

And Armstrong has a point when she uses the term "monster." A woman is, strictly speaking, monstrous when she fails to conform to social definitions of femininity. But I have to say that when I heard this speech, my first thought was, "Bullshit. You're not a monster. You're an asshole, just like the men you're describing."

Which is all to say, I've never been impressed by the supposed overturning of norms that happens when women enact the more reprehensible traditionally masculine choices and behaviors.

For clarity's sake, let me mention that the title of this dialogue, "Apology," is a transliteration, not a translation, of the Greek apologia. Apologia means, in English, "defense," NOT "apology." As Grube puts it, "There is certainly nothing apologetic about the speech."

Socrates is defending himself against the accusations of various Athenians. I have only just recently discovered, at ombhurbhuva, some of the political complexities behind Socrates' trial and execution. I heartily suggest that anyone interested check out this article. I'm just processing a lot of that information, so I'm not going to go into it too heavily here.

What I am going to take issue with here is probably obvious from the above notes on Nothing but the Truth. Incidentally, it is also something I seem to be alone on. Namely, that I have issues with idealists. Idealists, with kids. Socrates, despite having numerous ways he could have gone about being acquitted, delivers a beligerent defense and, in the Meno, insists that he doesn't want to survive by running away anywhere else. This, from man with a wife and children.

On the one hand, I've been experimenting lately with trying to be an asshole. Or, because I am nothing if not traditionally gendered, a bitch. Being a bitch is super fun (all ex-boyfriends and pastors totally left that little detail out), and frankly, I'm just getting tired of being perfect. So I've been pulling something of a Socrates/Lessing; risking, smashing, and/or abandoning human relationships, in an effort to be more radically true to the only compass I have some kind of direct access to. Namely, my own.

But there is a violence to idealism which I remain suspicious of. An attitude which places the ideal human situation well over and above actual human beings.

And I really start to squirm over this when kids are involved. Children are just little humans — rather difficult ones, as it so happens, and not ones I'm prone to romanticize — but they are little humans brought into the world completely unvoluntarily. Involuntary doesn't sound right, because it's not like we can say to a nonexistent being, "Would you like to exist?", get a negative, and drag them into the nightmare with us anyway. The whole point is you can't ask a nonexistent being if it wants to exist. And I absolutely do not accept the idea that existence is always obviously better than nonexistence. We're into making lots more humans exist — we get all those nice warm fuzzies every time we look at a baby — because evolution doesn't give a shit about voluntariness and it is very good at rewarding us. Nietzsche's abyss only makes sense when there is a something to worry about the abyss. I'm pretty sure babies that haven't been born yet aren't hovering over some Germanic, post-Romantic, terror-filled pit, just hoping to be saved and brought into this charming pot of melting glaciers, surveillance cameras, and biological warfare.

So you take a child — a creature which never wanted to be at all — call it into an existence of radical neediness and dependence...and then abandon it? Are you kidding me?!

Granted, I'm a nanny, studying to be a doula, hoping to become a midwife. So, yeah, I'm prejudiced. But the reason I'm prejudiced is that I spend time with kids. In other words, I don't get the impression that Socrates has any fucking idea who or what his children are. That's like, woman shit.

Socrates spends his life insisting that he is trying to overturn old ways of thinking — questioning the status quo — and still maintains this gigantic blind spot. It's a blind spot most humans share. Few and far between are the parents who see their children as more than creatures that exist solely to adore and obey them. And later, to be yelled at and punished when they fail to do so.

Socrates has ideals. He is committed to his ideals, and I can't blame him for that. But he also has children. And while he may have been able to rely on friends to raise and provide for his children for him — it seems in Meno and Phaedo that he is confident they will do so — I do not rest content. Men bring children into this world. It may feel more conceptual — their link to their offspring is, after all, at a remove — but someone who claims to respect and value concepts and ideas could and should know better. He could and should have at least taken his children into account when he was having his moment of fame, his "big moment to put everyone who's judging him in their place."

Postscript:

I feel it worth mentioning that the scene where Armstrong has her little speech fails because it is very hard for actors to convince me of nobilities I don't recognize in real life. The actress concerned, Kate Beckinsale, is more convincing when she seems flustered and intimidated by the size and scope of the machine she has stepped into. Her nervous gestures when talking to Pat Dubois, the federal prosecutor, layer on top of a frightened but determined attitude. In those scenes, I absolutely believed her.

Two (Very Different) Poems

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 20:52:00 +0000

As a poet, I consider it my god-given duty to bemoan how little Americans understand poetry. So here: "Bemoan!" Next week, thoughts on Plato's Apology. This week, I thought I'd post a couple of poems.
Neither of the poems below is what I would call the finest of the respective poets — namely, Mary Oliver and Maya Angelou. Nor are Oliver and Angelou my favorite poets. They are, instead, poems that were very important for my development as a writer.
The writer who first made me want to be a poet was William Shakespeare. I say this not so much as a "Hey, aren't I classy?" but more to demonstrate just how out of step I was with contemporary writing and thought and...well, existence. I read almost the complete works of Shakespeare sometime between the ages of 11 and 14, and understood little to none of it. I just knew that every once in awhile I would stumble across a turn of phrase that sent my head spinning with its convoluted-yet-crystal-clear beauty. Also, I knew that the main characters were largely sociopathic, fascinating, disturbed men, and I was already pretty clear on the fact that this was totally my type.
Then, one day, for reasons I don't recall, I was at a bookstore and thought to myself, "Well, if I'm a poet, I should read some poetry." I went over to the poetry section and chose one book — Maya Angelou's Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie — almost entirely because I recognized her name, though how I don't know. The other was West Wind, by Mary Oliver, and I have absolutely no idea why I picked that one up. I'd never heard of Oliver, and the phrase "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" printed on the front meant nothing to a kid as sheltered as I was.
The two poems below are the first poems in each book. They are the first poems that I read by these poets, and they may very well qualify as the first 20th century poetry I ever read. (Sidenote: I was eighteen or nineteen at the time.) I'm putting them here because...well, because for many different reasons, poetry has a reputation for being difficult. And it can be. And while I may enjoy slogging through difficult poetry, I certainly don't enjoy difficult literary theory or scientific research papers, so I sympathize with people who think poetry is somehow "beyond them." But it's not. It's just not. Poets like Oliver seem pretty intent on proving that.

Seven White Butterflies

by Mary Oliver

Seven white butterflies

delicate in a hurry look

how they bang the pages

of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow

and orange and plain

gold all eternity

is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such

wisdom in the agitated

motions of the mind seven

dancers floating

even as worms toward

paradise see how they banter

and riot and rise

to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into

the invisible wind weightless

lacy willing

to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles

down on a yellow thumb on a

brassy stem now

all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden towers who

would have thought it could be so easy?

The poem was something of an epiphany to me. The sensuality took my breath away, and while I understood the references to Blake and Whitman, the poem changed them for me. Before, poets like Blake and Whitman were part of a different world, a world that seemed both better than this world, and ferociously unavailable to full comprehension. Oliver, in twenty-six lines, wrote a gorgeous poem that had as its stars seven insects — no lovers, no sailors, no fairies or mermaids or goddesses or other-male-fantasies — while she effortlessly tugged Blake and Whitman into supporting roles. I had had absolutely no idea that poetry could be beautiful, and comprehensible.

Angelou is, of course, an entirely different writer. I'm not sure if she is more famous as a poet, or as an autobiographer, but either way she is one of our Black Classic writers. Angelou has very much played a role as a spokesperson for African Americans, and in particular black women. And while I knew Angelou was black — while her race and the radical difference between our life experiences was, it felt, written in blood in her books — I appreciated the violent shock I got from reading her poetry.

They Went Home

by Maya Angelou

They went home and told their wives,

that never once in all their lives,

had they known a girl like me,

But . . . They went home.

They said my house was licking clean,

no word I spoke was ever mean,

I had an air of mystery,

But . . . They went home.

My praises were on all men's lips,

they like my smile, my wit, my hips,

they'd spend one night, or two or three.

But . . .

In retrospect it feels almost charmingly naïve, the way I took Angelou's poetry in. I had read nothing like it before, and I was repeatedly flabbergasted at how frankly she wrote about sex and racism and violence and drugs and the beauty of black people's bodies. But it registered as something like, "Wow! I had no idea you could do that. Huh. I guess you can do that."

As a final note, I, like every other vaguely-guilt-ridden upper class white person in the world, feel uncomfortable talking about, oh, what shall we call it? Blackness? Race? Not-me-ness? I'm not sure. I feel uncomfortable drawing attention to a writer's race, because it is "rude" to do so. It has only recently dawned on me, however, that this is due to the fact that I am white and, therefore, the somehow "neutral" race. It's like, I'm normal, and it's rude of me to call attention to a black person's lack of normalcy. I haven't found what feels like an organic, graceful way to address my own privilege and racism, but until I do I'm just going to start hammering at it, probably, ungracefully.

Did you know your brain is a part of your body??!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 00:24:00 +0000

Thoughts on Chapter 11 of The Artist's Way. Part eleven of twelve on creativity.

I hadn't planned on lining this up with Thanksgiving weekend, but on reviewing Chapter 11 of The Artist's Way, I was reminded of the fact that Cameron took on the subject of exercise specifically, and the body more generally.

Artists and intellectuals seem to almost make it a point of pride that they don't give a shit about their bodies. We drink a lot, eat out constantly, and then get all high-horsey about popular culture's worship of sports celebrities and skinniness and six-pack abs. Though I quit, smoking (both cigarettes and marijuana) is still a big thing for lots of my artsy friends. And here we live, in the sickeningly privileged U.S.A., where we apparently still think it's okay to binge on tons of meat, dairy, white flour, processed sugar, and beer to celebrate...uh, "Thanks."

Artists and intellectuals never seem to mind aligning their own values with popular culture when it would make them feel deprived to do otherwise. Overeat when that's fun and convenient, and then mock the women and moms going for jogs around Green Lake in their Lululemon gear.* 'Cause nothing would suck more than using all those excess calories.

On the one hand, I get it. I have made very intentional commitments to myself in terms of what practices and causes I feel it is worth investing myself in. I put money towards them, I spend time and energy on the things I'm passionate about, I oppose the evils I can in those specific areas, and then I, like 99% of the people I know, get on with my life and effectively put blinders on to the stuff that falls outside of the scope I've chosen for myself. But I chose that scope for a reason: I can only be effective in so many spheres of life. I only have so much me to go around. I cannot work a job, hang out with friends, have a boyfriend, read a ton, participate in the dialogues I care about online and in life, participate in food/animal rights protests, political action, and fundraising, write poems, write blog posts, sing in a choir, be a vestry member at my church, go to the freaking church, schedule introvert-escape time with my cat and Monty Python, AND exercise regularly and eat well and occasionally sleep, and do any of it particularly well. Even writing that out is sort of terrifying, because as of right now I am trying to do all of those things.

So maybe artists and intellectuals would claim they are trying to pick their foci. They want to ensure they can do things, and do them well, and many of us didn't participate in sports when we were younger, so maybe getting outside and going for a run, or deciding to eat something more vegetable-based than meat-based, just feels foreign and like a lot of extra time and effort. And don't get me wrong: it is a lot of extra effort. If anyone ever cheerily says something like "it's just so easy to eat really healthy and you can totally just squeeze in a little brisk walk here and there and that's plenty!", they're lying. For dinner tonight, I'd like a burger, please. The kale and sweet potato will take infinitely longer to prepare. Also, when my writing time gets squeezed, the idea of going to a yoga class or swimming sounds counterproductive. I've got limited time, so I should spend it doing the most important stuff, right?

Which brings me to the title of the blog post. Did you know your brain is a part of your body? Of course you did. I won't insult your intellect by suggesting otherwise. I will, however, risk insulting your attitude. Most humans behave as though they were in fact two different things. We could say soul and body, or spirit and body, but these days, people mostly talk about their "self" in what I think is a similar way to how we used to talk about souls. It's gotten a little pop-psychologized, but I think the gist (in this context) is the same: I think and behave as though I, the person I talk about in my professional and social and emotional lives, am a different entity from my body. Only I'm not. I'm totally fucking not. I don't know nearly enough about neuro-philosophy and -psychology to go into detail on this, but suffice to say your body is precisely the you you are always talking about. Your body is precisely the you that makes art, and raises babies, and tries to love your partner(s), and listens to music and gets all choked up about it. That is you. That is your body. If there is a spiritual element, which I believe there is, it's so deep and so essential I don't think we can hardly talk about it. We might be able to sing or pray about it, and religious ceremonies can be great for connecting to it. But if it's there at all, I'm pretty sure it's not the part of you that nearly cries over every sweet photo of a puppy on the internet. (Okay, okay. That specific issue might be more about me.)

My point is, when you take care of your body, you are taking care of the very same thing that generates art and thought and insight and stories and plays and loving, well-reasoned responses to your horrible children/partner/family. Taking care of your body is not a time-suck that keeps you away from your creativity; your job might be, and certainly some relationships can be, and without doubt the entire nightmare that is the modern nation-state-capitalism-entertainment-industry-death-knell is one gigantic time-suck. Unfortunately, that mess isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and whenever it does, it will probably take us all with it. So in the meantime, you can either a) abuse the body that makes all that joyous art and thought, or b) get rid of it as quickly as possible, in as slow and painful of a way as possible.

Ham with a side of sedentary, anyone?

* The interwebs in particular like to complain about hot moms and their jogger/strollers and Lululemon, though I've heard it in real-time as well.

I know. It's just so obnoxious to see women (WOMEN!!) getting exercise, and they take up tons of room when they have those annoying "kid" things, and they get together in these groups and "chat" with each other about their feelings and their lives AND THEN THEY GO TO STARBUCKS AND CAN'T THEY TELL HOW OBNOXIOUS THEIR SKINNY LATTES ARE??!!

But seriously, I'm sick of it. Next time you feel like criticizing an upper-class woman with a nice ass, know that you are just jealous.

Inner and Outer Ethics, and Plato's Euthyphro

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Nov 2013 02:00:00 +0000

The stones are struck, and fire is made. The prayers are said, and the rains come.

If I had to guess at what draws us toward ritual, it would be the combination of our love of cause and effect, and our relentlessly pattern-making brain. Always, our brains look for the repeated — and repeatable — patterns. If the rains do not come, considering the general reliability of the weather, it seems not only understandable, but necessary, that humans would look for what went wrong; some practice left unfinished, some link in the chain of cause-and-effect that was left out.

But this gets into very complicated territory, very quickly. Because somewhere along the path of human history, we also came up with the idea of "pollution." I will refrain from using the term sin, only because it often has very Christian overtones in this country, and the idea of pollution is much, much older than Christianity. Whenever it came along, pollution meant that something went wrong in that chain of cause and effect, but internally, and perhaps invisibly.

Some terminology, and a bit of background:

Euthyphro is one of Plato's earlier dialogues. Pronounce it like "You-Thi (as in 'thimble')-Fro.* The earlier (and blessedly shorter) pieces are often called the Socratic dialogues, in part because scholars generally believe them to fairly well reflect the views of Socrates himself, as opposed to Plato, who is of course writing the dialogues and could put any idea he wanted into Socrates' mouth. Euthyphro ends, like most of the Socratic dialogues, in what is called aporia, which could be translated as "puzzlement," or something like "impasse." The Socratic dialogues, in other words, end without resolution. These dialogues demonstrate that no one knows what they thought they knew. The Socratic dialogues end with bewildered looks on their faces, and Socrates indicates that perhaps a conversation in the future might be beneficial to everyone concerned.

The titular character, Euthyphro himself, is a priest. As a priest, Euthyphro knows the rituals that were central to ancient Athenian life. He knows the appropriate sacrifices, and the gestures, and the prayers, and all of the various benefits of fulfillment, and consequences for a failure of fulfillment. Euthyphro is an expert on the topic of the dialogue: ὅσιον. According to G.M.A. Grube, the translator of my copy of Euthyphro, ὅσιον or hosion means,

in the first instance, the knowledge of the proper ritual in prayer and sacrifice and of course its performance...But obviously Euthyphro uses it in the much wider sense of pious conduct generally (e.g., his own), and in that sense the word is practically equivalent to righteousness...the transition being by way of conduct pleasing to the gods. (Grube, G.M.A. Five Dialogues. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002. Print.)

The story behind the dialogue is that Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father for the death of a slave, who was himself a murderer. Euthyphro is defying his entire family by doing so, and insists that it doesn't matter what one's family or even community think of one; the important thing, in modern parlance, is to "do the right thing."

This is kind of a crazy thing to think in an ancient and/or traditional society. For practical purposes, what matters is what your community thinks of you, not some abstract vision of morality. Euthyphro himself seems slightly less interested in the abstract and more interested in, for him, the reality of the gods. If the gods disapproved of something, it would be duly punished. In that sense, Euthyphro is being just as practical as anyone performing prayers for their neighbors' eyes' benefit. But in another sense, it seems to me that we are getting a window into a particular kind of phenomenon: Jesus of Nazareth was trying to counter this exact issue when he said "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). When exactly did human religion and ritual become less about serving the purposes it so clearly evolved to serve, and more about appeasement of either an abstracted Law or fickle Gods? Because while appeasing the gods goes way back, it would seem to me that any god whose service leads to the sundering of familial ties is a very modern, and very peculiar, kind of god. Don't get me wrong; Euthyphro's dad sounds like an asshole (so does Euthyphro for that matter), but religious ritual is intended to keep human society running along as smoothly as possible, to give humans a sense of control over uncontrollable circumstances, to glue us together so we'll be there for each other when it's needed.

If we keep hosion tethered to its primary meaning — as Grube puts it, "the knowledge of the proper ritual in prayer and sacrifice," — it feels distinctly external. This, in contrast to what I will call righteousness, or internal justification. (I am trying very hard to keep my Christianity out of this, so bear with me.) The internal justification seems to be a product of maintaining a harmony within one's self; keeping one's ducks in a line, so to speak, where the ducks are the disparate parts of one's psyche. There is a link between the internal and external, but I'm not sure that Grube's description of that link as "by way of conduct pleasing to the gods" captures it very well. Does one fulfill the proper rituals, and thereby gain some kind of inner concord? Or is the other way around, that one must have the inner concord in order to be able to fulfill the rituals properly?

And now we are back to cause and effect.

Over to the left you may see I have a blog on my list called speculum criticum traditionis. It's one of my favorites (though, full disclosure, the author is also a friend), and awhile back skholiast wrote a post that included the following Hasidic story:

When the Ba'al Shem Tov had to accomplish a difficult task, he retired to a certain spot in the forest. By mystical means he would light a fire, and he meditated in prayer; and what he set out to perform was done.

After a generation, his disciple the Maggid of Mezeritz too faced a challenge. He went to the same place in the woods, and would say: "We can no longer light the fire, but we can still say the prayers," and what he wanted done became real.

Again, a generation later, Rabbi Moishe of Sassov had to perform a task. And he too went to the forest saying: "We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the prayer's secret meditations; but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs, and that must be sufficient." And so it was.

But when another generation had passed, and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his chair in his room and said: "We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place. All we can do is to tell the story of how it was done." And the story that he told had the same effect as the deeds of the other three.

If you read the post on speculum criticum, you'll see that skholiast doesn't agree with the more common, feel-good interpretation of this story, which would seem to indicate that the answer to my question is that not only is the inner concord/morality/righteousness primary, it may be all that is required. I tend to disagree with him on this; I think the story is intended in this feel-good way. I happen to think the good feelings are nonsense, but I'll save that for another time.
The story does make an intriguing maneuver, though. Going back to my earlier questions — Does one fulfill the proper external rituals, and thereby gain some kind of internal righteousness? Or must one have the internal righteousness in order to be able to fulfill the external rituals properly? — the Hasidic story points up the cause and effect assumption of the questions. Maybe the Hasidic story asks another question: Is it possible that all we truly have observed is correlation? And if so, is this observation a gesture towards freedom, or towards terror?

*You should pronounce it this way because this is how I pronounce it, which doesn't tell you much. I looked at the phonetic pronunciation, but God only knows what those symbols mean.