Equal?

Recently a feminist friend, whom I admired as a person, posted the picture on her facebook profile.  I've seen it before and feel I had a pretty good grasp on the message.  It's a fun turn of play to imagine a female-centric, matriarchal society.  It's empowering and gratifying to women, to not only be shown as equals, but actually turning the table on the message of where real power and authority takes place. Of course, I'm interpreting this from a male centric POV, for which I make no apologies, whatsoever.  I love strong and powerful women.  My mother was one.  A real dynamo... and yet I realize all the ways that a woman, especially one growing up in a very patriarichal society could feel very disempowered, and second seat... but, gladly my mother never felt that way. She, and I knew this instictively as a young child - SHE was the center, and the core of my world. So yes, I know it is meant to portray women's place in the a male-centric religion.  I'm all for representing women in powerful and capable depictions.  I celebrate this full out depiction of ALL women when speaking one of the most central stories of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic patriarchy.

However, this particular depiction hasn't sat quite straight with me. As an egalitarian, and one who loves symmetry and balance, my ideal is just that, the Dao, the Yin and the Yang, which together create something so much more than the separated parts. I think the omission of either sex when depicting god's interaction with humanity is wrong.  Like I said, I'm fine with images completely about women or men in every other role.  I love songs of brotherhood (Petshopboys - Fugitive) or sisterhood, that celebrate a gender.

I realize, that in the depiction of men and women, there has been a great disparity, and difference in how each role or sex is portrayed, especially when you factor the sex appeal side of things.  So the more images which are respectful, complimentary, and extolling of women the better, especially those physical features so promoted that signify reproductive fitness (scantly clad women with all the right curves).  When the topic is humanity, (not our one track reproductive brains) it becomes another thing entirely.

I then thought, how would I depict this scene, and of course I would include both sexes in as equal a framing as I could.  The depiction of god would be hard, because if there is one I believe god is asexual, and has no gender.


Anyway, I then began considering how society currently portrays the sexes, and after a visual flood of all the advertising I've seen over my years washed across my brain, I then thought of this picture which I had seen recently, which I thought pretty much summed up how men and women are portrayed by advertisers and the media.

This is how I perceive culture today encourages us to be, and markets to us.  Men are less intelligent, less evolved, lustful animals, and women are sex objects, their power in their attractiveness.  The more women a man can his get hands, on the better.  And the more men that want a woman, the better too.  Typically, women LOVE male attention paid to their beauty (but only from the RIGHT men). Women love to be attractive - this is one of their super powers. This message of objectifying women for their looks and body alone is most pervasive in the music and images of Hip Hop.

So here is what I best recall posting to her (she deleted it so fast I can't quite remember exactly what I said):  "Not a very good depiction of the current state of humanity...this one is better
<Ape w/ girls pict>

Here response was thus  "I cannot possibly tell you how offensive and disgusting your question and the photo you have posted are.

Please retract them, or I shall unfriend you. Or you can simply unfriend me."

So, like a hair-trigger, she was immediately offended and angry.  First of all, it wasn't a question. It was a statement.  I wasn't asking her opinion.  I was giving my opinion about how we are depicted today, which really had very little to do with her beloved picture.  She was an English major, so she should have not made such a simple mistake to call what I said a question.

Initially in my state of mind, and what I was trying to express, I was surprised by her reaction.  But I quickly saw that she had misread my post, and I could clearly see how she had. She thought I was trying to replace her picture with this one.

No matter how I tried to explain myself, she would not have it, and persisted in her perception and outrage. Many times when we're angry we don't really want to understand someone, we just want to justify our rage (and stay angry), and punish them.  No matter what I said she continued to paint it in the way she saw it. (and get angrier it seemed).  Pretty soon, in making her case for outrage, she had me saying all kinds of things I had not intended to communicate.  From my perspective she was twisting my words to suit her perception. But doing so strengthened her case. She didn't really want to understand me at all. I eventually realized nothing would help but just shutting up and apologizing.  I should have simply apologized and shut up from the get go.,  But I'm a bit ignorant on human behavior and interactions, (people's social-moral hangups) and like my mother, I talk too much.

Later on she began badmouthing and misrepresenting me on her page with quite a few sympathizers doing the same.  It was all quite baffling and I tried not to care as I realized it didn't matter, and my need to defend myself was simply ego and the need to be right.  I figured let her have her opinion and take on it.  Which saddened me, because I think it has destroyed what little friendship we had, and as I said I admire her.  So I simply apologized again on her disparaging post:

Again I apologize. It was inappropriate and insensitive to comment how where and when I did. Holly is a verbal force to be reckoned with and I admire her. She had me back peddling quite clumsily. I should have simply apologized without trying to explain. The more I did the worse it got. I thank you for your correction.

I was a guilty as she, probably more-so, for the misunderstanding. The following is to better explain my qualifiers for being insensitive and inappropriate. How: It was poor judgement to communicate so poorly a very nuanced idea in such a flippant manner.  Where: Bad judgement too in trying to have that discussion on an update of her profile picture, something she saw as sacred.  These (profile memes) are typically very personal and not open to critique or commentary. When: The timing (during the Kate Kelly excommunication).  I posted this at a time when the atmosphere was charged with upset, and women were angry.

I really don't consider myself sexist, as accused.  Having a strong mother and three sisters, all of whom I love, and now a daughter, I can't imagine ever diminishing or disrespecting women.  I've always been attracted to strong women as well.  Every man has a mother, every woman has a father.  I guess I can understand issues if the person has had serious negative issues with the males or females in their lives.

I'm very analytic and like to share my analysis.  Some things don't need to be analysed.  With all of this recent mental activity and my very clueless read on social propriety and interaction I've been wondering if I may have a case of mild Asperger's.

For me, the experience was a learning one, as I struggled to understand why what happened happened the way it did.  Like I said, I was cluelessly surprised at her anger.  I foolishly thought my two liner would be read as intended.  I foolishly thought that we were closer friends than we were.  I thought that feminism was more about equality - which I think it is with most women, and likely too with this one (when I'm not pissing her off).  As a man involved in the cause, I have to be much more careful about what I say and question.  In fact, with some women, Like Holly, it would be best if I just shut my fuckin mouth, at the risk of "Mansplainin". As a result I consulted a lot of articles on taking offense and anger.

One in particular was very helpful.  It led me into reading The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. This book is filled with information pertinent to this whole interchange.  One of the more salient points of his thesis was that emotions fire before logic, and that we are emotional creatures that then apply logic, like his metaphor of the Elephant (emotions) and the Rider (logic).  My post was an emotional trigger, from someone who has likely suffered abuse at the hands ans mouths of a man (or men), and my depiction was everything she hated about the interactions of men and women.

In his studies, Haidt claims to have found the 6 basic taste buds on our moral tongue:

1. Care/Harm

2. Fairness/Cheating

3. Loyalty/Betrayal

4. Authority/Subversion

5. Sanctity/Degradation

6. Liberty/Oppression

My post hit her hard, square on the head of Sanctity/Degradation, which is admittedly one of my bias blind spots.  Since leaving our shared faith, Mormonism, that she claims to have left as well, I have jettisoned the notion of Sanctity, or the sacred.  I mostly think that when someone calls something sacred, they are just scared. You can say anything to me, and I can hear and watch anything, without getting offended... it might make me sad, or hurt my heart if too violent or hurtful to another person (I score very high on Care/Harm), but I do not think there is much in this world that is truly vulgar or offensive. Being offended is a choice we make. She, on the other hand, had a great respect for that sacred, that which stands for her cause.  That is a moral taste bud she has retained, even after her leaving the LDS religion. Sanctity.

People are different, with a different mix of these tastes.  Like I told my boys recently, who were swearing and flipping each other off in front of their 8 year old sister, who had a fit of screaming and crying, "You can say anything around me, and even flip each other off, if you really feel that way, but you will respect your sister when she is near, or in the room, and not offend her tiny eyes or ears.

Unfortunately, to not offend others, you have to know and respect your audience, and spot those easily offended, and monitor your speech and behavior.

Just like male and female, people are not equal on the moral tastes scales either.  We are all different, and differences call for accommodation, as best we can ... and consideration as well.  We are not equal, men and women, and we are not equal from person to person.  Thinking other people will think and react like you is a mistake you make when you suck at the theory of mind, and then proceed to make them just like you.  Not everyone will like you, or how you think.  FILTER!!! In a successful society we all learn to filter.

That said, in the future I should try to discover beforehand how sensitive a person is to the sacred.  It's said to arise from, or be close to disgust. Maybe a good litmus test is to measure their food acceptance levels - I'll basically eat anything, even raw oysters on the half shell. So the diversity or sensitivity of their pallet, could be a sign on just who sensitive they are to disgust. Also, at the first recoil to an idea or a word, that could be a sign.  I'm sure there are all kind of signs, should I pay attention, to how much reverence for the sacred they have... It's just a matter of keeping my eyes and ears peeled.  I truly, like my daughter Rachel, do not want anyone to be offended by what they see or hear ... but ultimately, offense is a choice, or maybe a limited understanding.  Some people are just puritans; many children are.  As such, I should do my best to be pure around them, so as not to offend, keeping my adult mouth and my adult humor in places where it belongs.

Also, never post a picture of scantily clad sexy women being groped by an ape to an overweight, unattractive, feminist with a legitimate ax to grind from her years of feeling less than and oppressed.  

Point of View (POV)

Practically and essentially, the universe only exists as we perceive it through what we know (our ken); therefore, if you change your perception of the universe with new knowledge, you have essentially changed the universe itself... at least from your own perspective...

But, really, what else is there from a subjective POV, but your own views at any given point in time? Even the views of others must be processed through your own, and just how well you are able to listen, to understand, and to connect determines the degree to which you can approach theirs. Ultimately, even given empathy, ALL points of view are subjective. Objectivity is a myth.

It's all relativity, even in human connections, your measurement depends on your point of view.

Change your POV = Change your Universe... Change it with frequency and you become a kaleidoscope of colors ever changing, like a beautiful sand mandala that cannot be swept away because it does its own sweeping once it's ready, and regenerates anew in each phase of understanding, and with each perceptual motif.

Change it too much in the company of others and you are judged unstable...and those in need of stability will shun you.

Ultimately, are we all not seeking to be unbounded (by our own limited perspective and abilities), just like the universe is so by all it contains. Are we not striving to be physically free in movement, both mental and physical, to flow in every endeavor, to master gravity and physical space, to master language and communication, in words, in music, in physical expression of art and dance and technology, in concepts and ideas that better this world of suffering and pain? Do we even want to rid the pain and suffering? A fools errand at large, but not in our own lives and minds. You've probably heard the phrase, "Think globally, act locally.", but in our own heads it's the reverse, where we think locally, and act globally (or at least within our tribe), in this game we play to maximize pleasure (joy), and minimize pain.

Doesn't every game worth its thrill have a price? Without the price of the perils would any endeavor be worth pursuit? Cannot any pursuit become an addiction, even love? If that is true, maybe life is all about managing our addictions, but to do so we need to be aware who, or what, is driving the car - Emotion -How invested we become in a thing, and our emotional (motivational) brains can sometimes drive us to ruin, or madness. I think as a sensitive person, I love too deeply, I attach too hard, and I expect too much from people that love me. I have been critical about everyone in my life - who loved me the best they could, and in that criticism there is an inherent rejection of love. I do know my parents loved me, best they could while dealing with their personal demons. I know I am loved by my siblings. I know I was loved (and still am in ways) by the two women I have truly loved... but they eventually had to go their own way, which felt a lot like pain and rejection - honestly, it was, leaving me to ask, over and over, "How could so much love, now feel like so much pain? And that is how the two are linked - loss feels like pain, which if left untended, or misunderstood, or fueled by ego, feels like anger and hatred.

Are we even capable of making this existence free of pain? Free from disappointments? I'd say many, by their inaction, mitigate the pain and suffering, by doing "safe" things, but that carried on will only lead to a life of regret, or stagnation. Some invest only just enough, so as to avoid the pain, or to have little to deal with when things die or move on. Some people develop a personality (or are born with one) that is stolid, careful, and measured when it comes to the feeling and expression of emotion.

Can we avoid pain and disappointment? I would say yes, but only so ironically, by embracing the pain and the disappointments, to make the moments of their absence or their resolution absolutely joyful. You cannot get rid of pain with more pain, nor can you get rid of it by ignoring it. You must find a place, in love, in peace, in understanding, from which to process your pain, to sort it out in a healthy way, devoid of ego. At least this is MY tact, taken amid the throes of being blessed and cursed with Bipolar illness. I have found a good companion in my loneliness, that helps me examine my life, that helps me meditate. A safe place alone, devoid of any judgment but mine. That companion is Cannabis...I've blogged about it elsewhere It is impossible to have the highs without the lows - simple brain chemistry and rebound effect. We are, our brains - differential engines, always comparing and measuring differences. It's widely said and known that as a person ages with this disease (bipolar) that the lows become more dominant and overtake the highs - consigning the person to a resigned state of being where nothing is ventured, or at least their way more careful, and disappointment is an all day sucker. The world is rife with disappointment and disaster, but also with hope and love, and beautiful experiences.

My mission, as I've chosen to accept it, is to continue striving to improve, to grow, to read and learn. To master the piano and guitar. To compose songs, and sing. To learn another language (Spanish, French German-Dutch), to learn to code, to rebuild a truck, ANYTHING, to keep my mind engaged, and to keep growing, but also to abide the pain, to feel it, and express it. My hope is to process it, such that my POV is primarily one of life and not loss, love and not hate, and most of all to understand the pain, that is inescapable, and let it heal.

I hope to bridle my emotions, as I think the depth of which is what causes my condition, and ride them where they take me, yet never take them too seriously... and if they are truly serious, about a serious situation, never wallow around in them to the point I am trapped in my own misery and cannot escape. I hope that I have tamed my soul, and my emotions, and my over-investing in things, such that I can deal in a healthy way with my bipolar illness, and my need to explore life at the edges. I hope that I have grown up emotionally, and past my over-sensitivity (a blessing and a curse) And I thank marijuana, for putting me in a state of mind that I can do so, and where I can experience the highs I miss when I'm depressed, or where I can thoroughly examine my depression. But it too can be abused, and must be bridled and saddled, and only taken out for a spin when necessary.

I know, that no matter how hard I try, I cannot escape my upbringing - the nurturing and information given me during my formative years. I cannot escape my culture, even if it's the whole world, nor can I escape my DNA (the sins of the Father and Mother, back four generations). All I can do, like anyone else, is make the most of what I've been given, all the things I did not choose, and make choices within that. This is agency, those choices had within all the things we did not choose for ourselves. And if you look at it deeply, if you want to see, in many ways, at the base and beginnings, it's really not your fault, it's baked into the equation ... but then again, in many ways it is your fault, you can choose anger, or hate, or understanding and love ... Just like God (or Satan). ;) To me, God is a metaphor, as is Satan, and when we blame either, we are really "blaming" ourselves or others. (blaming = assigning responsibility to).

Some people look at the Judaeo-christian god and blame him for all the misery and suffering in the equation, since it was he who created it all. It's called the problem of evil. Satan was even invented to be the scapegoat for god, and explain why there is evil in the world. People, who for whatever reasons behave badly, we say are possessed, or influenced by Satan, and people who behave well they say they are influenced or following Jesus, or God, or Allah ... But, this god created Satan, and this god is supposed to be all powerful, surely he could get rid of suffering... Jesus got rid of suffering by dying, but still people suffer, even those who follow him (if you think about it, literally following Jesus IS Suffering).

Maybe we have the wrong god, or have assigned things to god that are not true, that is if there be one. God, as I see her/him/it cannot break the rules that establish the game, and in this Earthly existence is not all powerful, but limited. It is said that healthy people establish healthy boundaries, and God exists at the boundary, having set everything in motion with the equation that created the simple atom, Hydrogen, and the equations which drew it together, like birds of a feather, to create Stars and Planets, wherein Life could take hold, it too being part of the equation - an emergent property of such.

In this world there is opposition... conflict and harmony, together (even in the Atom), and at the edges time and space, and space-time don't even make sense sometimes. Welcome to the paradox! Where you choose what you will see... even if it's a fantasy. Let's hope it is a beautiful one... and only you and your perception matter in this to make it so. "I changed my heart and mind, and the Universe changed with me."

Ape, I Ron

Last night, with the life and thoughts of Anaximander on my mind, I dreamed a dream, a vivid one ... where she was the ax and I the tree, cut down to dry and watch burn, sacrificed to keep her warm. I too was alive in the fire, this fire that now deforms me day to day, to ash and smoke, soon to disappear from the corporeal, reabsorbed and recycled into the ether. And she the ax, fire was made at her birth and becoming, made intense to shape and form her from her grounded and earthen core. A rib not from Adam, nor man, but from Alma Matter, the earth mother. She steel, maid of the Earth's core and outer carbon element, an alloy of iron. All that ascendant, a byproduct of Apeiron. And I now the Ape, named Ron, that formed made a man.
The remnants of my kind, mixed with hers, given the conductivity made electric, life as fuel to the friction which ground her down to quick cutting sharpness, with which I was felled and grounded, back to earth, to be reshaped, cut limb by limb and cast as fuel for future fires and forges, or ground to pulp, glued, tattooed and screwed to create walls and cheap furniture, soon to Fall as that felled; creating comfort in complexity, away from the detrimental elements, the crudely elemental. A separation. A reprieve.
I leave, as those long fallen.
My last logs tossed on the fire,
as Winter winds down,
melting the frost within her
upon my burning demise
into eternal springs of living waters.

All that remains of the tree of me is gone, in heat and smoke, as I awake from the dream, and see that I am now human - eternal forms of life and living. Ape-I-Ron, and Ron-I-Ape.

"Everything is generated from apeiron and then it is destroyed by going back to apeiron, according to necessity." We are all electric at our cores, and burn from within like candles from our pineal wicks. We all spring from fires of heat and light, from fires electromagnetic, which filtered and refined, fuel our neural activities and thus forward and interpret the conflicts and connections of our days, lit by a sun in conflict, ever exploding but never truly escaping the crush while burning a-fury, and in its eventual expanded red death, it still lives and breathes in an ever slower glower of stasis and energy more easily held and digested. Like the faint glow of heart warming infrared, as that felt from a child's uplifted cheek and doe whetted eyes, risible and rising, seeking in the gentle subterfuge of all that adorable and cute, steeling hearts to please parents and peers and so to win their love and acceptance, only to outgrow them when that is given over-abundantly, to branch out on their own, in overflowing measure of approval and freedom, their orbits now set to a velocity growing outward and toward a trajectory of forgetting, seeking release of the bonds, released enough to escape the gravity of their parent's grave, and the tragedies and splendors of the lives from which they sprung. The child reborn as an adult, to burn in other spheres, each heart and hearth lit anew being an homage to that of eternal starlight and expanding spectra of stellar bodies, screaming and burning in accelerated agony and expanded joy, away from each other, as is necessary and true to time and the forces within ... a fire to die alone, forgotten, and then to the unknown, each trapped in our own unknowable solitude and separation. A darkness that lurks at the edge of your existence, not unfathomable, only avoided, like a late knocking on your door you dare not answer, a visitor you do not know, and dare not entertain ... but that inescapable - We are tied to one another in all that created and experienced together, a spiraling of duality and contradiction which disappears into paradox, in an ever ongoing outward trail and spiral of time that becomes erased at the edges like con-trails fade to vapor, as the lead leaves the pencil of me ... a pencil formed from that tree. We are all dredged, divided, formed together, and then dragged across the page to tell the tales of time from perspectives unique and relative. In our perception incomplete are the lies measured by that not perceived, possibly by true ignorance, or that literally, purposefully ignored, but likely more of ineptitude and incapacity to realize, relate, connect ... to cognate. A dearth of neural connectivity necessary to know what otherwise cannot be known - the luck of the draw, the draw of luck. The curiosity which killed the cat One2Many times, but which made the monkey stronger, like the wind trains the tree. Yes, I'm some-wise sappy ... and happy to simply BE, a plot on the map, a blot on the page of the possible persistence of eternal recurrence. Life, it is said, is eternal, and I believe that in order to truly have eternal life - as it literally means, that we must incarnate again at each passing, to another life, another experience, and if time is eternal too, we, you and I and everyone alive have all lived enough to know another's life, or at least to know compassion. When you see god within you, god is found all around you. Among his deeply thoughtful and oft tortured works, Nietzsche famously decreed that "God is Dead", (or infamously declared such by some's reckoning, which reckoning is by my account a misunderstanding resulting from a shallow investigation of his claim, and that investigation made shallow by offense). I believe, big picture, that he claimed such not knowing that he was speaking his own demise by his devaluation of all that seen and experienced, he let the disappointments of his life and loves show him a world without hope, without meaning, and sought, to his own demise, solitude, as an inherently social creature made for the camaraderie of the group, increasingly isolated and alone. I think he would have been a hard man to live with - so stern, and so serious, so passionate and intense. He eventually went mad, diagnosed as Bipolar at the age of 45, and thereafter he had a few strokes that left him partially paralyzed, after contracting pneumonia, he died, August 1890, just one year after his mental diagnosis.

The science of his situation would inform that the ape is decidedly a group animal, and mentally ill-equipped to be a solitary creature. And should an emissary of the apeiron appear to his visage, call it God or the Devil, and speak with the contentions and contentments of his Zarathustra, that which escaped his character's ken, possible in such communion seek to resurrect him in a perpetual state of his inescapable self, steeped in the life conditions that formed him, and a deeper understanding causing a reappraisal of such. I would hope and think that he, consigned to madness and insanity in his last days would call that messenger an Angel, a God, and not a devil, for in knowing this thoughtful and tortured man we better know the inescapable torment and pain that is the fount of our joys, and the motivation for our own struggle. The yin to the yang. Without the loss there is no victory ... all that rots and ruins ... and this IS the universe from which we sprang, "ending" some say in heat death ... and it is our loss to call it loss, or only see such amid the motions and thrills of life. or plot beyond our space in calculations of separations not meant for human minds ... for the more we think the more we make ourselves the hypocrites of our own language which is formed in contradiction.

Life, is best celebrated, knowing that out there in the dark lurk lions, and in your heart, there too ... and in your quest for peace, your realization of God, the Lion will lay down with the lamb. Which I think is a metaphor for finding peace, eternal peace, inside you, from where you can experience the necessary duality called life - Anaximander saw it, opposition that is eternal, flowing, and creative and destructive - Apeiron generated the opposites (hot–cold, wet–dry, etc.) which acted on the creation of the universe, and of life itself, and he named it Apeiron...