re: ad: Eden & Identity (H)

From the latest episode, “Contents Unknown“, of This American Life:

“Those days where I was fed heavy meds through an IV, people treated me a certain way, and I became the kind of person who was treated like that. All I had to go on for my identity was the reactions of the people around me. I assembled a working self out of the behavior of others.”

The quotation is a from a man talking after losing his memory and going psychotic from taking antimalarial drugs. It’s also an apt description of how babies and young children form their identity, and how people who go through some sorts of trauma reform or heal an identity. But even without the blank(ish) slate of infancy or the disassembling that trauma can cause, sense of self is humblingly relationally/socially dependent.

addendum: Nonzero (H)

From Alice Walker, in “You Have All Seen“:

“Certainly the peacefulness Zan identified in me, a hard-won, not-every-minute-present peacefulness, to be sure, springs from my utter lack of interest in maiming, starving, killing, conquering, or otherwise inflicting humiliation and suffering on anyone or anything.”

Our Other Lovers (H)

This poem by Michael Ondaatje has been in my mind, like a prayer, all weekend:

Kissing your stomach
kissing your scarred
skin boat. History
is what you’ve travelled on
and take with you

We’ve each had our stomachs
kissed by strangers
to the other

and as for me
I bless everyone
who kissed you here

re: re: Despicable (H)

“How should we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest  being something helpless that wants our love.” –Rainer Maria Rilke

Vampires & Transformation (H)

Halloween night. Her face and hands are grayed with make-up and we’ve been talking much of the evening. I tell her I like her necklace, and she takes it off, puts it around my neck, a gift. And then, hours later, I’m curled up in a chair, trying to stay awake, half-listening to the conversation in the room, and I am surprised to hear her say, “Some people are just fucking vampires. I let my friends know that, you know, when I’m with them, I’m with them, but if I’m not there, not to count on anything. But people just want things from you like vampires.”

In my mind, the rememberance of it is closely followed by the rebuttal of the Sufi saying: “Do not become bitter because you are not equal to the magnitude of suffering with which you have been entrusted…” I find my mind throwing this saying at me again and again when my own stinginess and irritation arise; a call to remember that the source of tension is not so much in the person asking for something, but my lack of inclination or capacity to give.

When someone asks us for something or reveals a wound, they are offering us their vulnerability, giving us a gift of trust and giving us a chance to be worthy of it. The other’s implied belief in our goodness gives us more confidence in our goodness, or opens up for us the possibility of our goodness, and those things can bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Sharon Salzberg writes about “reteaching a thing its loveliness”. When people come to us with their wounds or a request for compassion, the interaction can serve as mirror where we can see our stinginess or aversion, or where we can act with generosity and see our own loveliness.

In “The Power and Meaning of Love,” Thomas Merton touches on the power of love to transform the one giving it (who perhaps learns that he is, indeed, capable of kindness ) as well as the one receiving it (who perhaps learns that he is not undeserving of love or unlovable):

“One of the themes that has constantly recurred throughout this article is that corrupt forms of love wait for the neighbor to ‘become a worthy object of love’ before actually loving him… Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love; and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbor worthy if anything can.”

Jean Vanier, too, touches on the idea that when we give someone an opportunity to act with greater love, or at least less harm, instead of assuming the worst, there is the potential for transformation:

“I have, on the other hand, some experience of nonviolence as a means of easing violence in people… If attention is paid in a positive way and welcoming way, responding to violence not with violence but with gentleness and understanding, then violence very often disappears… I am not saying that a man intent on killing will always cave in before nonviolence. There are so many different kinds of people with different forms of violence in them. All I know is that if a violent person is treated like a human being rather than a wild animal, there is a chance he will respond like a human being.”

As Bonhoeffer says:

“There is no way to peace along the way to safety. Peace is the great adventure.”

Re: Despicable (I)

From Hope’s post:

[W]e will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves.

-Jean Vanier

Reminds  me of something Mr. 5 once said:

We’ll be known as devils til we all act to the contrary.

-Jonny 5, i’m still not an angry white male

Nonzero (H)

From Norm Fischer:

“…Starting from Greek philosophy, there is a distinction between happiness and the good. Happiness is seen as less important than doing what is good or right. Happiness is self centered and goodness is connected to truth, to God, and so on. These things are usually in conflict, so we sacrifice our happiness to do the right or good thing. Again, this distinction is unknown in Buddhism. There is no distinction between the good and happiness. In fact, the only way to be happy is to be in tune with the good. For example, if you are having pleasure at the expense of another individual, this is not really happiness. What makes you happy is to be loving and giving towards others, and being attuned to others. Your interests cannot be teased apart from the interests of others. We come to see this through our practice. The basis of all this is awareness, of being sensitively present with your own experience…”

Jack puts it in Christian terms:

 ”…All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.”

More concisely:

“Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.” – Elbert Hubbard

“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad.” – Abe Lincoln

intro: Jean Vanier (H)

In Jean Vanier’s interview with Krista Tippett for Speaking of Faith, they speak about this passage from the New Testament gospel of John, chapter 21:14-18 (New Revised Standard Version):

This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs. ” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep. ” He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”

Here’s the excerpt from the interview:

Mr. Vanier: Yes, I come back to the reality of pleasure and to the reality of what is my deepest desire and what is your deepest desire. And what — and somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value. But not just seen — and Aristotle makes a difference between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship. Some of them had been in a psychiatric hospital. Others — all of them had lived pain and the pain of rejection. One of the words of Jesus to the, to Peter —and you find this at the end of the gospel of Saint John — “Do you love me?”

Ms. Tippett: “Do you love me?”

Mr. Vanier: So, thus, the cry of God saying, “Do you love me?” and the cry of people who have been wounded, put aside, who have lost trust in themselves, they’ve been considered as mad and all the rest. And their cry is, “Do you love me?” And it’s these two cries that come together.

Ms. Tippett: Not just in the context of disabilities, you know, you’ve posed this question, you know, the whole — you’ve said the whole question is, how do we stand before pain?

Mr. Vanier: Yeah.

Ms. Tippett: All kinds of pain and weakness are difficult for us as human beings. Why is that so excruciating? Why do we such a bad job with it?

Mr. Vanier: I think there are so many elements. First of all, we don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness? There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group — the white group — can despise another group, which is the black group? And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something, which is quite, what I find extremely beautiful and strong, is that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. So that, then we go down, what is it that is despicable in ourselves? And there are some elements despicable in ourselves, which we don’t want to look at, but which are part of our natures, that we are mortal.

I’d have read Jesus’s cry perhaps as a challenge, or a call for loyalty–Are you capable of loving me when I am in pain, can you do it? Do you love me still, even now? Or perhaps it was a call to remember that love is about action, not merely sentiment. Jean Vanier reads it as a sincere request for love or reassurance of love, as a sign that even God (at least, when he is embodied as a human) needs to receive love.

Kink & Alchemy (H)

A dear friend wrote to me about feeling that vanilla sex was inadequate and though he’s not particularly oriented towards BDSM, he’s decided to start exploring it to expand his sexual repetoire. He writes:

I’m under the impression (perhaps misguided) that BDSM has a lot to do with power imbalances, anger, humiliation.  I appreciate that it’s probably more complicated than that, but those drives aren’t really my deal… I’m also recently aware (via facebook) that some psychologists are considing recognizing five human experiences (interest, gratitude, confusion, elevation, pride) as emotional responses on par with the regular ones. So it seems that I could start looking into some kind of “topping” practice with a focus on aesthetic / emotional responses that are different from the ones I think of as being specific to BDSM.

I replied:

From my limited experience:

Pain is different from harm. Whether the two coincide often has to do with intention or context–the pain felt during childbirth is processed and experienced differently (and usually not as psychic or emotional harm, even if the body is injured) whereas an equal amount of physical pain felt when being tortured in someone’s basement or in a POW camp I would guess is much more likely to be harmful.

In less dramatic senses, I think there is more risk of harm when we are acting out of any sort of malice, retributive anger, hatred, resentment, defensiveness, aggression–anything that Yoda would put on the dark side of the force.

This purtains to kink in that, when it is done in a “safe, sane, consensual” manner, one of the intentions may be to cause pain–physical or emotional–but not to harm. Anyone who wants to do you lasting damage isn’t someone that it would be healthy for most people to get kinky with. A good top, when you are not “playing” with power or other kink stuff but doing something more serious, is more like a spiritual guide, knowing when to push and when to slow down, open to feedback, offering support and encouragement when necessary, with steady love beneath whatever else is going on or whatever the expression of it is (you know I don’t necessarily mean romantic love). And in this context, the sub has the opportunity to experience and confront some of the things we struggle most with as humans– perhaps, physical pain, which she will learn is easiest when one surrendors to it or accepts it wholely; mentally, humiliation–which can be an joyful release from selfhood, an entry into intense trance states, a way of taking the ego and breaking it against a rock, failure or guilt–which, in going into fully in the safety of the setting she will learn to fear less in daily life, and to meet fully when it arises, her psychic and physical limitiations–which may help release her from some of the perfectionism conditioned into us by our culture, fear–which she will become intimate with and learn to and enjoy, create for herself the tool of imbuing the terrible with the erotic thus helping her to face it, to make it bearable.

It is a grounds, perhaps most of all, for giving and recieving unconditional love. There is incredible risk on both sides to exposing “shadow” sides, in asking for obedience or giving it, in giving a command or following it. The scene can exist only when both parties conspire together, are in it together. And it is amazing, to humiliate oneself completely in front of someone, to for a period of time exist in a state of utter trust and let someone cause you pain without trying to escape, and instead of leaving, the person stays, appreciates, loves you all the more. And the top, I would guess, has a reciprocal experience–to demand, inflict, command, humiliate, and still be loved. It’s breath-taking, isn’t it?

The difference between this and actual abuse has much to do with explicit consent and intention. Abuse often comes from intentions to harm, defend, protect, intimidate. Kink, in good situations, comes from intentions to expand and open emotionally and experientially, to achieve intimacy, to give and recieve love, and often includes inflicting pain in the service of these things.

Of course some people use kink to channel hatred of various sorts, or to put themselves in harm’s (rather than pain’s) way, and in those scenarios, there is great potential to damage all involved. But in the best cases, sex can become a pretext, a means, a background, or simply a component of a deeply intimate, alchemical process.

Addendum: Eden (H)

On the plane, Kelly tells me, along with her life story, that the one thing she knows about babies is that you can’t pick them up every time they cry, because then they’ll learn that you’ll do that, and they’ll cry just so that you’ll come pick them up. She was worried about, I think, kids growing up with a sense of entitlement and an inability to delay gratification. But babies have no sense of time. When they are alone and crying, they don’t know it’s not forever. When they’re old enough to start to get it, then we can teach them–hold on, I’m in the middle of something, and I’ll come help you in a minute. And that ability to delay is really important. By having caretakers be responsive to them in the earliest stages of life, they’re taught a basic sense of trust. And they’re taught that they are effectual. They are taught agency–not helplessness or entitlement.