Addendum: Working with the Mind (H)

From “The Body’s Grace: Matthew Sanford’s Story” on Speaking of Faith:

Matthew Stanford: There‘s a reason why when my son who’s six is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love. He needs boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed, and it won’t be limiting his whole being, that he can—he gets a hug and, mmm, he drops into his body. And when you drop into your body, paradoxically, typically pain is less. But it’s when pain gets more intense and more…

Krista Tippett: And when you’re afraid and try to keep it at bay.

Matthew Sanford: …and then pull out of it, it really denies freedom. And it’s a great short-term strategy. That’s what I did when I was 13, I pulled out of my body to get it, but it’s a short-term strategy. And a lot of the process of my life is like embodying again and letting — and surrounding what’s going on so I can be part of the world.

And from the chapter “Falling Gracefully” in his memoir, Waking:

If nothing else, my life has taught me one thing: The mind and body that I have are the only mind and body that I have. They deserve my attention. And when I give it, I receive so much more in return. Learning to fall gracefully through one’s mind-body relationship is not a submission. One learns to fall gracefully in order to roll.

There is still so much to realize. My experience tells me that the silence within us can be experienced energetically as a nourishing sap. When this happens, consciousness changes shape. For example, I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without becoming more compassionate. A mental state like tolerance can deepen into a three-dimensional state of true patience. Nonviolence can become more than a moral principle, it can become an integrated state of consciousness that includes the body. And, of course, for good or for bad, the silence within us also contains the opportunity for choice.

Why My Friends Rock (H)

‘Cause they send me stuff like this.

From Nick:

…I will send you this Gandhi quote that I’m absolutely loving:

“Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance’, in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word ‘satyagraha.’”

I’m head over heals for the idea that the very word “truth” implies love. Seriously, this is all my mind has been focused on for the last 48 hours.

Also this:

“I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.”

Addendum: The Warrior (H)

I’ve been reading a great blog written by a friend-of-a-friend, and generally I appreciate her insight but was a little taken a back by a couple entries about “warriors“. The warrior is one of the male archetypes that our culture most glorifies and celebrates, which is by (a quarter of an inch of) extension celebrating the will to power and the will to do violence. But the idea that you can condone or celebrate that out there and not bring it back here just doesn’t make sense–not that it’s okay to do violence out there, either.

This is from Shepherd Bliss’s essay, “My War Story“:

The warrior image has damaged us. As we move into the twenty-first century we need to mature beyond wars and warriors. I disagree with those men’s movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits–like courage, teamwork, loyalty–but the archetype itself is bankrupt at this point in history. We surely need guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen, and citizens. If we are to survive on this planet, so threatened by war and warriors, we must get beyond the obsolete archetype of the warrior and value images such as the peacemaker, the partner, and the husbandman who cares for the earth and animals.

Letting go of a rape culture, hierarchy, violence, means celebrating men who fill roles other than “the warrior”. The process of self-re-creation and the revolutions in self-imaging are greatly supported by alternate images and archetypes that aver our new aspirations. After all, the brain doesn’t get rid of neural pathways, but it can create new ones.

So–Yes! Guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen. I especially like the last, the farmer (in my mind, vegetable farmer) who tends the land, nurtures growth, knows the balance of active and receptive, work and rest, shows patience, persistence. This concept of tending is key–caring for, supporting, rather than controlling or forcing. And what about the dancer who has an exquisite ability to respond to circumstance, bending when the moment calls for it, and staying firm when that is what is needed? The dancer works with energy, resilience, and grace; grace being, as Pablo puts it, “… the balancing opposite of power. It means rolling away and landing on your feet instead of bruised ribs, and small hand movements letting a stronger person tie themselves up when they try to hit you.” In other words, resilience, self-protection and disarmament that are firm and assertive, but not aggressive. And there is the healer, touching, mending, with the courage to open to great suffering. Again this theme of working with, supporting, rather than controlling, or being even a “benevolent patriarch”. And there is the poet whose work is the honoring of the inner life and creation of language; the teacher who is a guide to and within new knowledge; the bread-maker who creates and then relinquishes his creation, day after day, to nourish self and others. These are just a few in a plethora of alternative roles we can imagine self-actualized people of any gender filling–the seeker, the student, the scientist, the lover, to name a few more. Showcasing and celebrating these roles, creating them in our conceptual, social, and visual imaginations, is one important way that art and social media can work as a forces for positive social change.

The Indefensible Apathy (I)

I’ve oftentimes heard the argument that someone eats meat because whatever the argument against it, they don’t care. I get this argument a lot because somehow people, once they know I’m a vegan, think that I’m being vegan at them. That my diet is an affront to theirs. That I’m politically vegan.

And I am, I guess, but not more than I’m a pacifist  at them. I tend to use Hope’s stance, “I’m not going to start the debate about meat, but if you start it, I will win it.”

People have used the argument many times in defense of vegetarianism, “if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.” Which is ludicrous; there are people employed in slaughterhouses aren’t there? The places aren’t run by Judas cows. The idea is that the world is populated entirely by bleedings hearts, but most of them don’t know they’re bleeding hearts.

First off, I do not defend vegetarianism. Vegetarianism and veganism are each an inaction; it is a food you choose to not consume. If a chicken would peck on my door and lop its head off, it might be rude of me not to eat it. And it is true that avoiding meat and meat products is a pain in the ass. But I see no sense in having to defend an inaction where there is no real reason to take that action in the first place. I put the onus on the meat eater: an animal is killed so that it may end up on your plate. Defend yourself.

There are a series of arguments here. One is that vegetables are also alive, something has to die unless you photosynthesize, what’s the difference between an animal and a plant? This takes the stance, I assume, of the divine spark that is in all living things, and as an atheist I exempt myself from that. A plant possesses no central nervous system, and if we believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, I can’t find any evidence of consciousness in a brainless form. I see no evidence that they feel pain or fear. I read a book that said they’d found a way to measure the consciousness of plants, and proved that plants feel pain, but it contained no documentation, and when it started namedropping leaders in the Church Of Scientology I stopped reading. Plants are alive by the classification that we call something alive, but I see no argument for sentience.

Someone once argued to me that no one can know anything about the world; everyone’s perspective is different, which means there is no objective reality, which means there is no objective morality, so fuck off with morality completely. We can’t even be sure anything really exists. These conversations usually happen on the beach around a bonfire and involve brandy and/or spliffs. To this I say: then why do anything? If we say the world is possibly an illusion, then there are only two ways to interpret that: assume the world exists as we see it, acknowledging it might not, or assume that it does not exist as we see it. Option One means live the same way we did before. Option Two means curling up in a room and assuming absolutely nothing exists. You don’t get to say the beef patty exists because it makes you happy and choose to assume the suffering that it came from does not.

Some people claim that fish don’t have feelings. Aside from the idiocy there (who the fuck proved that? what did that test look like? who the fuck funded that research?), does the inability to feel pain mean you have no right to life? There are occasionally humans with no pain centers in the brain, who can’t leave a controlled environment because their body won’t feel discomfort in a warmer environment and consequentially won’t sweat. Obviously these humans deserve to live. And accepting the unlikely argument that a fish feels no pain, if you attempt to kill a fish in a way where it is aware its life is threatened, it will rapidly swim away. It can very clearly show a desire to go on living, and exhibit that, if not pain, it can feel fear. Do we only preserve life to avoid pain?

And once my father argued that he knew in his heart that a human has a soul and an animal does not. And as soon as he can give me any substantive way to define what a soul is and who has one, I’ll give credence to the argument.

But all these arguments can be dispelled much more succinctly, because they’re all the same argument. They’re an attempt to poke a hole in the defense of vegetarianism, the same way fundies try to disprove evolution. None of these is an argument in favor of meat consumption. The question goes unanswered: an animal is dying so that you can eat it. Why?

And there is only one answer, which is “I like the taste.” There’s no longer any reasonable argument for the health value of meat. A vegan has a 4% chance of dying of heart disease, while a meat-eater has a 50% chance. There is no vital nutrient gotten from meat that can’t be gotten from a plant, and if gotten from a plant there is less fat, less cholesterol, lower acidity, and so on. “I like the taste” ultimately comes down to a euphemistic way of saying “I do not care about the suffering of animals.” This is the only real argument in defense of eating animals. An animal dies unnecessarily for a human’s pleasure in eating it because the human does not care about the animal’s suffering.

If a murderer says on the stand that they killed 15 people because they simply felt no empathy for those people, we still send them to jail. This is not K-Pax (“every living thing in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong”). If we felt we could trust everyone’s heart to be their guide, we wouldn’t write laws.

Now: I’m making an argument against meat-consumption, but that’s only because it’s most often on my mind. But my real stance is this: morality cannot be a question of emotions. We can’t say that something is ethical because it “feels” right or unethical because it “feels” wrong. The fact that I’ve never met anyone in Iran and therefore feel no empathy for Iranians does not justify bombing Iran. I may spend days or weeks or months not giving a shit about animals, but I won’t eat meat at those times, because emotions aside I can’t defend it.

I am saying that apathy is never a defense. I am saying this: we must always and at all times be rational beings, and base our code of ethics on that. That’s why every homophobe in the world should support gay marriage, because the marriage ban is indefensible by any rational argument. And it sure as hell is why we should stop fucking bombing people, please and thank you.

The Goal (H)

From Martin Buber’s I and Thou:

“The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.”

(Incidentally, if you’ve got an English translation of the entire work, please lend it my way.)

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.”

re: Dominion (H)

From everyone’s facebook favorite,  Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

“The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. But let a third party enter the game—a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars —and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly!) to the cow.” (p. 159)

“Even though Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man’s care. Man was not the planet’s master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration.  Descartes took a decisive step forward: he made man maitre et proprietaire de la nature. And surely there  is a deep connection between that step and the fact that he was also the one who point-blank denied  animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton,  an animated machine, a machina animata. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the  rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in the laboratory.” (p. 160)

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.” (p. 161)

And for good measure:

“For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” – Pythagoras (re: karma)

“If [man] is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practise kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” – Immanuel Kant

Faking It (H)

It feels like I’m faking it. No, not during sex, during conversation. I want to be someone with whom people feel safe, someone with whom they can be open, with whom they have no reason to feel fear. And I believe that love (thanks Leah!) is a verb. It’s not so much about what you feel–you can’t force a feeling, or promise one–but about acting in certain ways. Or as MLK says:

“In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.” – 1957, “Loving Your Enemies”  

And of course I have lots of room to grow, but it seems like I’ve gotten some parts about making people feel comfortable or listened to down well enough, or have practiced them enough, that they’re habitual, automatic. And convincing.

There are two problems with this. One is that for the last couple months I just haven’t felt it. I act is if I’m in connection with the people I meet because I’ve come to thinking that acting anyway other than loving (loving in the verb sense of agape-ing or metta-ing, showing compassion, giving attention, etc.) is unethical. But when I meet someone new and we part ways after a drink or coffee, there’s just nothing there on my end. I faked it, but I didn’t make it. A potentially embarrassing side-effect is an inability to remember the conversations I’ve had in these situations.

The other problem is that people expect something after. It’s like your one night stand assuming he’s your boyfriend. Can’t you give a little milk without someone trying to buy the cow? Whatever happened to casual emotional intimacy, NSA empathy?

That said, I think the lack is more about me than the people I’m meeting. Heart break can refer not just to pain, but break in a more typical use of the word break: making a thing unable to function properly.

Still, I’m reminded of a poem I loved as a teenager: 

Who Are My People?

My people? Who are they?

I went into the church where the congregation
Worshiped my God. Were they my people?
I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.
My people! Where are they?
I went into the land where I was born,
Where men spoke my language…
I was a stranger there.
“My people,” my soul cried. “Who are my people?”

Last night in the rain I met an old man
Who spoke a language I do not speak,
Which marked him as one who does not know my God.
With apologetic smile he offered me
The shelter of his patched umbrella.
I met his eyes… And then I knew…

-Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni

Being A Man, also: WASP (I)

I want to talk a bit about how and why being a 13-year-old boy is hard.

Yes, your hormones are raging. Yes, your social skills are lacking. But I think it’s hardest for boys today, harder than it was in previous generations, because there’s a more pressing need to find out who you’re supposed to be.

There was a time when everyone was supposed to be what I was born: white, straight, male, middle class, and Protestant. Speaking for me and my kind, I have the highest median income, I hold the most positions in government, I grow 90% of the country’s food… Louis CK maybe said it best:

If you’re white and you don’t admit that it’s great, you’re an asshole. It is great! And I’m a man! How many advantages can one person have? I’m a white man! You can’t even hurt my feelings! What can you really call a white man that really digs deep? “Hey cracker!” “Ugh, ruined my day, boy! Shouldn’t've called me a cracker. Bringing me back to owning land and people, what a drag.”

I never asked to be in a position of power, but am I really going to cry that it’s been thrust on me? For centuries there was “WASP” and “everything else,” and “everything else” didn’t matter.

Nowadays, being a white straight male is akin to being vanilla. (I used to work in a gelateria, and I hasten to remind people that vanilla is indeed a flavor; plain gelato is Fior di Late: it’s nothing but milk and sugar.) The world outside of us has gotten a lot more interesting, and a lot more specific. It used to matter to be straight when there was only “straight” and “deviant.” Now we’ve got gay, bi, lesbian, homo- and heteroflexible, trisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, the dreaded pomosexual (which I won’t say out loud), asexual romantic, asexual nonromantic, and that all-encompassing “queer” which is basically a catch-all for “not straight.” “Not straight” is a hell of a lot more interesting than straight these days.

Across the board, too, with the gay rights and women’s rights and minority rights movements, there are fascinating developments in what it means to be gay, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be black or latino or asian in America. Not many people are writing about what it means to be a WASP. It’s not interesting.

My friend used to identify as “a dyke,” and she says she has trouble going to Pride some years because she felt abandoned by the scene. I don’t feel abandoned by the WASP scene; there is no such scene. What sense of community is there among white straight men other than the Klan? What can we take pride in? If we were the assholes we sometimes are and threw ourselves a parade, what would our floats represent? What did we do that it hasn’t been shown could have just as easily been done by gays, blacks, women? Could we omit centuries of slavery, the nations we destroyed, the people we denied rights to, the ones we still say can’t marry?

Again, I’m not crying “oh it’s lonely at the top.” I saw an amateur comedian perform in San Francisco a while ago, and he said he was a Republican. And to the icy silence that followed he cracked “yeah, you want to know what it’s like to come out of the closet in Texas, admit you’re a Republican in San Francisco.” I wanted to smack him. When was the last time a Republican got dragged down Market Street from the back of a pickup?

Being a WASP today means slowly becoming aware that the identity handed to you is getting smaller every few years. We realized piece by piece “this is no longer yours for free,” and “this is yours for now but it will likely go soon.” Maybe it’s why we cling to marriage rights, abortion rights, flip out over affirmative action; we don’t want what power we still have taken from us. Whether or not we want to be WASPs, it’s the only identity we’ve been shown.

Most of us don’t understand what it’s like to be anything else. We think the anger we feel when we can’t get a job is comparable to the anger felt by the black community when entire neighborhoods of people can’t get hired because all the employers are white. Or that a woman’s drive to succeed in the workplace is no different from a man’s, ignoring how much harder it is for a woman. This has been illustrated plenty by Michael Douglas movies from the 1990′s.

So yes, it’s hard being white straight 13-year-old boy. You are nothing until you recognize how much harder it can be to be to be around one. Whatever identity we’re going to have, we’re going to have to forge it as individuals. Whatever we’re struggling with, it’s a personal struggle. We don’t know what it means to struggle as a mass of angry people. Like the world needs another white movement.

Rodger spells his name with an R-O-D-J,
receiving A’s only in ROTC,
front-row seat sociology class,
when the teacher was asking about affirmative action
he said, “why do black people get all the attention?
my grandpa never did no lynching, he’s a Frenchman.
it’s beyond my comprehension, you talk about the sting from the lash,
my own people call me poor white trash!
yeah I’ve got some peach fuzz on my upper lip,
eat my supper quick cuz there isn’t much of it
and now you’re making me furious.
who’s living worse? I’m curious.
Huxtable homes are lookin’ mighty luxurious.
yeah slavery was bad, selling folks by the tonnage,
but just because I’m white why should I get punished?”
I don’t even know how to answer that kid.
great-great grandaddy, look what you did.
you’ll never know the damage, you’ll never know the ruin,
you’ll never know the spectrum of the evil you were doing,
cuz you and all the rest were trapped inside your tiny minds,
that’s why I’m being more than just a product of my times
so I tell Rodger he’s still better off than poor blacks,
I try to put my fingers in the cracks, but damn,
I think we’ll be known as devils til we all act to the contrary,
passing off the radicals but honestly they want very
fundamental things, so use your reasoning,
fix the liberty bell and let freedom ring,
see, I’m angry about all the ways America has failed
but I’ll never be an angry white male.

-Jonny 5

Getting Groped (H)

The first time I recall I was about 13, hanging out with friends and friends of friends and a friend of a friend grabbed my breast and I slapped him in the face, instantly, and kicked his shins a couple times and I told him not to ever, ever, ever touch me again. I felt angry, and violated. It was the first time anyone had touched my breasts.

More recently, on the way out of a club, someone grabbed my ass. I was with a love of my life, and he was livid. Not because someone had overstepped my boundaries, or at least, not primarily because of that, but because in the culture he was raised in, in the city we were in, that was an affront to him, a disrespect to him. He explained this to me a little–he wanted to go back in and hit the guy but didn’t, real violence erupts easily there, and you never know who’s got a gun–and then we stopped talking about it because it turned my stomach to be treated as or, rather, responded to, as property. It still makes me sick to my stomach if I think about it long enough.

And then today. Leaving the gym, I feel a hand groping my ass. And I turn around and there’s a kid, probably 13 years old, not any bigger than me. And I stare at him. And he’s stopped in his tracks, our eyes locked. And then he says, “I’m sorry”. And and he’s not saying it because he should, it’s spontaneous and sincere though he doesn’t sound remorseful. And we stare more. And he says, “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, that was completely my fault.” And I stare more. And then I turn around and leave.

As if it could have been my fault.

It occurred to me to slap him–not really as a wish to, just as an option. In the locker room after, it occurred to me to go back and tell him that after groping comes sexual assault, but I thought it might do more harm than good to tell him he’s a future rapist. I don’t want to make the poor kid scared anytime he touches a girl. My next thought is: it must be hard to be a teenage boy, all raging hormones and no one to touch (consensually).

My concern is: how should I have responded? Or put in a less second arrow type way, what’s the most helpful way to respond in that situation? Can you “slap sense” into a person? Do you warn him about the road that might be leading down? Ian pointed out a concern I have too, which is that responding angrily might close him off to realizing that he was mistaken, might make it possible for him to write off my reaction as me being a “bitch”. That’s part of why slapping is out, but also because I want to use as little force (physical or otherwise) as possible. As little violence. And it was unnecessary.

Ian says: you did the right thing, he realized you’re a person and was ashamed enough to apologize. And I think he may be right, in this case. But part of why it was enough just to stare, I think, is because he was young, and not any bigger than me. Part of why I didn’t want to hit him is because I didn’t feel powerless. Maybe that’s part of the drive for violence: a response to feeling powerless. But back to the question–what about someone bigger? How do you respond? How do you get it across that that’s not something they should do, so that they don’t do it to anyone else? What about the men who have followed me down the street, shouting terrible things? I’ve always ignored them and tried to get away quickly: it seemed safest.

I’ve never been in the mindset that sort of activity comes from. I’ve never had the urge to harrasss someone on the street, or grab someone who doesn’t want to be grabbed by me. What is the part they’re blind to that lets them do that? The approach that occurs to me is to put it relationally, and make it real that way. Say, “I’m someone’s sister, I’m someone’s daughter, I’m someone’s granddaughter, I’m someone’s cousin. What if someone followed your sister down the street, yelling at her about her tits?” Not in a bitchy way, but a simple, honest question. And then get away.

…?