The Widening Gyre

I went shopping at Target today.  Faced with that monumental amount of crap, I was reminded of what exactly is collapsing, and feel a lot less bad about the whole thing.  

Perhaps next we can come up with an economy that supplies more people with basic needs and actually useful goods and services, rather than six different neon colors of plastic snakeskin purses that will break within a year of use.

Coming up, a more exhaustive and less flippant discussion of the shortcomings of capitalism.

I just read this post by Jess at Flip Flopping Joy, a long meandering reflection on, among other things, privilege and perfectionism.  It struck a chord.  Jess writes about suffering from at times debilitating depression based to some extent in a need to justify her existence through accomplishment—through some sort of contribution demonstrating exceptional intelligence or ability.  I may not be representing her story completely accurately, because I am also expressing mine.  And it became clear in the comment thread that this sort of depression is a very common experience.  People in the thread attributed this phenomenon to capitalism, white supremacist culture, the Midwest, being poor and trying to compete with/become the rich—and I would add modern education.  While all of these may be complicit, it is not my intention here to find the culprit and excoriate it.  

In fact, I’m not quite sure what my intention is.  Reading Jess’ post brought me out of myself a bit; made me realize that the experiences that I struggle with in solitude—the very experiences I use to isolate myself—are shared by many, many others.  Two of my dear friends seemed also to have recognized themselves.

I have been studying Buddhism and dabbling in the practice of tonglen, or sending and taking.  I’ll explain my understanding of it.  If this interests you, find some genuine Buddhist teachings on it.  Pema Chodron is a good source.  Tonglen is a practice in which one breathes in suffering and breathes out happiness.  One can begin with some suffering one is experiencing, such as (to take one personal example) anxiety about finding a job.  One breathes in this anxiety, then breathes out spaciousness, acceptance, or even the image of having a job.  Then one thinks of other people having the same (or a similar) experience—perhaps one or two people one knows—and breathes in their anxiety as well as one’s own, and exhales relief to them.  Then one inhales the anxiety of all the people in the world who are unemployed and worrying about it, and exhales happiness to all of them.

This and other Buddhist practices have been encouraging me to allow those private sufferings which normally cause me to draw away from others to instead bring me back into connection with my fellow human beings.  However, Jess’ post brought the point home in a way these practices have not.  It made me realize that yes, other people really do have debilitating doubts about whether they deserve to exist if they haven’t or won’t make some brilliant contribution to the human race.  And something as simple as expressing this can be tremendously helpful to others who share that pain.

The discussion was not, however, entirely about the depression that comes from this sort of paralyzing perfectionism.  It was also about how this myopic attention to whether I’m good enough or smart enough or doing enough gets in the way of helping other people who are suffering—whether that’s by engaging in mass activism, or simply being ready to really listen to the next person who talks to me, and really be present in my reply.  Again I’m blending her thoughts and my own.  Jess’ post, for me, was about realizing that it doesn’t matter how good what I write is, if it helps one person to soften as I did when I read her words.

I’ve been just a tad livid about the McCain campaign’s (primarily Sarah Palin’s) horrifically but infuriatingly deniably racist comments about “real Americans” and “the pro-America parts of the country.” Karnythia at The Angry Black Woman has an excellent post about how it is often precisely those who have sacrificed the most for America that are routinely excluded from “Americanness.” I would just add that the further you go back in history the more glaring this becomes *coughcoughslaverycough*… excuse me.

National Coming Out Day was October 11th, but along with traditional notions of gender and sexuality, I reject traditional notions of what day it is. Ha.

Actually, I was just reading Rebecca’s coming out post and all the comments, and was inspired to make a post of my own.

What I mean by “I am queer” is actually that I resist the social pressure to identify as anything in particular with respect to my sexuality or gender. I don’t feel the need to “be” heterosexual, bisexual, or even pansexual, especially on a consistent basis from one moment to the next. I would also rather not define myself in gendered terms much of the time. Other times I enjoy engaging in the game of masculinity and femininity.

By polyamorous I basically mean that I don’t want any rules for my relationships other than those determined by the participants in those relationships. Monogamy is just one of the rules that I don’t often find very useful or appealing.

The reason that I say I’m an ally is that I support the struggle(s) of marginalized groups—of all people who resist or are denied access to hegemonic identity structures and privileges. This means I do my best to challenge and to support those oppressed by sexism, racism, heterosexism, religious prejudice and other social inequalities. Despite the above, it is very easy and habitual for me to present as a heterosexual male, and I have the slightly dubious privilege of being white and middle class. Thus I don’t claim to truly understand what it means to be marginalized. There is a lot I still don’t know about the structures of oppression in my society, how I unknowingly perpetuate them, and how best to join the fight against them. But I’m trying to learn, and I’m immensely grateful for the guidance I’ve received from my queer and/or female friends, for what bloggers like brownfemipower and everyone at The Angry Black Woman have shared, and for the past and (especially) future comments and contributions of my readers here.

So, what about you?

Get together with a friend or a few and play Gods.

Each of you is equally omnipotent. For example, it is a trivial labor for one of you to utterly destroy the others beyond all possibility of return, or to cause them never to have existed at all. It is an equally effortless maneuver for them to return from such banishment.

Go.

March 31, 2009:  Comments on this post have been disabled due to spam.

The title of this entry is an exercise in crude attention-grabbery, but it’s also essentially what I’m asking. Violet recently responded to a post by Lisa Kansas in which the latter got fed up with feminists excusing women, including sex workers, who have sex with married men. The discussion continued here, here, and here. Feel free to read it if you’ve got some time, but I’ll give you the quick and dirty and then veer somewhat off topic, so the details won’t be essential. Basically Lisa was pissed that the sister of the woman with whom John Edwards had an affair dared to try to defend her honor. The reason this was relevant was because Lisa believes that the sister’s response was typical of feminism:

Frankly, I’m completely sick of so-called feminists maintaining a tomblike silence on the females who engage in this behavior and the damage it does all those female spouses.

Unsurprisingly, the response was on the whole less than sympathetic (to Lisa). People accused her of slut shaming, and violet even said,

I don’t think in the context of feminist blogging and critique that shaming these individuals is either valuable or appropriate.

which is dangerously close to trying to revoke her feminist card, at least on this issue.

What’s most interesting to me about this hullabaloo is that it gets to the heart of a major difference between liberal and conservative rhetoric and analysis. Continue reading…

My good friend Violet remarked a couple of months back upon how the internet is (slowly, so far) bringing about the downfall of Western Civilization. On the traditional purveyors of The News, she wrote:

Having grown up in an environment where you built your identity on the trusted words of a few white men, it must be terrifying to look at the enormous, overflowing wealth of voices that can now be heard and realize that people are listening. Not that many, not yet, but they are listening to them and not you. It is in a very real way the downfall of western civilization. It’s not a violent revolution so much as simply the collapse of that particular institution that distills the world into a pleasant hour to be taken in at the end of the day. It’s the slow degradation of our ability to say the world is like this and have it simply be true.

And I, for one, welcome the barbarian hordes.

I’d like to use that post as a jumping off point for the content of this little corner of the internet to which I’ve laid claim. See, I’m pretty much of the opinion that Western Civilization^TM could use to collapse just a wee bit, or perhaps entirely. But I don’t think the best way to do that is to just start tearing shit down, as fun as that would be. I’d rather pull the rug out from underneath Western Civilization by just going and doing something else. And that starts with thinking and saying something else. I chose the name of this blog for a reason (other than that it sounds cool, or that it makes a cultural reference that might make certain people think I’m smart). Here’s the context (W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”):

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

In a nutshell, “oh noez, it’s Teh Apocalypse.” Only Yeatsy. Which is actually important, because Yeats is a firmly established figure in the Western Tradition^TM, and he’s not too happy about them things falling apart. (To be fair, I’m not all that happy about WW1 either, but I’d be likely to put the blame in a different place.) Anyway, what’s important here is the imagery of the falcon and the falconer. To me, the falconer is all those rich (mostly) white (mostly) men sitting in their newsrooms and their boardrooms and their White Houses and their Kremlins and their basilicas and their megachurches and thier capitol buildings. Or rather, it’s the whole structure of perspectives and ideas and values that they represent and benefit from, but to which they are also servants. And the falcon is us. And we can still hear the falconer, but we’re learning not to listen. And each day, gods willing, we’re widening that gyre just a little bit more.