SubscribeFebruary 1st, 2011
Am I a not-man?
There has been one heck of a battle on twitter between PZ and his crew. There’s a post by PZ trying to be clear about what he is saying and I have to say I’m glad he was driven to it because I really did enjoy it (and the comments, which are yaaaaaaaaaards long).To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure why some people are so upset by his antipathy for what he calls “dictionary atheists.” It’s got to be clear that how one defines a thing has real power.
Let me give you an example: am I a not-man?
Well, as a woman it is true that I am not a man. But if you try to define me as a not-man to my face, you are going to rapidly have one less eye-ball. I mean men have been trying really hard for a long, long time to define women as not-men. It’s called misogyny. When you set up a definition as a negative, you set the terms of the discourse in the hands of your “opponent.” If I defined myself as a not-man, I have then said that men are the “norm” and I am to measure myself against that standard – even if I rebel, fight, hiss and spit.
Men do not get to define me. Not no how. I define myself based on my own experiences, my own behaviours, my own desires, my own society.
(If you are a man reading this – try defining yourself in public as a not-woman for a week. Just a week. See what happens.)
In just the same way, theists should not get to define the terms of discourse for all of us with respect to interpreting human life. And that is what happens if you define yourself as their opponent.
I am not a not-man. I am a woman. There is a profound difference in power with the two definitions. Take a lesson from feminism; define yourself as something positive and not as someone else’s opponent, because if you do that you are going to have to carry them everywhere for fear that you will cease to exist should they go away.
October 4th, 2009
Random topic: Agnostics are not cowards
Recently peardg had this idea that I should post little reflection essays on random topics. Since my son, guango, is an amazing random password generator, I thought I could get him to shift his talent sideways and shoot me a weekly random topic. I must warn you that his mind is quirky so some of the topics are likely to be quirky as well. Here’s the first:
Agnostics are not cowards. Atheists and theists are cowards because they are the people that are too fearful to live without knowing. So great is their fear that they ignore reason and simply fabricate reality to their liking.
My little reflection essay: Read the rest of this entry »
August 21st, 2009
Studying magic in North America
I’ve started reading Arthur Versluis’ book The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance. It’s clear that the author is going to bring to bear many of the magical strains that populate the early American mental landscape – alchemy, gnosticism, theosophy, Hermeticism and Swedenborgianism – on authors such as Emerson, Poe, Alcott, Whitman and Dickinson (can’t wait until I get to that chapter!).
Read the rest of this entry »
July 15th, 2009
No god
There is no god. That is not a scary thing to say. It is not depressing or demoralizing. In fact it is a wonderful and powerful thing – enriching, enlivening, delightful – bearing a history and leading toward a future.
When I say “no god” there are worlds of responsibility, history, belonging, duty, delight and memory attached. Most of these worlds come along unbidden and unconscious; some are linguistically learned and some are not. That is how language works. Its power lies in what it says as well as in what it brings along in the tail of its bright efflorescence. Words are like comets, burning with meaning and presence but they only do so because of the dark intense space through which they pass. Any utterance is like this. The universe of “no god” is both full of dark corners and cups of light because this world and its creatures are also such. The universe of language is born from the universe of the world. Each reflects the other. Each changes the other.
July 12th, 2009
When an atheist ponders the spirit
I have recently been watching a discontinued TV show called Dead Like Me. It posits a world where some people, when they die, become grim reapers whose job it is to take the souls of other people who are themselves imminently dead. The main character, an 18 year old girl, dies in the pilot episode – dies by flying toilet seat – and starts her (eternal?) unpaid job as reaper. The show only went to two seasons. I have watched all of the first and 3 episodes of the last. It’s delightful.
I tend to like shows like this. Ones that create a world where there are things like paranormal insight, bodiless souls and odd creatures (in the case of Dead Like Me that’s gravelings –they’re the ones that set up the deadly accidents). When I am really tired, really stressed, I will watch (or read) something like this and feel soothed, reoriented.
I wonder about this, what this says about the power of atavistic notions for, of course, there is no life after death, no soul to take, no gravelings and accidents are just that. But really, of course, the show isn’t about death at all. It’s about living, about being in the world, and there is nothing to heighten the value of life like the closeness of death. Positing a world where death has a positive presence, where it exists as a thing itself, allows all kinds of life-moment mirrors. For example, the young woman in the TV show finds herself suddenly responsible for herself. She has been a real pain in the ass with regard to her parents: taken what they offer (home, food, clean sheets) for granted but now, as a reaper, there is no one offering. She suddenly has no place to live, no dinner waiting, no one to hurt by her sarcasm. Her death forces her to begin looking at her life. This is what I mean by a life-moment mirror.
I think that anthropomorphizing death in the form of human reapers is an easy way to create these “mirrors.” (Nothing grabs our attention quite like death, except perhaps sex and there are plenty of shows about that as well.) Human social life is something we deeply understand. Giving something completely alien and nonhuman (like meaningless accidents and death) an animal-like existence as well as a human face allows us to think about it, to try to extend ourselves outward into the world a little more from the relatively safe perch of humanity. Doing this is one aspect of learning: emotional learning, becoming more conscious of who and what we are.
I am a creature of the world. That means at least two things. First, I am born of a long line of apes and carry the complete history of primate evolutionary history in my genes, my behaviours, my senses, my reactions, my desires, my fears and my consciousness. So when I am at risk (even mildly) I turn naturally to what has always worked for my ancestral line – I make the world into a place I can understand. Hence the TV. Second, when I feel most myself, when I don’t feel so discombobulated, I still turn to the world of earth for answers. But at this point, I can try for more exacting insight. For the second that often either means science or poetry.
Like this poem by Melissa Kwasney:
Madrone
Animal, this nakedness, the bark
rolled back
as a bear or dog would bare its teeth.
Whose limbs, red and gold as mango,
flare like lanterns
among the darker, creek-side trees.
Glowing above the charred wrist
of root, they light
the wild iris in the muddy bottom.
They glow. They grow acrobatic,
offering their arms
shameless, they coil through the forest.
What is hidden inside us is suddenly
exposed to air.
The trunks gleam like a wound gleams.
Here is a mirror; a much subtler statement than Dead Like Me but still an anthropomorphizing of the world: a madrone-mirror. What ever it is to be a tree, it is not shameless or its unspoken corollary, shameful. This is an emotion we experience and find hard to understand consciously since its power is archaic and limbic and thereby not easily dis- and re-membered by our awareness. Looking at the world through narrative builds backdoors into our psyche and allows us to sneak in, peering around with the lantern that is narrative. So I watch paranormal TV shows and read poetry. I do this for my primate, worldly self, the one that is obsessed by what it means to be human, to be me. If I want to understand madrones themselves, or what death actually is, then for that, I need science.