SubscribeJanuary 8th, 2012
Santorum and what we know in our hearts
Boston (dot) com reported on Santorum’s “arguments” against gay marriage as a part of a recent essay covering New Hampshire political campaigning.
Santorum grew impassioned while discussing his opposition to gay marriage, saying that it was harmful to families because it could mean that children grow up without both a mother and a father.
“You’re robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to!” Santorum said after the first question. “They have a right to know and be loved by their dad and their mom. And that’s what marriage is about. It’s not about two people loving each other. There’s lots of people who love each other that we don’t give a privilege to and call it marriage.”
“Not that those relationships aren’t important — of course they’re important,” he added. “We honor them and we respect them, but we don’t give them this unique privilege.”
He also suggested that those who disagree aren’t being honest with themselves.
“You may convince yourself that it’s not — you may rationalize that that isn’t true,” he said. “But in your own life and in your own heart you know it’s true.”
There is, of course, the issue of who gets to define the reach and distribution of “privileges”, which, as far as I know, Santorum has not made clear. I suspect that such power of definition is to be led by his thinking organ – the heart.
There might be a problem with that, as any student of anthropology, psychology — any of the “ologies” really — would be able to discern.
Here’s an example with the idea that children deserve a two-parent family, and making constitutional amendments to enforce such a “heart” decision.
So, a woman (or man) dies in the war leaving behind a spouse and children. The remaining family is now a single-parent family. Under a law defining family as one with a man and a woman married, then this is no longer a family and should not receive benefits designed for families.
Outrageous, but if follows on Santorum’s “heart” knowledge.
(Note: this is why it is probably best if the head also takes a role in decision making.)
What a dweeb that man is. I know he has a couple of degrees but — what? — he slept through his critical thinking class?
December 26th, 2010
the calm of a coherent world
Boxing Day was a busy day and I got very little reading time but what I did spend I spent on Miss Buncle Married. I learnt about the Miss Buncle stories over at litlove’s place and read the first of the two after she did a review there. I was so very delighted with the first that I immediately ordered the second.
I wonder sometimes what it is about books like Miss Buncle that I so enjoy, because it is a high pleasure for me. When I look at the kinds of fiction authors I go to for a steady, warm pleasure, they are remarkably different yet they all have a way of seeing the world that is essentially kind. Even the bad guys, should they be actually bad, are dealt with kindly.
I think that was what my mother was seeking when she moved our family back to England for those years. She was an Austen fan and had the same craving for that gentle, civil world. So we moved. My father worked, I went to boarding school in Surrey and my mother converted a home and built a wonderful garden from what had been an outdoor model railway and budgerigar breeding site. It was quite a transformation and while she had that to do things went tolerably well.
The thing about the Miss Buncle-type world is that it depends so much on community agreement on the principles of life. And that agreement is formed very early in life, or has to be worked, and worked, and worked to achieve consciously. I think perhaps this sense of worldly coherence is what I love so much about these books. It is not an experience I can depend upon, not especially since I have relations in very, very different worlds—worlds whose basic assumptions are wildly different, which, of course, generates very different standards of behaviour and expectations.
It’s a nice world to visit, the Miss Buncle’s. I have to sustain the belief in such a coherent possibility, but it isn’t very hard since it would be so nice if it were so. I know that people have this golden age notion that says it used to be so, but coming from the extreme lower classes myself, I’m sorry, I know better. In Miss Buncle’s world everyone has a modicum of their needs met. Even the serving girls get to flout off from houses where they don’t get to go to the pictures. No one sees them starve once they leave the margins of the pages. It’s a delight really, but what it tells me is that to get to the place where love warms and our wants are possible, the needs based on human agreement must first be met.
Of course that’s easier if you can force your narrative of the world as the norm, but much more difficult if you are a minority in any kind of way. Hence, those who foster the idea of a golden age tend to be those whose narrative rode in the social saddle. They very understandably want to return to that place, because there, just like in a book, one can ignore those who are beyond the margins and concentrate on oneself as the central character. It makes for a delightful few hours spent reading abed, but it wouldn’t do at all to assume that the limits of the page mirror the limits of the world. Doing so makes for a revolutionary state of mind in those clinging to the page edges and a kind of fierce stoicism in those not even within reaching distance. And of course that practice—that refusal to admit the narrative quality of social life, of norms, values, morals and laws, and readmit the marginals onto the page—is what makes any coherency we achieve break down and society fracture.
Nevertheless, what makes Miss Buncle such a pleasure to read is that coherence, and that gentle civility which can be depended upon as long as you remain within the page’s influence. I’m going to try some of the author’s other books to see if she achieves a similar feeling of calm—I do very much enjoy that state, even if it is temporary and not what social life is actually like for me. I think it probably does me a world of good to settle into that felicitous, if imaginary, world once in a while. I view it as a kind of literary meditation, or a bookish person’s relaxation yoga. Because of that induced serenity, Miss Buncle helps smooth out some of the more incoherent bits of the world. Like honey and lemon on a sore throat, I suppose. It might not fix anything but it sure does feel good, and that, I suppose is valiant achievement enough.
December 2nd, 2010
aggression in women and the pouting princess
I’m an aggressive person. And female. That seems to be a problem. I keep getting counselled to “let it go.”
Certain things make me really mad and to be truthful I suspect that at least some of the things that make me mad are the result of my pedophile “uncle” (hereafter known as “P”).
Yuck, I know. (Please relax. I am not going to tell you about that set of experiences, rather I would like to briefly meditate on the outcome today, all these decades later.)
I acknowledge that some of my aggression is the result of trauma and emotional damage. However, I suspect I would have been aggressive whether or not P turned up to the family property that summer. My father was a terrier with an attitude. He was, frankly, terrifying in his rages and drunken affection and I have inherited some of that disposition, although not the alcoholism. (I associate the feeling of being out of control with the hurt of others and therefore do not partake to the point where I feel that instability which precedes drunkenness.) What I suspect is that P narrowed the focus of the natural aggression. I react poorly, for example, to threats to my physical or emotional safety or to the safety of children or others under the power of a “well wishing” majority.
One time, as an example, a boyfriend thought that pushing me into a corner was the answer to my anger at a bit of his behaviour. Before I knew quite what was happening I had a pair of scissors in my hand and the points were headed for his throat. He had very long (and fast) legs. Last I saw of him he was booting it down the road outside the apartment.
I have fought very hard to control the actual outcome of my anger. I did not kill the bugger above, for example. And as soon as the threat was gone, so was the anger. I will not tolerate what I consider to be abusive behaviour. Even things as simply juvenile as snides, snarls, slammed doors and tossed heads in the work place I consider worthy of disparagement, nay, outright scorn. I recognize it makes me an uncomfortable, and vaguely threatening person to be around and there is no cure for that I’m afraid. I just stay away as much as is possible from people who are afraid or threatened by my presence. I don’t really care if a 30-something year old acts like a 10 year old except when I have to both witness it and suffer its effects. If you want to be a princess do it away from me. That’s all I require. I don’t think it too much really. And if you do decide to sport your tiara and flip your hair at me, I will attack.
A lot of people see that as a problem though. I keep being told that I can be assertive without being aggressive, for example. Actually, I’m not sure that this is really possible, not without changing an important component of what makes me me. It’s who I am, welded, now, to the bones of what I would have been.
I am a badger. Leave me alone and I am kind of fun to watch. But I have enviable claws and a disposition to dig.
I do like being me for the most part. While I have had several rather nasty things happen to me in my life, I feel more than compensated by my “gifts.” I hear the sky singing, for example, and when the brain shifts sideways I can also experience yellow as a “ting” sound and other such cross-modalities. I can think; I can reason. I can flow in and out of the experience called “art.” I have wonderful children and friends. I live in a country that will take care of me should I need it. And perhaps most importantly, I have a strong sense of ethics.
This last – my sense of what is OK and what is not OK in the commerce between people – I thank P for that. The horror that was his life, his actions, his pain and inability to control it, left me (and others) irrevocably changed. I can never be what I would have been, but I don’t think of justice as pertaining to the outcome for the transgressor but justice is rather the eventual outcome for the transgressed. And I think justice has been achieved: my life is a good one all told.
I am aggressive and not simply assertive, it’s true, but I suspect that my justice achieved is really due to my agression, so it is not something I would forgo for others’ comfort’s sake. I can’t help but think of the time and current places where the chucking of full grown women under the chin, the silly diminutive names and bottom pinchings that highlight genderized power disparities and the people who counsel the few outraged women to accept what men are like for the sake of peaceful co-existence. Rage has its problems, of course, but it is also the social change engine.
For me one key to living with rage is the control of my behaviour. Yes, I make most people uncomfortable but I never actively set out to hurt except in self defense. Rage is a form of power and it must be controlled. P taught me that. Still, I don’t think social ease is something that should be overtly fostered, rather the self awareness that must underpin any real acceptance of others should be the focus of our joint efforts. (I mean, the vocalizations of the deaf make many hearing people visibly uncomfortable. Whose problem is that?) Hair flippers that gain self awareness stop being hair flippers. Since I see the source of hair flipping and its generalized form, princess pouting as emotional immaturity and as such an emblem of emotional damage in a woman that should have achieved a higher level of maturity, I think that addressing that damage is the way to achieve justice. So I leave it alone until flipped and then inquire if the person realizes that she isn’t really a princess. “You do realize that daddy wasn’t really a king, don’t you?”
Don’t you think that should be warning enough? Certainly it’s better than smacking her upside the head.
The other key to living with rage is a profound respect for the nature of what is. Slipping into the easy but empirically incorrect comforts of belief is dangerous to self, but more importantly, dangerous to others. The princess pout limits the pouter but it actively hurts the eye and ear of the one witnessing the shocking loss of decorum. To be more serious, I do find that my ability to feel joy, to fall into awe, is directly relational to my ability to accept how I actually am, where from I, in fact, came and where to, in fact, I will go. Princess pouters cause me pain and while I can moderate my response to that pain, I cannot stop the pain itself. Nor should I have to really. It’s not that I expect the princesses of the world to stop being affected assholes, just that I expect them to do what I do and control their natural propensities. In other words, pout all you like, just don’t do it near me. I mean, really, all of us need to shit but most of us learn to do it in a way and place set apart for such unsocial needs. Princess pouting is just a sort of emotional defecation. Do it in private please.
I suppose you can see why I am not universally liked. Oh the joy of living with others.
September 9th, 2010
Hybrid people
I have this odd feeling that somehow She Who Watches is related to Ariadne. How that would have happened is mildly interesting to think about. I mean is there a link between Naxos and the Columbia River? Or somehow the disconnect between what Theseus wanted and what Ariadne wanted reflects the difference between – say – the writers of the 1926 House Document starting the process that would lead to the drowning of the Columbia River and the Tribes who depended on the Columbia just the way she was. Perhaps.
When I walked the trail that leads to She Who Watches the other day, I kept feeling as if I was wandering along a labyrinth and, inevitably I suppose, the ghost of the stranded Ariadne kept appearing. (Interestingly, the austere dryness of the land, and the wind, reminded me a lot of Greece as it has now become since deforestation.) I mean all those relocated glyphs and graphs, all those signs made, still speaking, lined up as many are, a small remnant in regiment along the path next to the car park. I wonder what Ariadne thought of being passed from a would-be king to a god? Not that much difference from being turned to stone I suppose.
I also wonder what the chief thought of coyote’s warning that soon there would be no more women chiefs. Of course that turned out to be a temporary setback since there are women chiefs now. So really She Who Watches also waits. And Ariadne? Turned immortal so Dionysus and she could remain together in youthful splendor; I doubt this as much better than being turned to stone. Ariadne. I suspect her of waiting too, but for what? Theseus is long dead.
And the River is drowned.
Here’s a question: If Ariadne and She Who Watches were to raise a daughter, how would they really go about it? How much rage would surface? How would the pain be navigated? And if She Who Watches and Ariadne were to be melded, to become one woman, would she make the same choices now, this hybrid woman, faced with the same kinds of problems that pertained in youth?
September 8th, 2010
Bloody life
I feel like I’m on a bloody roller coaster. First I go out and it is a perfect almond torte kind of day – deep blue sky, leaves beginning to turn, a cool undertone to the breeze, the air rich and slightly spicy. I sat in the sun at the coffee shop, drew out a new beading project, and marveled that no matter how fragile I feel, that the world can still cause in me such intense happiness.
Then I come home to find out that my niece is being released from psychiatric lock up into the very situation that caused the problem in the first place. I don’t know how to describe the despair of that to you.
September 1st, 2010
A cloud come to earth and odd gifts
Drove last night through a cloud come to earth. Weather.
It rained for many miles. All grey, the edges of things blurred. Everything looked the same. Up and over the pass it rained but it was as if the higher I drove, the closer I got to the cloud’s natural home, the less giving the grey masses felt.
Past Snoqualmie, the rest stop at Indian John, all wet and standing water. But then the road down onto the high plateau and the weather tired. The rain sputtered out close to Ellensberg and the world took on contours and colour again.
By the time I crossed the Columbia, the roads were still damp, and the earth smelt life a giant white mushroom but the clouds had retreated back to the sky.
Still, they were there. The moon rose unnoticed, even its light was indistinguishable from the general haze of neon celestial reflection.
I slept at a rest stop, under a sleeping bag in the back of my car and woke just before the sun crested the horizon. Ripped open, the clouds were, where the waning moon pushed through high in the southern sky. I awoke on a long slow breath.
Today is the psychiatric assessment, and a (probably not very pleasant) road sign for my 13 year old niece and yet I was more relaxed than I have been in months. The source of the gift of a contented sigh? A gift of cloud, rain, light and silence probably.
When I unfurled and left the car to go get hot water, I found a folded $100 bill clipped under my windshield wiper. Odd the world.
August 31st, 2010
On the road for longer
I am in Vancouver. I will be here for less than 24 hours and will return for a psychiatric evaluation and disposition hearing for the 13 year old mentioned in the last post. Imagine a life broken irreparably at only 13. Everything she had is now gone.
Tragedies.
There will be a life from the moment she was first locked in the ward, sure. Most of us never get to really experience so immediately the consequences of our actions, and in some ways I can see that this is a gift to her. At least since she is a minor, her record will be sealed once she reaches 18, but at only 13 she now must muster the will to change, to accept responsibilities most adults cannot bear. While possible, the chances are extremely small that she will make it out of this alive in any way that matters.
August 28th, 2010
Memory and death
I am in Spokane, in the motel where I always stay. Asleep still are my son and one of my nieces. I have already been out to get my coffee and some bread, cheese, fruit, etc for breakfast. Apple juice for the niece, and coke for the son.
I am sore from walking yesterday, the powwow at Riverfront was being set up and I was looking for another one of my nieces. She of the Washington School of the Deaf. It turned out that she had already left for the Reservation with her dad. Nevermind. I’m going up there this morning.
Still, I was glad I walked the grounds. It’s been several years now since I lived here and so there is a an almost ethereal quality to my walking here. I went by my old apartment to gather some seeds from a kind of Lunaria that grows here. It has bigger, whiter seed pods than the kind that I’ve seen up in Vancouver so I am going to plant some at home. I was there just after dark and the stands that I went for are at the edge of a badger’s wood. There are coyotes near by too since it is within easy reach of the river. And I visited the witch’s house. Her place is always really beautiful and verdant. But it was the powwow grounds that really seemed dense with the past and the odd thing is that I’m not much of a powwow person. Love stick game because of the songs but powwows have never been my favourite. Still this time it was different.
I suppose it is because Thyra is dead and she used to be a part of this powwow. Walking around was a bit like walking through the liminal zone where the shades and living intermingle. I kept “seeing” people that were once busy getting ready to dance, or sitting together in their camp chairs talking, and through them would hustle the current powwow workers setting up for grand entry at 7PM.
Today should be interesting because Wellpinit powwow is next weekend and Thyra’s camp is being set up today on the grounds. I’m heading up there in about an hour to exchange one niece for another. I’ll get a chance to walk around Wellpinit powwow grounds then. I’ll also go get some mugwort and buckbrush that grows near there.
I need juniper too and every morning when I burn it I suppose it will continue to keep the shades fed and therefore the memories sweet. At least I don’t use blood like Odysseus, and like Homer (I presume) I know it is a story, even if a compelling one.
August 25th, 2010
Travelling
I have been under a doctor’s care of late and am heading out of the city for a few days as a kind of therapy. The fact that I am also accomplishing a family task is no never-mind.
Are you like that? I feel so much better when my time is being well spent. Just sitting is something that is really hard for me to do. I can take a book and be OK with it, or my beading, but to sit without a goal, without a task?
My niece is deaf, and the task is to go get her and take her over to the Washington School for the Deaf for her first week as a boarding-school student. She is super excited to be in a place where everyone can talk to everyone else and as tasks go, apart from the long drive, it is an easy one. I am heading out a few days early (she has to be at school Sunday night) so that I can go up to my favourite mountain lake, swim, sleep and just sit. The thing is I am also taking my beading and my notebooks and a few books of poetry.
I wonder if I will ever again be the kind of person that can go somewhere without something to do? I used to be at one time. When I went out on the road at 16, hitchhiked and walked until I was 19, I went with a hairbrush (really long hair) as my main luggage. There were books during that time, but mostly, when I’d read them, I put them down for someone else to find. I read Darwin, and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, and Mao, and the Sumerian myths, and even the Bible. I remember thinking then, in fact some really important understandings came my way during that first 2.5-year trek, but I also remember long periods, long, curved roads when all that I was really aware of was the world around me. The only tension I had then was hunger and sometimes cold.
I guess that the real challenge would be to find a balance between the two states. To once again be able to pick up a task, but then just put it down for someone else to pick up. The critical thing here is to be OK with the probability that some of my tasks, should I put them down, will simply not get done. I am sure there are the sodden remains of books out on the road somewhere, that, once I left them behind, no one ever picked them up again. And the stakes are higher now. I mean if no one ever picked up my old copy of Flatland? But what if I put down the task of making sure a lost child gets found?
August 5th, 2010
Feeling miserable – seeking remedy
I had a bad evening and night – nasty, nasty dreams about killing and animals and then woke about 04:30 feeling disgruntled and fragile. A cool shower and a walk later, I still can’t shake the miseries so I went online seeking comfort and found that U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker has said
Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation. (page 109, lines 12-17)
I am not giddy, but I definitely feel quite a bit more cheerful about the day. That was especially true when I read page 10, lines 5-22. This is a summary of the (Prop 8 ) proponents’ argument:
Proponents’ procreation argument, distilled to its essence, is as follows: the state has an interest in encouraging sexual activity between people of the opposite sex to occur in stable marriages because such sexual activity may lead to pregnancy and children, and the state has an interest in encouraging parents to raise children in stable households. Tr 3050:17-3051:10. The state therefore, the argument goes, has an interest in encouraging all opposite-sex sexual activity, whether responsible or irresponsible, procreative or otherwise, to occur within a stable marriage, as this encourages the development of a social norm that opposite-sex sexual activity should occur within marriage. Tr 3053:10-24. Entrenchment of this norm increases the probability that procreation will occur within a marital union. Because same sex couples’ sexual activity does not lead to procreation, according to proponents the state has no interest in encouraging their sexual activity to occur within a stable marriage. Thus, according to proponents, the state’s only interest is in opposite sex sexual activity.
Jeez. If the “state” is really interested in stable households for the purposes of (presumably) mentally and socially stable future citizens and taxpayers, then marriage between the opposite sex probably isn’t the way to go since marriages between persons of the opposite sex are somewhat unstable. In fact the CDC has a faststat that says that in 2009 the marriage rate was 7.1 per 1000 total population and the divorce rate was 3.5 based on the same population number. Proponents of Prop 8 might want to turn their energies to finding a better alternative than marriage if their interest is actually in life stability for future citizens. While they’re at it they might want to look into alternatives to religiously based bigotry.
The ruling is here.