Mon, 2009-01-05 07:52

Image: A Room with Two Views by Flickr user J.B. Kochanie (yes, that’s me)

One day I found a mouse caught in a trap. With her leg pinned to the wooden plank by a bar of steel, the mouse had crawled twelve feet across a stone floor. She tried to escape into a small gap in a concrete wall, a passageway between the world of bright lights, whirring machines, heat and food to the dark hidden world of narrow spaces, cold and blessed quiet. The trap was too big to pull through the gap, so the mouse remained there — half in one world, half in the other — until Death or His agent, in the form of this author, arrived on the scene.

It occurred to me that the mouse with her leg caught in the the trap was the perfect metaphor for my failed attempts to balance work and life.

If you expected me to say that the trap represented “marriage” or “mortgage,” the metaphor would be just as apt for work, money, and love are interrelated. Mortgage and marriage “go together just like a horse and carriage,” to paraphrase the lyrics of the old song. Intoxicated with love and the validation we have been seeking since childhood, we become the emotional big spenders, making big plans and life-long commitments. Big plans per se are not bad. I could argue that those big dreams urged me to pursue a list of accomplishments that I would not have thought possible when I was a child. But everything has its price and the currency demanded, in one form or another, is Time which is precious because our share is finite.

While work is an essential part of our existence, ensuring that our families are clothed and fed, work rarely feeds our souls. Even if we are employed by a charitable organization dedicated to eliminating poverty or illiteracy, we will grow weary of the tedium of staff meetings, deadlines, and reports. If we developed the unfortunate habit of checking our email during the evening commute, we may have given up the few minutes of quiet before returning home to family and chores. Perhaps we avoid those quiet moments because if we stopped being busy, we would realize what drones we had become, how many promises to ourselves and others we had broken in the name of work.

In his book, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, poet David Whyte describes the effect of these broken promises.

Some time ago, at AT&T, I found myself working with a roomful of particularly thoughtful managers. We were looking at the way human beings find it necessary to sacrifice their own sacred desires on the altar of work and success. Out of this a woman wrote the following lines. She read them slowly from the back of the room, unaware how stricken we all were by the silence she created:

Ten years ago
I turned my faced for a moment

and it became my life.

Five years ago, if anyone had asked me if I read blogs, I would have answered with an emphatic, “No.” With my workload, I found it difficult to find the time and energy to write or read for pleasure. Nor did I want to waste that time reading someone else’s litany of complaints about work and life. Looking back, that is exactly what I did need — reading someone’s else’s words — because it may have resuscitated my own neglected writing. Neglect is dangerous because it is an easy first step to being silent, being voiceless.

In his essay, The Longing: the Web and the Return of Voice, David Weinberger explains how readily we allow ourselves to be silenced.

A managed environment requires behavior from us that we accept as inevitable although, of course, it is really mandatory only because it is mandated.

It requires this by stressing the virtue of “professionalism.” To a large degree, that translates as being voiceless. Professionals not only act according to a canon of ethics but also dress like other professionals (one eccentricity per person is permitted — a garish tie, perhaps, or a funky necklace), decorate their cubicles with nothing more disturbing than a Dilbert (formerly Far Side) cartoon, sit up straight at committee meetings, don’t “undermine the authority” (i.e., be smarter than) their superiors, make idle chatter only about a narrow range of “safe” topics, don’t curse, don’t mention God, never let on whether they’re going to shit or pee, make absolutely no reference to being sexual (exceptions made for male executives after the new secretary has left the room) and successfully “manage” their home life so that it never intrudes unexpectedly into their business life.

Most of us don’t mind doing this. Like Sartre’s waiter, we actually sort of enjoy it. It’s like playing grownup. Having extremist political banners hung in cubicles or having to listen to someone talk about his spiritual commitments or sex life would simply be distracting. Disturbing, actually.

And yet … we feel resentment.

...Just about all the concessions we make to work in a well-run, non-disturbing, secure, predictably successful, managed environment have to do with giving up our voice.

Nothing is more intimately a part of who we are than our voice. It expresses what we think and feel. It is an amalgam of the voluntary and involuntary. It gives style and shape to content. It subtends the most public and the most private. It is what we withhold at the moments of greatest significance.

Our voice is our strongest, most direct expression of who we are. Our voice is expressed in our words, our tone, our body language, our visible enthusiasms.

Management is a powerful force, part of a larger life-scheme that promises us health, peace, prosperity, calm and no surprises in every aspect of our lives, from health to wealth to good weather and moderately heated coffee from McDonalds. We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable. This assault is literal as well as metaphoric. It shows itself in the embarrassment over having an accent, in the reduction of political thought to two identical parties, in the lust for buzzwords and catchphrases, yadda yadda yadda (and, of course, in the use of the phrase “yadda yadda yadda”).

It is only the force of our regret at having lived in this bargain that explains the power of our longing for the Web.

You can read the entire essay by David Weinberger here..

Five years ago, I was sick to death of professionalism. I had become so professional I was voiceless. What I needed was to read the words of others such as the wise, pleasure-loving Minx:

I compromise my artistic soul so that I can afford to live — but I have great difficulty living with said compromise. Hence this blog.

So I began to read the blogs I previously had scorned. After a time, I dared to submit a comment. One blog in particular helped me to regain my voice. It is the blog which you are reading now.

Sungold of Kittywampus has called bloggers the adjunct professors of the media, and I agree. It takes discipline and dedication to inform and inspire on a daily basis, especially when the basement floods, the kids are sick, and you can’t find pants that fit.

So if you have not done so already, please cast your vote for Figleaf as the Bloggers’ Choice Hottest Daddy Blogger (the badge in the sidebar will take you to the site) and for Sungold as the Hottest Mommy Blogger.

Reference:
David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, published by Currency Books (a division of Doubleday), ISBN 0-385-42350-0, pp.230-231.

Sun, 2008-12-21 04:55

December from White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems by Mary Oliver

Image details can be found here.

Thu, 2008-12-11 11:11

In his recent post Regarding K-Lo’s snark on Blagojevich: Right Wrong Again, Figleaf provides a poignant reason why the downfall of Gov. Blagojevich should not be cause for celebration:

And that’s right around the point where I part company with K-Lo: my heart is not warmed by the scandal. There are two little kids, roughly my kid’s ages, who are looking at growing up while their dad (who richly deserves it) and (ditto depending on how involved she was) maybe their mom are in jail.

Not convinced? Allow me to present another reminder of a scandal presented by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review:

Another name Republicans could have mentioned if they’d fought back better would have been Mel Reynolds — the Democratic Congressman who went to jail for, among other things, having sex with a 16 year-old campaign volunteer, soliciting child pornography and various and sundry corruption charges. He was convicted on 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography. He was subsequently convicted on unrelated bank fraud charges. Bill Clinton commuted Reynolds’ convictions on bank fraud, letting him out of jail early. One does not remember the hothouse of Democratic righteousness about “the children” back then. 10/06 01:03 PM

Link to National Review article:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODQyNjFlYzkyNDdmMmM1ZTUzNDViNjgzYTQ5ZWQ1YTc=

As Figleaf points out, that’s not the end of the story.

In an interview with the Chicago Reporter in 2001, Mel Reynolds described how his conviction and imprisonment affected his family.

...I wonder if any of the prosecutors in my state case as well as my federal case and especially the federal case, if they ever think about the fact that my children were homeless at times.

My wife tells me that not one prosecutor, even people that she, you know, initially helped the prosecution, they never once called her to help her with our children when they were homeless, when they didn’t have any place to go. They were the cold heartedness people that ever lived.

When, when this guy [FBI mole John] Christopher, whatever his name was, the alderman, they gave him over 300 and some thousand dollars. Now I’m not suggesting that they should have given my wife any money but they should have at least been sensitive. She wrote a letter to the judge, Judge Norgle, begging him to allow me to go to a halfway house so I could help her with the children. She never even, he never even paid her the common decency to write her back. She wrote [U.S. Attorney] Scott Lassar asking the same thing. He wrote her back saying, well, you know these are, this is misfortunate, misfortunate, and the, the children have to be the, have to suffer, but he didn’t offer any solution. So, you just wonder perhaps they think it is normal for black children to suffer, I don’t know.

And I’m not making any excuses for Mel Reynolds as far as what I did and what I didn’t do and the mistakes that I made. I made mistakes and I regret those mistakes tremendously because, the real reason that I regret those mistakes is because they brought a lot of wrath down on my family. My three babies had to suffer and had I not made the mistakes that I made they would not have suffered. But once a person makes a mistake he does not lose his right as a United States citizen to be treated fairly. And race and poverty should not come into any punishment when it comes to someone who had made mistakes. I think in my case it came into it. And it’s not fair.

The entire interview can be found here.

I think it appropriate to quote Figleaf’s concluding statement:

Nor will the stork tidily take them away in time for her [Lopez’s] next vapid snark.
If the Blagojevich children do end up fostered to others let us hope that as well as providing comfort, stability, and love those grown-ups, unlike Lopez, have the capacity to understand, and communicate, both basic decency and the differences between right and wrong.
Heart-warming my ass.

Note:
The campaign volunteer, who was nineteen when Reynolds was indicted based on her initial accusations, recanted her sexual abuse charges three times, refused to testify, and, as a result, spent 13 days in jail until she agreed to testify. At the trial which took place in 1995, she explicitly stated that her relationship with Reynolds was consensual. It should be noted that Reynolds would have succeeded Congressman Dan Rostenkowski as Chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. Rostenkowski was indicted on corruption charges in 1994 and resigned his office in 1995 following his conviction.

Thu, 2008-11-27 21:06

Image: Aristotle and Phyllis by the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, c. 1485, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The depiction of the concubine Phyllis riding the philosopher Aristotle was a popular subject for artists of the Gothic period and early Renaissance. Popular because the patrons of those artists considered the scene to be emblematic of the relationship of the sexes and of the mind and body. The scene known as Aristote chevauché is derived from the medieval tale Lai d’Aristote“ written by Henri d’Andeli, a thirteenth-century Norman poet.

According to the Lai, Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, advised the young king to avoid the company of the concubine Phyllis, since the time spent in her arms was dissipating Alexander’s energy and dedication to his studies and civic duties. Alexander agreed, albeit reluctantly, and eventually told Phyllis the reason why he avoided her company. Phyllis devised a plan to unseat her learned rival.

When Aristotle was in his study in the early hours of the morning, he was distracted from his reading by the sound of singing in the garden. Looking out the open window, he saw Phyllis, barefoot and clad in a gossamer shift, dancing and singing in the garden. As any serious student will tell you, willpower is no match for sexual desire which has been denied for too long. Aristotle groaned, closed his books and called to Phyllis. He told her how much he wanted her and, she promised to satisfy him if he would indulge a whim of hers: he should be her steed and allow her to ride on his back around the enclosed garden. Aristotle agreed, dropped to all fours, and carried Phyllis on his back while she sang:

Master Silly carries me.
Love leads on, and so he goes,
by Love’s authority.

Alexander, intrigued by the singing in the garden, looks over the wall and sees Reason ridden hard by Desire. When confronted by Alexander, Aristotle tells his student that there is a lesson to be learned here: if a wise and aged philosopher can be swayed so readily by Love then one as young and inexperienced as Alexander must be on his guard against such temptation. However, Aristotle’s influence has been weakened and Alexander once again enjoys the company of Phyllis.

Henri d’Andeli’s narrative has a tongue-in-cheek quality, poking fun at those who believe themselves impervious to physical desire. But over time the story behind the scene was changed. Phyllis was no longer Alexander’s concubine but the wife of Aristotle and, her act of riding her husband like a beast was interpreted as an example of woman’s malicious manipulation of man’s need for physical love. By attributing such power and malice to women, men became, by default, the submissive class. A resentfully submissive class.

We are in dire need of new imagery.

Where can one find an image of male vulnerability that is not insulting? The place to start is the most powerful sexual organ, the human mind, preferably the mind of one who has lived on both sides of the whip. One such as Elizavetta Mora, of Vespertine Erotica. Consider this excerpt from a piece entitled, Words: sometimes they’re pretty useless, in which she describes a man who can deliver a fifteen minute monologue detailing what he wants Elizavetta to do, yet cannot look her in the eye as he speaks. And for her, that reluctance holds the key to what that man really needs and wants:

“Tell me how much,” I said. “Tell me how much you want me to hurt your cock. Say it. Say all those words you just said… say them again to me.”

His eyes began fluttering with tears. He struggled with trying to speak while looking in my eyes. His struggle went on for a long, holy moment.

Then just before it seemed he was going to finally speak, I reared back fast and slapped his face very hard.

When his head snapped back toward me, the look on his face went from stunned to hurt… betrayal… anger… in a matter of seconds. I backed up and stood barely a foot away from him to watch while he strained and arched in his bonds toward me, away from me, totally at the mercy of all the emotions and sensations firing at light speed through his being.

Eventually, as I suspected would happen, a great rage rose up in him; a rage that made me thankful he was bolted to the wall. And, as I suspected, it was the rage that finally did it (along with, perhaps, my uncompromising, uncommenting witnessing of it).

And as that lifetime of rage silently burned it’s white hot way from the center of his body outward, he never broke my gaze – and never said a word – until his knees gave way and his cock spurted in wild grunting whole-body thrusts into the electrified air between us.

You can read the entire post by clicking here.

That scene conjures up many images in my mind, none of which I would describe as humiliating or insulting. One has to have a profound respect for another human being to free him from so fortified a prison of the self.

If you visit her site and read her poetry and stories, you will find that Elizavetta understands what Helene Cixous meant when she referred to l’ecriture feminine, feminine writing, language that allows a woman to express what her body feels like to her. Such language is poetic, nonlinear, and free of the restrictions of realistic prose. It is this language, grounded in the body, that Elizavetta uses to give shape to the thoughts of the spellbound Thomas Rhymer:

To her understanding smile, he begged, “Am I dying?”

“Ah, no, I am not that One, Thomas.” So gently she spoke, with a knowing of long abiding sorrows it seemed. “Not yet that One.”

With that, she took his hand and suddenly they were astride her horse. His arms went about her like they had always been there, and his face buried itself in her hair.

His wife’s voice gone. His children’s smiles, all gone. His afternoon rest along the safe bank of his own river, the river of his fathers, gone. Her hair, her apple-scented hair was the whole golden world, the only world before him now. Everything else, forgotten, forgiven, swept away.

She clicked her tongue and snapped the reins. They lurched forward and the river’s rushing tumble sang along with the harness bells. The sky around them clouded over with every blue and gray that could be painted.

You can read The Rhymer’s Queen here.

Please. You have a long weekend ahead. Go visit Elizavetta and allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Sat, 2008-11-15 20:33

Image: Schoolboy by István Nagy, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Imagine that you are a young boy. Your tenth birthday is less than two months away. It is late fall and those few days are gone, when the leaves turned yellow and scarlet and the sun was so hot that the chilly autumn breeze felt refreshing. The rainy cold that precedes winter has arrived, her suitcase filled with grey wet things.

You are late for your music lessons, so you walk, then run until what you see and hear makes you stop. You see a crowd of people along Bajcsyezsilinszky Ut, the east-west thoroughfare that crosses the city of Miskolc. It is also the street that serves as the major artery between Hungary and the northeastern territories of the U.S.S.R. It is not unusual to hear the roar and drone of Soviet trucks as they traveled through the city, certainly not so unusual to form a crowd that is oddly silent. But what you hear does not sound like trucks.

You are not tall enough to see above the shoulders of the grown-ups, so you slip in to the crowd, minnow through the overcoats until you emerge in the first row, face to face with the steel hide of a Soviet tank as it rolls past. The next tank approaches but does not move past you. It groans, then stops. No one speaks, but something akin to a warning moves through the crowd, not unlike the awareness of a predator that is felt instantly throughout a herd. You do not need to look around you to know that the crowd is backing away from the tank. Your eyes remain fixed on the flank of the beast but your feet are moving of their own volition, inching backwards until the first rifle shot cracks the air. Then you run and run and all you want is to get back to your home.

You run up the stairs of the apartment building where you live with your mother and father. You do not know that your mother was watching from the window as you ran back, even though the bullets arrived before you did. You rush into the apartment, calling for her and are too stunned to say anything when she pushes you face down onto the floor of the sitting room. She is on top of you, cradling your head with her arms. From the corner of your eye you see the floor is littered with broken glass and plaster.

When the gunfire subsides, your mother warns you not to move. She crawls past the broken window, to the sofa and pulls a thick down comforter to the floor before the sound of gunfire resumes. She crawls back, wraps you in a cocoon of down and places your body beneath hers. Then, like an insect that has taken its young back into its belly, she crawls beneath the bullets, out of the apartment, through the hallways to the safety of the inner courtyard.

Two nights later you are wrapped in that same comforter, lying between your mother and father in the hayloft of a deserted barn. You fall asleep before your mother finishes tucking the down around you. Two days spent walking , hiding then more walking to escape the fighting in the city.

“Rope! Remember to bring rope!” Years later, when you introduce me to your mother, you tell me about those nights spent in hiding and poke fun at your mother’s insistence about the rope: “Apparently my mother thought we might have time for mountain climbing during our extended holiday.” Your mother does not laugh at your joke but turns and looks at me across the room. In that moment, when I look into her eyes and see a sadness so deep, I understand why you joke, poke fun, do anything to avoid looking into those depths. For hanging was and is the last resort for the poor, for those without money for a gun or time for poison. For those who lived through one Holocaust, but doubt their chances of surviving a second. And in that moment I realize that I never would have known you if the sounds outside that barn had been footsteps and gunshot instead of rain, wind and the scratching of mice.

More than fifty years have passed from that night when you slept between mother and father, between life and death. You rarely sleep as deeply as you did on that night. Each night sleep eludes you until the moment when you reach for the comforter and burrow into a cocoon of silk-covered down.

Sat, 2008-08-02 01:56

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,
And I shall go in the Divel’s name,
Aye, till I come home again.

Fri, 2008-08-01 02:01

Image: Cafe Risque courtesy of Online Athens

The city of Lavonia, Georgia decided that $997,000 was not too great a price to pay to stage its own Bonfire of the Vanities. Using the subterfuge of an unnamed third-party, the city officials succeeded in purchasing the Cafe Risque, a local strip club which the council has tried to shut down since it opened in 2001.

According to the City Council, Jerry Sullivan, the deceased owner of Cafe Risque, had obtained their approval for a family-style restaurant. However, once the establishment opened, it was advertised as Cafe Risque and seven years of legal proceedings by the town could not put the club out of business. When the owners of Cafe Risque announced their intention to sell the property, it was no secret that the owners refused to sell the property back to the city. Fearing that the weaknesses in the zoning ordinances would allow another adult business to operate in the same location, the city officials decided to buy the land and building through the guise of a third party. When the first transaction was completed, the city immediately purchased the property from the third party.

By that night, Lavonia’s council members were having a victory party at the cafe, burning the business’ signs in a parking lot bonfire. On Wednesday, Fesperman and city officials giddily began gutting the building

“We all took turns daring each other (to slide down the strippers’ poles),” Fesperman said. “But nobody would actually go through with it.”

You can read the entire article in OnLine Athens here

While the residents of Lavonia are celebrating the demise of Cafe Risque, here are some facts to consider.

• The population of Lavonia is less than 2,000.

• For 2003 Lavonia’s crime statistics, according to city-data.com, were: 1 murder, 4 rapes, 4 robberies, 23 assaults.

• With a population of less than 2,000, Lavonia has a small tax base to support its annual expenditures of $1.8 million (based on the 2004 budget).

• The financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2002, which are the most recent statements available online on the city’s website, indicate that Lavonia held $1.9 million in cash and certificates of deposit in the fund established for its water treatment operation. The water treatment facility had been financed through the issuance of long-term bonds totaling $4.1 million. According to City Manager Gary Fesperman, the $997,000 used to purchase the Cafe Risque came from the city’s reserve fund which was slated to pay off those 1997 bonds used to build that water treatment plant.

The investors who hold the debt securities issued by Lavonia and the bond rating agencies will not be as jubilant as its citizens when they learn that $1.0 million of the liquid funds set aside for retirement of those obligations had been used to invest in an illiquid asset, i.e., real estate, during one of the worst markets in over a decade. While I do not know the specifics of Lavonia’s debt covenants, I hope that this city will be able to meet its obligations to investors and creditors. But in the event that Lavonia defaults on its scheduled debt repayments, I would not be surprised if the city’s use of those funds earmarked for the retirement of the long-term debt could be construed as fiscal mismanagement.

After looking at this information, I have to ask this question. What was so abhorrent about the Cafe Risque, its employees and patrons? Why would the public officials of Lavonia, a town with a very low crime rate and a small tax base, spend the money to file five lawsuits in the span of seven years and then jeopardize their town’s bond rating just to get rid of a strip club?

Seems a shame, doesn’t it?

Thu, 2008-07-31 21:20

Image: Courtesy of CuteOverload.com

While it may not be the best place to meet with your elected representative, the men’s restroom provided a safe haven for this flock of flamingos at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Bronzeville, Texas during the recent hurricane-force winds.

See. There is a reason why women go to the restroom in groups.

Tue, 2008-07-29 02:09

Image: Detail from “The Hunt by Night” by Paolo Uccello, courtesy of The Yorck Project, Wikimedia Commons

I know the truth — give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look — it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

1915 by Marina Tsvetaeva

For the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
For those who share their beliefs.
For those who oppose their beliefs.

Wed, 2008-07-09 18:06

Kit Roskelly has a “Kink 101” article up at the F-Word. The article is pitched at the perfect level for feminists who are concerned, but not deadset-convinced, that BDSM violates feminist principles. If you’re kinky, feminist, and sick to death of having to argue about this issue, Roskelly’s article is not for you. But if you’re on the fence, it’s worth checking out.

I’m not a kink expert by any means; I just like to whack my boyfriend with things, like to be whacked with things, and have attended a few kink events. Most of what Roskelly says strikes me as true and helpful; I especially like “feminism should not have a prescriptive stance on female sexuality” and “Consent is an absolute requirement of sexual interaction”. You could nitpick about the safewords (you don’t need to say ‘red light’ if you have some other way of communicating that things are going really really wrong, and you should probably agree on a safe tap before anybody stuffs anything in anybody else’s mouth) but the basic idea of safewords is pretty sound. Both partners need a way to say, “stop” and be taken seriously.

I have one substantive criticism of Roskelly’s article. (This criticism is not new. Trinityva, who writes at SM Feminist and The Strangest Alchemy, has made this point repeatedly; my favorites are here and here.) Twice in her article, Roskelly urges kinky feminists to be mindful of the social context in which their desires arise. But what does mindfulness entail, exactly? Are we supposed to seek the reasons for our kinky fantasies and desires? At this point, I don’t think anybody really knows what causes people to have one set of sexual tastes rather than another. And if you did know what caused your sexual desires, what would you do with that information? Learning that your rape fantasies are the result of childhood trauma wouldn’t necessarily eliminate your rape fantasies.

There are things in the neighborhood to be mindful of. Are you really satisfied by the kinky sex you’re having, or are you doing it because you feel pressured? (And being in the dominant role doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily satisfied by the sex; submissive people can be very good at manipulating their partners into indulging fetishes they don’t really get off on, in a way that’s not reciprocal. Bitchy Jones’ kinky sexism category has a depressingly large number of examples.) It’s also a good idea to reflect on how your expression of your desires affects other people. Does the person next to you faint at the idea of needles? If so, it’s not very respectful to play with needles right in front of them. Does the event you’re organizing have pictures of naked women, and only women, on the walls? If so, you may be alienating some of the women who attend. In my experience, BDSM people are already more mindful about this stuff than average, but extra reminders never hurt.

I’m on board with mindfulness if it’s meant to apply to actions. But what’s inside your head is yours.