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He did not know where he was when he became aware of himself, speaking to a middle aged man with a graying beard. He did not know his own name, nor anything about his life, but he did not feel confused. He had a sense of himself, the way he perceived, how he felt toward what appeared.
It was hard to understand what the bearded man was saying. They were standing in a large alcove, beneath an overhang of rock. It was dusk. Other people were standing there too, in a rough circle. The speaking man was a builder of some kind, and he was speaking about people from someplace nearby, people who had been in an accident, but the particulars of his language were difficult to decipher. Nobody seemed to take notice of this. It appeared that all of them standing there understood each other's emotional gestures and paid no mind to the words exchanged.
It occurred to him that none of them knew about the others. They were all familiar, comfortable with each other in an implicit way, but they remembered no language for their own condition. What was not occurring occurred to him. No questions were being formed. The capacity to do so was absent, and in recognizing this, he felt grief simultaneous with relief.
The rocky walls seemed to be illuminated by candles, but it was just the sun passing along the horizon. Outside, the sky was huge. Turning away, he walked to the opening of the space where he had become aware and sat, staring out at the sand and the dusky hills. The breeze was warm. Someone came and sat beside him, and he touched her on the shoulder and almost remembered her. The way she was there now was just the way she had always made herself present to others. He almost spoke to her then, but there were still no words for want of questions, so they just remained for a while in the intimacy of luminous darkness, forgetting the others as they had forgotten themselves, by name alone.
When it came to be morning he was still where he sat, but she had gone. The sun seemed to rise from every direction and already the day was hot. He rose and walked down into the basin below. Someone had erected a high wooden wall around an enormous rectangle of space, which he could not see into from the outside. There were no trees anywhere nearby, but the fence was made of rows of tall thick logs, the largest limbs and largest trunks from the largest of trees. He walked along the outside perimeter until he found the gate, open and hingeless, and passed into the abandoned amusement park inside.
Derelict rides and vacant booths stretched far into the distance, where the wind had formed an enormous mountain of sand, high enough to be capped with snow, blowing away in a white plume. Already he'd been walking for some time toward the mountain when he passed beneath a Ferris wheel, red as a wheelbarrow, high as the tallest of skyscrapers. It was completely rusted into place, and from beneath it he stared for a moment, up into its frozen scaffolding. Beside him, he encountered another traveler, a man in a purple sweatshirt, his father, and when they turned their attention away from the rusted steel, they continued on together toward the distant peak.
The day was late when they reached the slopes and began to ascend, each step sinking down and vanishing into sand. When they reached the snow, they sunk down three times for each step they rose, and the wind blew away their footprints as a fast as they could make them. He spoke, "We no longer have time to make it up and back before its too late to go home." "Lets turn back then," the traveler said.
So they faced back and let the slopes dissolve beneath them, down toward the motionless Ferris wheel that towered above their return, glinting red in the fiery dusk. The sky began to swallow the edges of the land as night arose. He realized then that he did not know where he meant by ‘going back.’ Perhaps to the cave where he first woke into his awareness, to the people who did not speak in words that could be understood, but regarded each other as neighbors. But this was still no question, and he did not desire the power to ask nor lament the powerlessness of not asking. After all, he thought, I am only dream.
It occurred to him that his companion had gone, and for the first time he thought to call himself alone, saw in that word a seed from which ten thousand things might become. But there was no soil on which the seed could fall. Only he, the sand and the rocks and vague mountains; all of it was sky.
THE BLUSHED FACE OF WHEEL
So much depends
Upon
A red ferris wheel
Gazed with other
Beside a returning feel
Another Interesting Article
This one is from the March 1 New Yorker about the tenuous and complex relationship between medical science and mental illness (depression specifically).
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/01/100301crat_atla...
I NOAH A MAN WHO CAN COMMUNICATE BEFORE HE IS UNDERSTOOD
Noah, ever since I read your post, Elliot’s line, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” has stayed in my mind and I’ve been meaning to comment on it. How can poetry, or language for that matter, communicate before it is understood? It means that language is embodied, constituted in the world and in the senses, first the sensing and then the making sense. That is, to know language we first have to feel language.
Language is the bringing to light of the manifest and, as such, is both its expression and method. From Latin, methodus, method is the "way of teaching or going.” Language is the (form)ulation and the showing itself as seen in the very way it shows. And yet, by itself, language is insufficient to express. Language needs choosing and intention, and thus, begins in the silence of opening and stretches (intendere) across experience as possibility. Language is the opening up to the (con)fusion of possibility as it reveals and points to (the meanings of) the excesses and over-spilling fecundity of world. Language is alive and embodied in the (e)motive forces swirling and racing through molecules and cells, and in the pulsating organs irrupting as (sens)ation bending toward the light beyond and of sense.
Silence and Language
Yes Om, I feel the embodiment of language. You say, and yet by itself language is insufficient to express, it begins in the silence of opening. What is it that language expresses? From many perspectives we define in language what language does and how it performs. But when I ask myself to say what language expresses, I pause.
It reminds me of something Alan Watts used to say: You cannot taste your own tongue, nor touch your own finger. To me, this is the understanding of 'genuine poetry,' which communicates without defining itself. "Language is alive and embodied in the (e)motive forces swirling and racing through molecules and cells, and in the pulsating organs irrupting as (sens)ation bending toward the light beyond and of sense." I hear you saying: the body of language is the feeling of the world. Language is feeling sens(e)ing itself.
We've said that language points, and it does. For me it points to silence. What is language without silence, or silence without language? Language cannot speak its own silence, and yet it does. At its most mystical, this is the poem, the communication of the poem. I feel it in Elliot, (and of course Stevens). It is something about the way I begin to understand as I let go the desire to define.
At first I'd have said, I must not confuse language with experience, I must not mistake the symbol for the symbolized. This is true. Then I'd have thought, but what is the symbolized apart from its symbol? What is form absent its language? I have to accept that language is neither the same as nor other than what it expresses. It is ultimately between being and non-being, creating and destroying in the embodiment of silence.
SILENCE AS LANGUAGE
Noah, the exact quote is:
“And yet, by itself, language is insufficient to express. Language needs choosing and intention, and thus, begins in the silence of opening and stretches (intendere) across experience as possibility.”
To elaborate, language expresses need and desire as possibility. Both need and desire constitute the evolutionary process of consciousness, the ever-becoming choosing and intention of transcendence, and so is dependent on time and space. Language does not inherently exist and thus is composed of non-language elements, including body. Language is inseparable from world and so emerges from and through world, already as. Language is the first sound naming itself in the effort of seeking its unnaming. Though language cannot speak its own silence, it does give voice to silent experience precisely in the returning to silence. Language speaks silence as mirroring of other; mirroring is the intimate nature of language, though the mirror, like silence, is itself neither intrinsic nor extrinsic in quality. And so, as language shifts between being and non-being, as indeed the (e)motioning itself, it can be said that language is always (re)turning to the silence.
Construct to Deconstruct
For the past several days if not few weeks I have been pondering or perhaps wrestling with thoughts regarding the actual role afflictive emotions, and specifically ‘shame’ play in my own delusional sense of reality. I say delusional for I’m coming to believe that while the frame of my tapestry may be by nature pure and good, the main thread woven over the years seems to be one based on a falsehood of affliction. Consciously, I realize the initial weavers of this delusion were emotionally unhealthy and unable to stop themselves. However, now I seem to be facing the fact that as time has passed I seem to have taken control of the loom and unconsciously continued the pattern initiated. What a precious weaver I have become – picking and choosing experiences, relationships, reactions, all which trigger or reinforce the deeply embedded negative messages of the past.
My question to throw out is: In order to deconstruct this weave without throwing out the entire tapestry or in other words, one’s sense of self into a true understanding of ‘selflessness’ - must one first construct a sense of ‘I’ or ego so as to examine and dissolve the triggers of affliction? This is what I feel I am currently doing.
Personally when I decided it was time to examine how ‘shame’ played out in my sense of reality, I had no idea how pervasive it was. For the initial 48 hours on this journey I have never consciously worked so hard to be mindful of each moment, my thoughts, reactions and perhaps most importantly interpretations to stimuli of all forms. It was and remains an exhausting experience. Enlightening in many ways as I examine emotions as they arise and abide and try to acknowledge their roots or the ancient messages they reinforce. Shocking, as I realize how often even little things in my daily life trigger this pervasive afflictive emotion down to the core of my psyche. Repeatedly throughout the day I find myself emotionally exhausted and wondering why I feel compelled to continue this process. And then I remind myself that it’s time, I’m not certain why I feel so strongly about it, but I do, so I must – there’s no turning back.
Intellectually, I understand that ‘I’ is just an illusion, a name, a stream of experiences in continuous transformation. But (there usually is a but ..) it is almost as if I created a boat on my stream, named it ‘Bodhi’ and unconsciously cling to it whether it’s filled with positive or afflictive nourishment, as if it was real, solid and never changing.
So how do I dissolve the boat, change the weave and let my tapestry expand.
POETIC PLAY WITH BODHI: FROM INSTRUCT TO CONSTRUCT TO
POETIC PLAY WITH BODHI: FROM INSTRUCT TO CONSTRUCT TO DECONSTRUCT TO STRUCTURE TO STARSTRUCK
I sit amidst the oak and pine too restless to give way
to the breeze that the forest and pond breathe into. I see
the pond and the length of its shore. I hear the cardinal's
what-cheer, but give it a name. I inhale the intoxication
of pine and the jasmine-like fragrance of the spicebush
dotting the wood white; but memories are stirred of more
romantic times before I was a subtraction of myself. I am
wanderlust, but mistake aimlessness for desire, ignorant
of the fear fueling like a drug its very existence. I, not love,
am blind, my hand dismissing in backward gestures attempts
to guide myself through ministrations of tenderness and love.
I pray, but like a ghost I will not leave. I am stuck as I have
been thousands of years, caught in myself like the lobster
nets flung out into the sound, my head the buoy bobbing
up and down ceaselessly in the waves. History holds me
tight like dependent parents. And I the loyal child, a tightly
wound machine sit here under the sinking orange sun burning
off the last blue from sky as the oranges, reds, purple-slates
and blues of me blanket in for another night of dreams.
“However, now I seem to be facing the fact that as time has passed I seem to have taken control of the loom and unconsciously continued the pattern initiated. What a precious weaver I have become – picking and choosing experiences, relationships, reactions, all which trigger or reinforce the deeply embedded negative messages of the past.”
How to still a deluded, restless mind.
The flowing spring says, “Listen as I
Cleanse your mind.” The chilled air
Says, “Let me keep you mindful.” The
Pond says, “Find your reflection in me.
No, not your human face, but your
Original Face from before your birth.”
And the dying leaves, fallen and falling
From the trees nestled in the bowl of
Mountain, say, “Follow me back to joy.”
"My question to throw out is: In order to deconstruct this weave without throwing out the entire tapestry or in other words, one’s sense of self into a true understanding of ‘selflessness’ - must one first construct a sense of ‘I’ or ego so as to examine and dissolve the triggers of affliction?"
from the depth of subject
to the death of subject
to the insatiable breath
breaking through the next
barrier of awareness
and the next and next
through the murky, dense
black smoke of thought.
"So how do I dissolve the boat, change the weave and let my tapestry expand?"
I’ll say it in one sentence:
…psychoanalysis seeks to rediscover /create/co-create/uncover/ reveal one's core self and meditation seeks to dissolve it and pychoanalysis strengthens one's sense of self and meditation pierces through the illusion of self and the ensuing realization is that there is no self, only a relativized version and Absolute Self is nothing more than a stream of consciousness outside the realm of time and space without form without cause without boundary and brother pychoanalysis depends on language as a vehicle for discovery and meditation requires silence to break through the noise and reification of language which leads to misperception and the failure to realize Awareness is because Awareness is clouded by what I am now engaged in and this and that activity is incessantly focused on the individual self and focusing on the individual creates a perceptual split which further creates a thought/feeling of separateness and separateness is at the heart of suffering on a deep existential level because to be separate is to experience one's self as a-part and to experience one's self as a-part one necessarily has to imagine himself as confined to his own body/mind and to be confined to one's body/mind is to separate or split off from all one perceives--the result being birth and death time and space and all activities are bound to time/space and must therefore engender tension or resistance because movement itself is resistance and time and space cannot exist without movement and we either move away from the past or move towards the future and only now is free from resistance… and behind the apparent difference of Being and Non-Being, they are each other… now let's go to the heart of paradox to the big question the really really big question of first cause (how did manifestation happen in the first place) the one that says something like in that distance the division between the seer and the thing seen, in that division the whole conflict of man exists…. so the big question of first cause speaks to paradox like nothing else because …each time a boundary is superimposed upon reality, that boundary generates two apparently contradictory opposites and the same thing occurs with the primary boundary for the primary boundary severs unity consciousness itself splitting it right down the middle and delivering it up as subject vs. an object as a knower vs. a known as a seer vs. a seen…. the natural line…between the organism and the environment becomes an illusory boundary a fence a separation of that which is really inseparable [this is] Buddhism's spin [which] says that the individual doesn't exist as an independent entity because the individual is the continuity of functioning and has no more existence than the mind attributes to it and Pure Consciousness has by nature no form no substance no color and is not quantifiable and when the wheel of discursive thought ceases there's an awareness a clear state of consciousness usually free of representations and it's no longer a linear pattern of thought but direct knowledge and we know this because when we remain in a clear state of awareness discursive thoughts naturally calm down the process of one thought leading to another in an endless chain so that at this point there's a clear state of consciousness usually free of representations where the mind is perfectly lucid what we might call consciousness without an object where the dichotomy of subject and object no longer exists what the Buddhists call a "stream of consciousness that continues to flow without there being any fixed or autonomous entity running through it" what Wilber calls "unity of consciousness" that placeless place or pathless path without manifestation you remember that one the world of subject and object ("autonomous entities") which is created out of a primary boundary and engenders attachment… and… as we create the severing of the Whole we necessarily feel on the deepest of levels a loss that something inherent to who we are is missing (how sinful) and attachment I have a sense is a compensatory mechanism to restore what was lost and consequently we are always seeking in reified ways restoration of the Whole whether it is a psychological reparation of a disordered self a transformation of derailed developmental strivings within reconstituted intersubjective therapeutic contexts or a rebuilding of compensatory self structures or spiritually outside the realm of language through contemplation to dissolve the boundaries of phenomenal experience "wake up" and understand things in their true nature … and understanding the mental state and the root of disease and the healer within and the healing power of nature and treating the human being as a whole and so as we sever the boundaries of Pure or Unity Consciousness death and birth become separated and one has to be chosen over the other and it is at this point that a consciousness of one's death is spawned and a great battle ensues to combat one's own awareness of non-existence ….
Wonder of the Run-On
Following and comprehending your "single sentance response" is similar to tracing a single silk thread in my tapestry - challenging. What a wonderful distraction you have provided. I shall enjoy seeing where this silk leads me.
Regards,
A Deluded Restless Mind
LOL! I GOT THE RUN-ON FROM MY SON'S POOP PATTERN
my path is that of a bird
as his wings create cincture and gird
as he lifts into sky
i watch with my eye
but i can't fly so i follow his turd
Flight Patterns and Fall Out
Watch out for the droppings - like your usage of language, they can leave a lasting impression :))
Mind/Body - they are me and I am them
I really don’t know how to jump into this discussion, partially because my brain just can’t seem to grasp all the words. For most of my life there has been a profound confusion between emotional states and physical states –and my wondering about where the source of pain or disease begins. In the end, does it matters? How does one look at the symptoms? I am low energy, feeling on the cusp of despair – is it a physiological fatigue, just tiredness in the body or is my mind telling my body to shut down as a way to justify what is going on in my emotional brain?. If I look back over the years: the hospital stays that were the result of panic reaction; stays at home in excruciating pain which turned out to be kidney stones( that a physician thought was in my mind), and my complete inability ( as well as the medical professional’s inability) to discern the difference. When one feels badly, where does one look: to the body, to the soul, or the marriage of the two? It is still a big question for me. I have looked to brain chemistry to explain my despair – been on the drug route, rejected the drug route. I think it helped at the time; knowing that I had something to “take,” may have helped me as much as the chemical itself. I cannot come down on either side – not in any rigid, dogmatic way. I had been through these ups and downs many times before I met my teacher, who simply said, “Don’t be afraid of your emotions.” Your emotions are your friends and your teachers if you allow them to be. Wow! Had I heard this earlier I am sure I would have been kinder to myself and my process. Now, when working with others, listening and attempting to be of service, I have no definitive answers to offer. I live in the not knowing. Sometimes, I think, perhaps a chemical intervention for a brief time will bring someone enough relief to begin the process of looking at the emotional underpinnings. Other times I think it may be a way to look for relief without growth and knowledge. And, even then, does that matter?
I have seen residents at JH in pure agony, complaining of pain – and one staff person or volunteermight rush for the morphine, while someone else discerns that just sitting, sitting and listening,might calm and removes the heat of the pain. To not know what to do, makes doing possible.
These days I am challenged every day. Not in a bad way, but in a way that keep me attentive, keeps me alive. Sometimes I feel frightened and sad and don’t know why – I could attach these feelings to any number of things, but do I need to? They are just feelings – challenges. The residents at Joseph House present me with moods, emotions, questions, and the constant unknown. “What will happen at the end?” one lady asks. Damn if I know. I have to struggle for the right language – not necessarily my metaphors, but hers. “Only God really knows,” I tell her. For God, is her word, her language; and only God can give to people what he thinks he or she can handle. She relaxes with this. Am I lying to her? Am I a fraud? Is it enough that I tell her what she needs to hear to be at peace? But what is it that I believe? What do I take out of the room when I leave?. What does happen at the end? What does the cessation of life as I know it mean? Will I be thinking about loss? Will I grieve? These are the big questions, aren’t they? What is the meaning of my time here? I don’t need to be sitting at death’s open door to wonder. I do this questioning all the time. I do wonder. Then, I just go on living with the unanswerable questions, creating meaning as I go along. That's it, I guess.
The umpire whispers Play
I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and I wanted to share a passage I found particularly splendid.
The protagonist, Hal, relates "a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. . . .
In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I'm in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It's hard to tell. But mainly the court's complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. And it's public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court's periphery, dressed in summer's citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks' flies. High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I'm supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.
The umpire whispers Please Play.
We sort of play. But it's all hypothetical, somehow. Even the 'we' is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game."
How great is that?! What I particularly love about this passage is how well it encapsulates the experience of life in competitive American society--where competition as a pervasive and animating motivation. Hal realizes the silliness of the game, which translates into a "deterioration in performance and rank," both valued quite highly in Hal's artificial tennis academy environment. I think Hal would have benefited from this blog, where much of the luster of competition has been removed.
THROWING THE (MALE) BABY OUT WITH THE BATH WATER
Asher, nice find. As you know Foster committed suicide. There is no doubt in my mind that the underlying dynamic driving competition, namely shame, was key to Foster’s death. Though he was intellectually able to see the absurdity of the competitive mentality, he was a child of competitive culture. I was an athlete as a child and adolescent and know that a very deep competitive spirit drove me. However, it was a spirit that was completely contaminated with shame around, not success, but being happy. My point is that there was a dynamic driving the competitiveness, which had nothing to do with football and baseball, my two sports. What drove me was an unquenchable need to be recognized and feel safe. My isolation was so great that I became afflicted with intense anxiety and later, after my father died when I was 12, depression. It was true that being a part of a team with an intense mission to win felt temporarily comforting. But, the point is that it was temporary, and worse, I was duped into believing that the better I was and more achieved, the happier I would be. This was unequivocally false. Competition was not only a foil, it drove a deeper wedge between my needs and fulfillment of those needs. For most people, tragically, this lasts an entire lifetime because it’s constantly fed by cultural prescriptions and misguided teachings (the “dominant fiction” of conventional reality) that feel like edicts.
As I mentioned in a previous post, which I highly recommend, this competitiveness is primarily the packaging of a masculine ideal, where “the aspiration of male mastery and prideful showmanship to overcome lack” somehow, if achieved, enables us to magically overcome our very own mortality and decay at the hands of impermanence. The anger, rage, and even hatred that drive this vessel of grand illusion are so addictive and compelling from a neurobiological perspective that the core beliefs that buoy deluded thought processes feel intractable to change. No wonder we have historical revolutions and movements, courageously collective attempts to counter these competitive ideologies, which, by the way, pervade all patriarchal power structures, including religion.
Competition, and the violence it fosters, as I said, is peculiarly male. As I said in the aforementioned post, regarding my father:
“My father, as a veteran of war, represents what I would consider an extreme but worthy example of a more insidious and pernicious bastion of social pathology and genocide at the hands of patriarchal power and, ironically, to the psychological and spiritual development of men. Violence has a peculiarly male face, but what is not discussed enough is how one of the victims of that violence is man himself. Ideology and representation have historically and thoroughly eviscerated male subjectivity by perverting its originary vitality. We tend to envy the voice, means, and opportunity of male privilege but rarely take the time to find in its web the tragedy and isolation of its imprisonment.”
What a burden we as men have to correct this great and destructive imbalance. Most of us do not even reach the conflict level of this pathology, its recognition of which will lead to its antidote: intimacy through understanding. We need to begin gaining clarity as to who we are. As I shared (and I think worthwhile to repeat the entire last two paragraphs),
“It was immediately clear to me that my father didn’t feel free, though he thought for a brief moment he was, because an alignment seemed to have taken place at that moment between his theretofore inability to accept his own psychological depth and recognize that he didn’t fit in to the dominant representation of male subjectivity. It was a way for my father to accept his own desire for a more feminine position of “submission” without guilt and to abdicate the sexual aggression that prepared him for killing and war. By “submission” I do not mean passive; rather I suggest the acceptance of power from another person, accompanied by increasing understanding. This is the feminine perspective, in my mind. The Latin of “submit,” submittere, suggests a “letting go” and disavowing the need to control and dominate. To accomplish this we need to dismantle the phallus from the penis. Prior to this “revelation,” my father compulsively repeated the death drive of war through alcoholism, linking the trauma by reducing himself to a psychic nothingness. His innate vulnerability and depth were particularly susceptible to the unbinding effects of hyper-masculine modes of being and the violence (or death drive) they engender. My father couldn’t actually commit suicide because that would have left him off the hook; alcoholism as a form of death in living was the masochist suicidal thread that slowly suffocated him in penal shame and guilt. Guilt for the identity he adopted, shame for his inability to live up to that identity.
My father taught me the tragic costs of embracing the dominant fiction of male subjectivity and I feel grateful to have grown up through the politically driven critiques and practices of feminism and gay rights. And I say this as a heterosexual male for whom the phallus (as symbol of male power) as signifier of desire has been thoroughly critiqued. To undermine sexual difference is not to conflate masculine and feminine forms of sexual expression. It is, however, an integrative function which gives difference more fluidity and perspective. If you arrive at “lack” from a negative dialectic instead of a moral edict, then the “ideological fatigue” of the belief in the dominance of the male subject -- and the associated structures enveloping it, such as, conventional family life – gives way to a higher order of integration, complexity, and organization in the social formation of relationships. Only then can men achieve the fluidity of intimacy with other men (and women) that the feminine so agilely achieves.”
I USED TO BE SEXY; NOW I AM SEXIST
After reading my last post, a friend emailed and called me sexist.I didn't know if she was serious or just provocative, since she knows how much I love being provoked. So, I decided to respond to her pithy statement with an equally pithy response: ? and we began a nice little exchange:
FRIEND: If you are saying that by 'naming' one is perceiving a compound of various factors which comprise an object, feeling, or form comprised of a mixture of the great elements then I will agree with you. But (and there usually is one) when you say, "competitiveness reflects an imbalanced masculine aggressiveness " I take issue. Why does behavior have to be associated with either gender, can't it simply be?" In many third world societies gender roles are opposite to what those of us in the west would consider male or female. Does this mean those societies are more delusional than what may be found in the west? What is the difference between labeling a red flower with thorns a red rose and naming it a red rose. Aren't we splitting hairs?
OM: The main cause of misunderstandings is the failure to understand the definition of terms of an argument. This may be the case here.
FRIEND: If you are saying that by 'naming' one is perceiving a compound of various factors which comprise an object, feeling, or form comprised of a mixture of the great elements then I will agree with you.
That’s very close to what I’m saying. But, the key term here is “nominal.” We name to discern a set of respective propositions for the purpose of understanding what is consensually factual, true, valuable, and useful. Importantly, because reality is relative, what is factual, true, valuable, or useful can change. Now, for the fun part.
What do I mean by masculine and male? And gender? Though the term masculine is traditionally considered to be characteristic of a male, it is clear that those characteristics are largely socially-determined. But, remember, the social historically emerges from biology, and so brain differences between men and women, for example, easily become conflated with socially constructed attributes. When we speak of gender, we are referring to the wide set of characteristics that are “seen to distinguish between male and female entities, extending from one's biological sex to, in humans, one's social role or gender identity.” A gender role, however, is a theoretical construct that refers to “a set of social and behavioral norms that, within a specific culture, are widely considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific gender.” You can see that gender and gender roles have openings for socially constructed prescriptions ("fictions") and it is exactly those fictions that I critique.
This balanced perspective I believe is useful in critiquing gender and gender role arguments, such as, "competitiveness reflects an imbalanced masculine aggressiveness." Why does behavior have to be associated with either gender, can't it simply be?" Because aggression, violence, and destructiveness is historically gendered and rooted in patriarchal power structures, which have been almost exclusively male governed. You say, “In many third world societies gender roles are opposite to what those of us in the west would consider male or female.” This feels like a non-sequitar. How do socially-constructed matriarchal (which are likely more matrilinear) roles in some third-world countries vitiate the horrific imbalance of both eastern and Western male power and the concomitant destruction that power has let loose? If anything, that these more matriarchal cultures exist likely further confirm how this imbalance works.
My point here is that overall male brains are more aggressive and independent and female brains more responsive and communal. This reflects the distinct differences in male and female brains. What is functionally relevant are differences in composition and “wiring” and thus how certain aspects of learning and relationship to the world is coded in brain processes. Does this mean that gender roles are pre-existing and the socially-constructed reality we historically know nothing more than an epiphenomenon of neurobiology? Of course not!
So, I ask again, why can’t patterns of behavior and tendencies be linked to gender if it is clear by the context of the discussion that 1) it is critical that these patterns be critiqued (even and especially as social constructions); and 2) that these patterns are not intractable and only gender specific?
FRIEND: What is the difference between labeling a red flower with thorns a red rose and naming it a red rose. Aren't we splitting hairs?
OM: In a botanical context labeling and naming are synonymous because they represent observable hard data (natural science). However, when we are exploring the human sciences, interpretation is the critical factor for understanding, and so, discerning, for example, between relative (and therefore temporary) conditions and permanent identities allows us to come to see what is ultimately radically relative.