It's Snowing on My Tomatoes!!
Forty years ago, by early May, we would throw on our shorts and tank tops, take our books and Coca-Colas out to the quad and start working on our tans and cramming for finals. As I sit here deciding whether to turn the heat on or not, it's snowing on my six beefsteak tomato plants, eighteen basil plants and assorted other herbs. The parsley will make it; it made it through the entire winter. I did mulch. In Jeneane's world it will never snow on tomato plants.

Last night, I had one of my recurring dreams: I parked my car (white 2001 Subaru outback sedan, loaded) in some parking lot and then couldn't find it. At one point I was walking down to the parking lot after work in very high heels and slouch socks which kept falling down. I saw my reflection in a store window and was embarrassed at how tacky it looked. And then when I got to the huge parking lot, it was dark and I knew that I had to change my shoes so that I could walk around and look for my car. I spent the entire rest of the dream trying to change my shoes. I never did find my car.

I have had frequent dreams about my car ever since I was married and we lived out in the country and only had one car -- which never seemed to be available for me. I used to dream that my husband would pack up the car into a briefcase size and leave with it. Heh.

Elsewhere in cyberspace, Halley Suitt and Chris Locke attempt to exchange brains. Personally, I think the only way it will work is if we do a massive cyber-ritual where we all get online and chant Boy George lyrics.
Ain't nobody's business
How I live my life
I learnt my lesson
Whether it's wrong or right
Ain't nobody baby
Gonna tell me how
I should live my life
Do live my way now

Satisfaction can be hard to find
I go crazy keeping it all inside

Funny. I've never wanted to be Chris Locke. At various times, I've wanted to be Tina Turner or Erica Jong. Today, I like being a blonde, sassy, sexy Crone -- a dancing Coyote Woman (I saw a t-shirt with an image of that and now wish I had bought it) and, mostly, today, I just want it to stop snowing on my tomato plants.

And, personally, if we're going to use technology to create the kind of male mate all of us (well, almost all of us) heterosexual females wish we had, I opt for the cyborg in Marge Piercy's He, She, It. Drool.

The World According to Jeneane

I had a good cry today – the kind of cry that you feel building inside your chest, rising up into your throat, linking the pain in your heart with the hurt in your head (the one that swells just behind your third eye when you try not to cry over what you don’t want to feel).

Jeneane blogged a world that made me cry like that, made feel forgotten yearnings for deep and safe connections. Made me remember how I thought those connections would be there with husband and family, how during the ‘60s we used to fantasize about gathering all of our kindred-spirit friends and seceding our little 1/3 acre of house and trees from the Union. How now my women friends and I sometimes imagine that we might someday find land and build places for ourselves around a central room so that none of us would have to grow old alone. And all of that time in between, trying not to think too much about just how far I had wandered from the kind of world that would give me a safe and connected place and yet not steal my soul.

The world according Jeneane is my dream too:
A real place, a magical place that nurtures the ebb and flow of bloggers, our dreams, a place of potions and remedies, a healing place, a place we could all come, give, take, then go—or maybe never leave.

Go and read Jeneane’s world-dream. And if the cry builds from your heart until it hurts your head and forces out the wet sobs you’ve been holding in for longer than you can remember, then you’re one of us, you have a place in this world too – a place in a magical connected world that not only doesn’t steal your soul -- it gives it space to soar. Welcome to Blogaria.

Hail Halley, Full of Grace
Halley Suitt begs my forgiveness missing my phone calls when I tried to reach her from my daughter’s in Boston. Hell, Halley, I’m disappointed, but not discouraged. We’ll get together yet. And with my forgiveness and AKMA’s blessings (they DID manage to get their families together in New Haven), thou art definitely blessed among women (bloggers).

Believe me, I know the way that six-year-olds have of stimulating an occasional need for a hide-under-the-covers afternoon. Heh. Just imagine what it was like trying to mother a 6-year old b!X.

Now, about your RageBoy wannabe urge. We might have a way………

The Master's Voice
It's more Chris Locke than RageBoy, but it's still THE "voice" that we all know and love speaking the truth of the web. And you can even hear his actual mellow tones as he talks to Tess Vigeland on NPR's Morning Marketplace about the marvels of weblogging. According to Chris, the program's editors cut out a lot of his references to specific webloggers, but what they left in is his right-on take on what's really important about weblogging, and that's what matters most. It's worth the listen.

Vote for zefrank
When I first started blogging I stumbled on www.zefrank.com and spent a whole evening giggling and popping from one page of his to another. It's a virtual playground. His sections on "Annie" still make me laugh, and if you're a cat lover, be sure to check them out. And then go and vote for him in the webby awards. The instructions on how to do so are on the first page of his site.

The Vagina Knows It’s Beautiful

Do I have your attention? Today is “Turn Beauty Inside Out Day.”

As I drove out yesterday to visit my pregnant daughter in Boston, I listened, on NPR, to a presentation by Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues. You can access the whole presentation, either to read or listen to. She’s worth listening to.

Meanwhile, think about some of these things that she said:

I often hear women in the West talking about the terrible lot of women in Afghanistan, but are you aware that 700,000 women in America are raped every year? We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it. Whether it's an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to look like - so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and bulemia to achieve it - or whether it's being covered in a burqa, we all have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression. If you're a 13-year-old girl in this country and there's an ideal of what you're supposed to look like, do you really have a choice to look like yourself? The pressure of capitalist consumer culture is more than any 13-year-old girl can bear.

The interviewer for a New York Times Magazine piece kept saying to me, "You're so dramatic." I finally realized what that means: You're really alive. Things really bother you. Things really move you and excite you. Look at teenage girls. They get crazy, excited, pissed off, and they do it all the time. Then the world comes along and shuts it down and clamps it and punishes it, makes it immoral or too sexy. Then we get to be good, contained, quiet, behaved, then disappear.

We have been trained as women to divide against each other, to fight for each other's space, to not believe there's enough for each other.

If you're jealous of your sister, if you think she's shinier, bigger or more fabulous than you, get over it. If you can do anything for a sister today, if you have a moment of jealousy or competition, give her something. If I feel competitive, I just give it away: Have it, take it. Otherwise, I'm saying there's only room for me to shine and not for you to shine - and we all have to shine right now. Remember that Afghanistan is everywhere and that all of us get to be big, so that we can take back the planet.

I don't think women should spend their time recovering and surviving. We have better things to do, like feeding the planet, nurturing, creating, envisioning. If we bang, beat, burn, mutilate and destroy women, we've destroyed everything. If we really put our attention on stopping violence toward women, it would be like bringing back the sun or earth. It's not coincidental that the earth is being destroyed as women are being destroyed.

Know and love thy vagina, and hold it sacred. Do not give it to anyone you do not want to give it to. I mean that as a metaphor. So much of what happens to girls is that we don't know our desires and bodies. We don't know what we want, so we enter the world in a haze. I love college students: They have cunt clubs and big vagina parades and balls, and they have speak-outs. They wear vagina pins. They're outrageous and they're fully here. I look at them and think, What happened to all of us? When did we lose this? Be as revolutionary and passionate as you are, and don't let anyone talk you out of it.

One of the last things Eve Ensler says is this:

In the process of doing "The Vagina Monologues" I have met so many tender, seeking, loving men who really want the world to be better for women and men. We have to allow them to find ways to embrace their own vulnerability and tenderness. We have to stop shaming them for not being these superheroes and power creatures that they're supposed to be.

My soon-to-be grandson has one of these exceptional men as his father. Somehow my son-in-law manages to be a “regular guy” who is tender and sweet and easy and beautiful inside. (And he’s cute, too.)

I spent the past day with my beautiful and pregnant daughter. I held my hand on her belly and felt my grandson respond to my touch. I looked at my daughter, no make-up, hair up in a straggly ponytail, sweat pants hanging below her incredible roundness, glasses sliding down her nose -- and my heart hurt from the beauty of it all -- and her spirit, her heart, her humor. Sprawled across the couch in gestating disarray, she looked more stunningly lovely than she ever has even during her years of modeling and acting and glamorous headshots (which, by the way, cost me a fortune!) And when my son-in-law came home at looked at her, put his hand on her belly, well, it still makes me want to cry from the sweet, sweet beauty of it all.

*********
And that brings me to Chris Locke’s most recent Topica essay, in which he admits “God I do love women” and goes on to yearn for that as yet unmet “partner-in-crime” who will “cover his back,” knows how to be tough as well as tender, knows how to be his best friend.

She says, "You got that certain something..."

"What you give me," I say, "takes my breath away."

I check her eyes to see if she's lying. Gypsy woman. Girl that can tell my fortune, read my future.

Locke’s yearning narrative is seductive because it is what we all yearn for – someone to watch our backs; playfully go toe-to-toe with us; stand with us and by us and for us -- protect us and accept our protection – a partner, a best friend who shares our passions and understands our prisons. The key to our locks. The keys to Locke.

Cast the sticks, pick a card, read the runes, toss a coin. It’s such a crapshoot, isn’t it?

But if you win, it’s absolutely beautiful, inside and out.

The Blessings of Rain
It's pouring in Albany, NY today and it will rain for the next couple of days. Great for my garden. Not great for my trip to the Boston area tomorrow for an overnight to visit my 7-month pregnant daughter, probably for the last time before the big event. While I'm there, I'm going to call Halley Suitt, although I probably won't have time to see her in person. I also talked to Jeneane on the phone a little while ago. There is something special about the company of special women, even if it's virtual.

Which leads me to bring up a very interesting article I stumbled onto last week that I'm trying to wade through because, while pretty dense, has some exceptionally interesting things to suggest about the way women blend their virtual and real lives. I'd love to have some others read it and give me their opinions. In addition to including some good related links, Feminist Cybermaterialism: Gender and the Body in Cyberspace offers some fascinating theories, such as:

.... we have the feminist analysis of cyberspace which very clearly takes the point of view that the male in cyberspace is attempting to transcend the body whereas the female or the feminine is attempting to use the technology to bring the body into cyberspace and cyberspace to the body.

and the idea that cyberspace is liminal space -- a place that is neither here nor there -- and

...people in liminal space have no responsibilities; they are beholden to no one. They are completely outside of society. But what happens is that, when they come back, they have a renewed appreciation for the order of the society in which they live.

All of this is relevant to the conversation going on in the Comments on Shelley Power's blog.

Hooooo Hoooooo
Stay tuned for the “Mothers Day 2000” report from OWL (Older Women’s League), which will soon have, online, its analysis of how Bush’s hopes to privatize Social Security will devastate the financial stability of older women. From the OWL site:

Social Security Privatization and Women
As OWL members know, women are the face of Social Security, comprising 60 percent of beneficiaries over 65 and 72 percent of recipients over 85. Women depend on Social Security's guaranteed, lifetime benefits: 27 percent of women over 65 rely on Social Security for 90 percent of their retirement income. A comprehensive discussion of Social Security and its future cannot be had without women's realities, perspectives, and needs being made perfectly clear. OWL's 2002 Mother's Day report will prove instrumental in this discussion.

For those of you not versed in feminist mythology, the owl is associated with Lilith, the first “uppity woman,” whose identity merges with that of the Crone.

Blueprint for Children

Tonight, David Letterman begins his monologue with “Tomorrow is Mother’s Day – that’s the day we honor the person who we blame for all of our personal problems.”

I was one of those kids who felt as though she must be a changeling or else adopted. My dreams were never my mother’s dreams. My “otherness” confused her, angered her, frustrated her, disappointed her, made her cry. My mother seemed to see me as an appendage of hers; she couldn’t understand my independent will, my need to separate myself from my family’s strong conservative attitudes.

I couldn’t wait to go away to college, but as glad as I was to leave home, I still wished that my mother would somehow come to understand me and accept me for who I was. And so, my freshman year, I sent her a copy of Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet for Mother’s Day.

And on the book’s flyleaf, before my signature preceded by “Love,…” I copied the following from the section On Children:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Since my mother has always been a committed Catholic, I figured that Gibran’s language style and references to a capital He might make the passage have the ring of “sacred truth” for her. It didn’t work.

It didn’t work for her, but it worked for me and the way I have tried to view my own children.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

Today CNN reported that A U.N. summit approved a new blueprint late Friday to improve the world for children in the next 15 years. The agreement came after contentious negotiations between the United States and other nations on sex education, abortion and the death penalty.

Succumbing to conservative pressure, the United States stood in opposition to the180 nations that adopted – by consensus and with a round of applause -- the final summit document, "A World Fit For Children." However, at the insistence of the United States, the intent of the original document regarding "health and reproductive services" was diluted to skirt the issue of abortion counseling, and, in addition, the United States is excluded from a requirement barring the death penalty or life imprisonment for those under the age of 18.

"A World Fit for Children" – except if they live in the United States, where an adult minority of small minds and stagnant souls refuse to acknowledge that life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

A Basil Reader

I planted my garden today. That’s the grave-sized garden that we who live in this hotel-sized, up-scale senior warehouse are allotted if we sign up before they’re all taken. (The only reason I I live here because I take care of my 86-year old mother, who lives across the hall from me. I try not to dwell on where I dwell.)

I planted my garden today, and that means that now I have an excuse to dig in dirt, sweat in sun, smell growing things -- parsley, that, having weathered the winter, already has claimed its place at the center of things – new lavender buds poking through old growth – melissa (lemon balm) that I plant in honor of my daughter – the usual rosemary, sage, and thyme – and most of all basil. Lots of basil. Basil for pesto. Basil for tomato sauces. Basil for cold chicken and pasta salad. Basil for herbed vinegar. Mostly basil. And tomatoes. Beef steak tomatoes to eat with the basil, fresh mozzarella, and olive oil.

I planted my garden today. It’s mostly basil. According to a website called Horsetail Heaven, In Italy, a pot of basil placed on a balcony signaled that a woman was ready to receive suitors…. In India holy basil is considered a sacred herb and at one time was used to protect the dead from evil. It is still found growing around temples ….Early Greeks and Romans believed that a good basil crop would only develop if the gardener shouted and cursed while sowing the seeds.

I neither sowed nor cursed; I went to the local greenhouse and bought a dozen basil plants. And six beefsteak tomato plants. That pretty much takes up most of a grave-sized garden.

Except for Pan (and a pink calla lily bulb that a friend of mine gave me). An infant Pan has reigned over my basil-laden herb gardens for the past five years, which seems appropriate, given his connections to the Mediterranean region from which basil mythology springs. Each year, I plant him to watch over my grave-sized garden. Perhaps, one day, someone will think to plant him on my garden-sized grave. Along with basil. Lots of basil. And maybe a pink calla lily.

Gonzo for the public sector?
Based on my experiences working with "public information and outreach" for a government education bureaucracy, I've been doing lot of thinking about how very appropriate Cluetrain's philosophy and the Gonzo Marketing approach is to the public sector. Does anyone one know if there's been any thought in that direction?

Macromedia sticks a toe in the Gonzo Marketing sea.

Well, they at least them seem to be trying to get the first part of what Chris Locke has been saying to businesses in Gonzo Marketing. An interview with Locke in the current online issue of The Guardian (which the Bombast guy calls the “best article on my checkered career to date") includes the following quote from Locke that pretty much sums up that first part.

What I'm telling them is: drop this invasive, intrusive advertising - it's not going to work any more - and build relationships around shared interests, and that will create good will towards your company. Instead of turning people off, you can turn them on by hooking them up and getting out of the way. And if this works, I see trillions of dollars shifting towards a bottom-up artistic web renaissance. What could come out of that is a cultural flowering that we can't imagine, just as the middle ages couldn't imagine the Renaissance. I don't think that's a whacked-out vision.

According to wired.com, Macromedia (the company that makes Flash and Shockwave) is going to use weblogs to provide a forum for the managers to discuss the new products, show developers how to use some of the new features and answer questions. Most importantly, the community managers would write like bloggers, with that casual, this-great-idea-just-occurred-to-me tone which sometimes makes weblogs so addictive…… Macromedia asks only that its bloggers keep their postings relevant -- no blogging about what they ate for breakfast, in other words. They're free to discuss any aspect of the software…

I think that it remains to be seen whether Macromedia will be successful in getting to the next level that Locke insists is of utmost importance – keeping the “voice” free. As reviewed online in Tom’s New Commonplace Book, On one level, Gonzo is a mythic tale of the reallocation of voice. The power to speak that the giants of mass marketing and mass media tore from us – the rape of voice – is envisioned restored to the multifarious intelligences of the Net.

One can’t help waiting to see just how much freedom Macromedia will allow its blog voices.

Tin Men and Fallen Angels
There are certain men that capture my attention and interest almost immediately. My women friends tell me that, from their perspective, it is the “arrogance” of these men that attracts me. And, for sure, on the surface, there is the appearance of arrogance. But is it only appearance.

Tin Men and Fallen Angels
She is drawn to the dramas
of Tin Men and Fallen Angels,
the loose threads of their dreams
tangling too easily
with the thickets of her own.

Their gestures hint at faded grace.
Their eyes belie the freedom of their stride.
Their touches fire the sun,
birthing shadows fierce as flame.

She flies into those shadows
like a bat
out for blood.

And so she cannot turn her hand
from the sweep of sky
that sheds his battered wings,
cannot hide from his shadow,
so dense it masks her senses,
stretches the edges of scars,
stirs her skin open
to the haunting lure
of a lone tin man,
a feckless
fallen
angel.

During the twenty-something years after my divorce, I managed to get entangled with two such men. I’ve lost track of one of them, although I believe he still spends the summers in the cabin that he remodeled into an elegant A-frame. He is the one who gave me the antlers. He is the one with whom I once spent April in Paris. We went dancing in a ballroom on the Champs Elysees after a day of window shopping among all of the best designers. Rode up the Eiffel Tower late at night, lost in the lights of the city, in the drama of the journey.

The other I keep track of on the web. He’s an ex-priest and astounding artist. He finally married the ex-nun who continued to love him through all of his various adventures, one of which was me. I run into them every once in a while. She looks at me coldly. But he and I still smile at the strange, short, and passionate time we spent together. I stirred his interest in non-Christian mythology, some of which he began to incorporate into his paintings. He paints big – I mean BIG. Canvases that cover walls. At least he used to. He lives big, open. At least he did. I don’t know how he lives now, and I haven’t been to one of his exhibits in a while. I only know how he still paints. And how he stirred my soul.

Pan Makes a Personal Appearance
To think it was you I summoned!
All those incantations,
those spells dispatched
to shift the stars,
returned as this immortal face,
this ancient tale.

To think the gods still answer prayers!
Make bright, deft-handed landings
right before my eyes,
fall haloed and goat-footed
deep into my mark,
breathing mischief and mayhem,
and bold, bewildering dreams.

Angel, satyr, shepherd,
your music stirs the skin.
Play your syrinx
now for me, my kin.

We will dance, dance,
to your tune.

Reading Chris Locke’s/Rage Boy’s Bombast Transcripts brought me eye to word with someone whose persona, at least, seems to define him as one of those men who, indeed, are so open to, in love with, entranced by, plagued by life, the world, people, contradictions, possibilities, ……..that their passion and energy pull like a magnet, make us want to know more about what’s under the next layer, and the next, and the next…..

On the oldies radio station I have on, Don McClean is singing “Vincent.” Poets and artists dancers and ranters. Tin Men and Fallen Angels. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without ‘em.

(poetry copyrighted by Elaine Frankonis)

I’ll trade you a Foucault for two Erving Goffmans
The pop culturization of the international egghead class has begun. So begins an article in my local paper about (according to the site) free downloadable trading cards depicting theorists and concepts close to the hearts of people interested in social and cultural theory, gender and identity, and media studies.

Of course, I immediately thought of AKMA, Steve Himmer, and Mike Sanders, especially since Card # 5 is the “Postmodernity Card.” And, of course, there’s always Card #3, the “Michael Foucault” card. My favorites, of course, are # 11, the "bell hooks” card, and #22, the "plastic.com" card, which includes – RageBoy take note – the word “fucknozzels!”

They’re looking for more cards, which you can design and send to them, using a format described on the site. Do you hear that, Gary Turner, creator of "blogstickers?" Oh, and “cards about people who are not old white men are encouraged!”

Oh Yeah!
I love this quote, lifted from the site of the Heartless Bitches:

Here's the thing: If you ever get me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me." -- Maxine (in "Being John Malkovich")

Depth Charges
On Blogsisters, Jeneane Sessum posts about Helene Cixous, whose urgings and urges find their visceral marks in the writings of such as Chris Locke, Mike Golby, and Jeneane herself -- bloggers who careen headlong down those brambled, precipice-riddled paths of memory and desire, prodding our pulses with their raw prose and challenging our own emotional inhibitions with their soul-full honesty. What they mean is what they say. Unlike my word trips that have always tended to slide along within the protective cover of metaphor.

Take Spring, which always seems to put me in a funk; it always overwhelms me with its sweetness, its promise, its newness, its hope. Yet, despite the prolific stirrings of nature, I have never felt any kind of passion generated by that season. It offers me heavy pregnancy but not heady passion.

Waiting for the Fall
I was never one to yearn for spring,
the sky too full of eager wings,
the air a burden of song.
Even the ground swells, straining
under a yoke of seeds.

I wake with the winds of autumn,
when a cold sun
fades the trees to clarity,
when the line of the sky
cuts clean and sharp
above the leveled land,
when the earth is a slate
set for the poet’s chalk.

Leave me in spring
to wait for the season’s passing,
and look for me then,
when I turn with the leaves
and hold my mouth
to a hungry sky.

Maybe it’s that Spring is mating season, and, not having a mate at the moment, I’m out of synch with the season. Rather than feel fertile and rooted, I feel separate, untethered. There’s something major missing, something just beyond my grasp, something unspoken, some fundamental secret just beyond my ken.

The Hunter
On the rise beyond the stream
on Trout Mountain,
they say, he shot himself—
a still-young man
despaired of a world
too full of fear.

On the west wall of his cabin,
hang the antlers he tore
from some stalked fair game,
banging the nails bent
through thick bone,
clumsily shattered skull.

In the shifting summer light,
their shadows writhe
in fearsome memory.

(They say he loved the land,
the hunt, the kill.)

Some think the land is haunted, now.
They say they can feel the fear
in the heavy mountain mist,
hear it in the hollow scrape
of bone on stone.

(They say what he feared
he loved too much.)

When land was finally sold
(to someone starkly purged
of love and fear)
the new owner found a photo
face-down on a dusty shelf –
a stiff-faced young man
in an unforgiving setting,
sternly victorious over
his finally fearless prey.

And so I ask for the antlers,
chipped and weathered, now --
artifacts made unworthy
of either fear or love.

Is the answer hidden somewhere
in the pits of those old bones?
If I scrub them clean, soften the scars,
set them like icons on an altar
ringed with strings of stones,
will I dream one night
of some daring beast
who lifts me gently
on his gleaming horns
and tells me
the unspeakable secret?

Speaking of "Deep Throat"
According to the SF Gate,
John Dean, the White House counsel whose revelations about the Nixon presidency were the first flames in the volcano of Watergate scandal, is about to turn up the heat again by revealing the identity of Deep Throat. .....At an L.A. Times book festival discussion of "Abuse of Power, Then & Now" -- including panelists Oliver Stone and Arianna Huffington, moderated by Chronicle Columnist Bob Scheer -- Dean said "The Deep Throat Brief" will be published online by Salon.com on June 17

Nixon and Watergate: now there's a scenario that's really obscene.

Go Transgenics!
In the Dark Angel's season finale tonight, Joshua, the artist/transgenic who looks an awful lot like the "beast" in the old "Beauty and the Beast" TV series of several years ago, paints a red, white, and blue flag with a white dove that I wish would be published online as an image that could be copied. I'd love to have it in my site. They should promote it as a symbol around which all anti-violence "outsiders" could rally.

Hee Hee!
I just have to share this Comment that "Uncle Sam"left on my blog about Linda Lovelace's death .

You should be ashamed of yourself for likin pornography.
This is is the type of material that weaknes us so that the Muslims can take over.
-Uncle Sam

Now, what am I supposed to make of that? No email address; two misspellings in the two-line Comment; no "voice" and no Comment feature on his/her own site. I guess he/she is either (1) a terrorist posing as an American in order to undermine our democratic right to free speech, (2) a complete illiterate idiot and an embarrassment to the American educational system, or (3) someone trying, unsuccessfully, to demonstrate a sense of humor. No wonder he/she chooses to hide behind anonymity.

And just to make it perfectly clear, I never said that I liked pornography.

Even if it's not real, it's still true.
b!X emailed me the following, attributing it to Nazi monster Hermann Goering. I don't know if Goering ever really said it, but even if he didn't, he could have, and it's still true:

Why of course the people don't want war! Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Almost Famous
Thanks to my blogfriend Anita Bora, who writes for rediff.com, Blog Sisters and Kalilily Time got some play in that online magazine this month. The article also links to Mike Golby, Gary Turner, Anita (of course), and b!X.

It always amazes and delights me how these loosely joined pieces keep constantly reconfiguring and reconnecting. The feature article, written by Nidhi Taparia Rathi, profiles the online experiences of three "older generation" netizens, including me. How cool is that!

Inside Out and Upside Down
While Blogsisters readies its first ever monthly Burning Issues soapbox (Turn Beauty Inside Out), b!X finally gets around to finding something he thinks is worth posting, and it’s a glimpse into an alternate universe, where the assumptions of the corporation's mission are inverted. His post explains that the manner in which we have structured the entities known as "corporations" is not some sort of inherent natural law, but one we have deliberately created. And it is one that is in no sense the only way in which a free market "corporation" can be constructed.

The “inverted” version, as he quotes from The Divine Right of Capital , certainly gives one pause.

Brave Hearts
Shelley Powers, Tom Shurgart, and stavrosthewonderchicken all have beat me to making this post acknowledging the uncanny talent that both RageBoy and Mike Golby have for peeling back their skin and letting you not only see, but feel what they're made of.

Chris Locke/RageBoy is a pioneer in publicly and purposefully dissolving the boundaries between his passions and the hearts of his readers:
For better or worse, I said, I am trying to live my life in public. Online. We've never had any channel for this. No models. And the models we need are not "model" lives but real ones. Uncertain and afraid, crippled, broken. Trying to make sense of our minds and our hearts and the world we encounter out here. Telling each other what it's like to be human. Making what we can with all we've got. Not shitting ourselves and each other with facile platitudes, easy formulas, empty slogans. A human life for all to see, for what it's worth. It may not be worth much, but that's what I'm doing here. Not a model life, but writing that shakes and shivers and burns and speaks for whatever life we have.

I have just finished reading both the Cluetrain Manifesto and Bombast Transcripts , which I promised Chris I would. Soon I will post my reactions to those texts, as I promised Chris I would.

Just Curious.
Who is Samuel Mcauley and why is he leaving very brief compliments in my Comments without indicating contact information?

I like tracking down people I don't know who leave comments because they usually have compelling blogs of their own. So, who are you and where are you hiding?

Lapham hits the mark, as usual
Jason of museunlimited pointed me to an article by Lewis Lapham in this month's Harper's which analyzes Ashcroft's and Bush's crusade mentality. There are two quotes from that article that particular grabbed me:

I happened to read "The Psychology of War," a study of the ways in which human beings adjust their interpretations of reality in order to recognize the mass murder of other human beings as glorious adventure and noble enterprise. First published in 1992 but fortunately brought back into print this year by the Helios Press, the book, written by Lawrence LeShan, draws a distinction between the sensory and the mythic perceptions of war. Let war become too much of a felt experience, as close at hand as the putrid smell of rotting flesh or the presence of a newly headless corpse seated in a nearby chair, and most people tend to forget to sing partiotic songs.

and

Because the civilian population finds itself drafted into service as the target of opportunity for terrorists armed with asymmetric waeapons, we're being asked to believe that we're opposed by Morgoth and the Corsairs of Umbar rather than by an incoherent diaspora of desperate human beings, most of them illiterate and many of them children, reduced to expressing their resentment in the impoverished vocabularies of violence. Best not to see our enemies as they are; better to go quietly into the caves of myth thoughtfully prepared by our news media and our schools, there to find, praise be to Allah, our comfort, our salvation, and our glory.

See also Jasons post on the Politics of Fear.

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers....
from Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a concsious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from montsers. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss people, will know us too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can't name it. When that happens, you have me one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers...they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind.

Anne Siddons is someone I read during those lazy summer days when I don't want to think too hard; I just want to be entertained. But the above quote is something that must have caught in my thoughts one summer because I found it typed up and lost among my many drafts of many poems. I like the notion of "abyss-walkers." It kind of goes along with my view of myself as a "rim-walker" -- definitely NOT one of the "solid golden half."

A Sense of Scent
This afternoon, I walked over to check on my grave-sized garden. The parsley patch I planted last year was already up and dancing in the wind. In the corner, small green sprouts of new lavender peered through layers of winter-grayed spikes. I held one of the new lavender leaves up to my nose. I love the smell of lavender, only in part because one of the great romantic adventurers of my life loved it too. The scent lingering in my memory prompted me to unearth this poem I wrote in the early 90s.

The Sense of Scent

She thought she was done with him,
but one night the moon rose
clear and full-faced,
and an early autumn wind
swept the scent of lavender
through her open window.

Some times are harder than others
to sit silent,
hands clenched against
the lure of the pen,
mouth set against
the call of the phone,
thinking to oneself
that some things are better
left to silence,
to the slow decay of time,
the turning of moons
and lavender seasons.

But even in the darkest of corners
some things refuse to die –
some small husk still
riddled with seeds,
some insistent root
defying the dust,
some dormant dream
of a riotous clash of hearts,
curious clutch of minds,
a dance of hands that
hope and hold and, too soon,
let go.

She thought she was done with him,
except his voice
still pulls at her belly
like the insistent tides of the moon.
So when he calls
from places lush
with a thousand thriving things,
she sends him dewy lavender
wrapped in familiar black lace,
because, they say,
the sense of smell
is the most visceral,
holding even the darkening
memory of the dying.

Sigh. Spring.

What is happening to our children?
We give them birth, and most of us look forward to all that comes after. We do our best to teach their minds, touch their hearts, heal their bodies, guide their souls, keep their eyes clear and their butts clean. We frustrate them, we limit them, sometimes we embarrass them, but we always love them. Most of all, we love them. At least most of us most of all love them.

And yet we might never really know them -- especially the ones who one day walk out of a rest room dressed in black and coldly eliminate themselves as well as those who are not their enemies; the ones who one day walk into a crowded market and boldly explode themselves and those who are not their enemies; the ones who eliminate their bothersome sibling and bury him along with their dreams.

What happens to them between us and the rest of the world? What happens to how much we love them? What happens to how much they love? What is happening to our children? What is happening to us?

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." --Carl Sagan
This was a quote nestled among the blog posts of a lively and creative student, whose site is worth checking out.

I got fixated on the quote because of a link that b!X emailed me that offers a theory, based on information that the genome project has shared, about human ancestry.

The site begins with the following statement:
In whose image was The Adam – the prototype of modern humans, Homo sapiens – created? The Bible asserts that the Elohim said: “Let us fashion the Adam in our image and after our likeness.” But if one is to accept a tentative explanation for enigmatic genes that humans possess, offered when the deciphering of the human genome was announced in mid-February, the feat was decided upon by a group of bacteria!

The site goes on to explain, in somewhat scientific detail, the composition of human DNA, beginning with this statement:
Moreover, there was hardly any uniqueness to the human genes. They are comparative to not the presumed 95 percent but to almost 99 percent of the chimpanzees, and 70 percent of the mouse. Human genes, with the same functions, were found to be identical to genes of other vertebrates, as well as invertebrates, plants, fungi, even yeast. The findings not only confirmed that there was one source of DNA for all life on Earth, but also enabled the scientists to trace the evolutionary process – how more complex organisms evolved, genetically, from simpler ones, adopting at each stage the genes of a lower life form to create a more complex higher life form – culminating with Homo sapiens.

It was here, in tracing the vertical evolutionary record contained in the human and the other analyzed genomes, that the scientists ran into an enigma. The “head-scratching discovery by the public consortium,” as Science termed it, was that the human genome contains 223 genes that do not have the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree.

How did Man acquire such a bunch of enigmatic genes?

The site offers the same answer that many others have regarding "ancient astronauts." I find it as believable an explanation as any put forth by more traditional spiritualities.

Can we move from "feminism" to "humanism?"
Halley Suitt has several blog posts that cite various books and other blog posts about the struggle women still have achieving careers success on an equal basis with men -- a definition of "equal basis" that includes the sharing of family responsibilities. She hopes we are moving into a new era of "humanism" in contrast to "feminism."

I hope that she's right, although it was the feminst movement that gave women like me the personal confidence to go out and make our way in the "man's" world of work. Oddly enough, however, both the best boss and the worst boss I have ever had were both women. And, while "feminism" had nothing to do with their management styles, I must say that "humanism" did.

However, mine is a feminist success story. I was a teenager in the 50s, rebelled against those values in college, and married someone who seemed to accept me as an equal. That is, until I got pregnant immediately; then I was expected to become the wife/mother/homemaker. He made it impossible for me to pursue a career, but after we divorced, I had no problem doing that successfully and raising my kids myself as well. I have found that, in my generation, husbands often made it very difficult for their wives to have a careers while raising children. The husband expected that he would work outside the home; but if the woman did so, she was also expected to do the work inside the home as well. No wonder we succumbed to either anger or depression, and no wonder so many of us embraced the feminist movement.

It's much different for my pregnant 30-something daughter, whose husband has shared homemaking with her from the very beginning of their relationship.. He also intends to share the child care. While they haven't yet worked out how they will share the bread-winning, he is open to doing whatever will work best for the family -- from one of them staying home with the child, to their each working part-time, to one of them working full time and the other part time. That kind of equality of responsibility was rare in my generation. Perhaps many of us "feminist" women who struggled so hard have it all and realized that we couldn't, have raised sons who are aware that having it all means sharing it all.

Creating workplaces that are flexible enough to accommodate this more humanistic family unit, however, is another story. My last job (with the best boss) allowed for a great deal of flexibility for both men and women who had childen, including telecommuting, bringing kids into the office, taking emergency time off etc. etc. And she wound up with an incredibly loyal and productive staff as a result. So it can be done. But I wonder how likely it is to be done by many male managers/bosses.

Linda Lovelace died yesterday.
She died in a car accident. But that's not my point. Linda Lovelace's most famous and most degrading movie, Deep Throatwas the first porno movie I ever saw. It was on a double bill with The Devil in Miss Jones in the only movie theater in Gloucester, Maine.

One summer weekend in the mid-seventies, a female elementary school teacher friend of mine and I left our husbands with our kids and took off for a weekend on our own. We wound up in Cape Anne, Massachusetts, where we did some sightseeing, including discovering that Harry Chapin's song about "Dogtown" was based on real and really weird stuff. On our first night there we were so tired that we crashed after dinner (and wine, of course) and then set out the next day for Gloucester. Well, what can two married women do in the evening after dinner in a town where they don't know anyone? Heh. Go to the movies, of course. We had a choice of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or a double porno bill. Neither one of us had ever seen a porno movie, and no one in town knew who we were. It was a chance we couldn't pass up.

Years after, Linda Lovelace revealed the horrors that she endured as her (then) husband proceeded to get her hooked on drugs and caught in a spiral of prostitution and personal brutality. That was the reality. But for two young naive married women off on a weekend away from their every day real worlds, the fantasy was too intriguing to pass up.

It is important to know the difference between fantasy and reality.

Today
Today, I sat in my dentist’s chair for a couple of hours while he “fit me in” to make an adjustment on a bridge. But that’s not my point. My point is that all of the chairs in his rooms face a perennial garden that includes a birdbath and eight bird feeders. The large trees behind the garden are hosts to various birdhouses. So, while you sit there waiting and waiting, you can watch a colorful wildlife pageant, and you can even do so through a pair of binoculars that you find on the windowsill, along with a bird watching book.

Having grown up in a large city, I have always thought that all pigeons are gray and dirty. Today, I discovered that some have the most stunning iridescent green and purple markings, and their pewter hued feathers actually shine in sunlight. As the pigeons came and went on some sort of agreed-upon schedule, blue jays darted among the branches, and an elegant male cardinal shared the platform of a feeder with a insatiable squirrel, while a lone chipmunk and another squirrel danced around each other and the birdseed falling below. I identified a nuthatch and a downy woodpecker, and just as I was sure that the chubby robin -- who seemed to be watching me watching him -- was going to hop up and tap on the glass, I had to turn my attention to the reason why I was sitting in that chair in the first place. The bridge still isn’t right, and it’s going to take several visits, I’m sure, to fix it to my satisfaction. In the meanwhile, the garden will grow lush, and I will learn more about birds and the peaceful coexistence of the various species that mingle and mix in my thoughtful dentist’s perennial garden.

Today, the news on my local TV station reported on a local twenty-something father who shook his 2 month old daughter to death; a local thirty-something mother who purposely drowned her 4-year-old son and wanted to drown her 5-year old but he got away; and a track coach at a local high school accused of having sex with a 16 year old male student (who might not be the only kid he sodomized). And that’s just within a 30 mile radius of where I live.

We humans are supposed to be the most intelligent species on this planet. I guess intelligence has nothing to do with compassion, empathy, consideration, or love. And, looking at what’s going on in the Middle East, it certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with respect, tolerance, cooperation, and patience either. We could learn a lot from observing life in my dentist’s perennial garden.

How to learn from the past and then let it go.
I don't have the answer to that. If I did, maybe I could get my mother to stop dwelling on all the injustices that have been done to her, personally, and to her Polish ancestry, generally, so that she might find a way to make something more positive of her own present life. She is wasting what time she has left letting her past control the way she sees her present -- which she winds up often mis-perceiving as being full of continuing personal affronts as well. I see that same pattern in certain other peoples who use past injustices as an excuse to continue feeling victimized. Sometimes the past has to be let go, or else we just continue to set up self-fulfilling destructive situations.

Drawing Lines in the Sand
There's a lot of drawing lines in the sand these days. Lines between war and peace, between intellectual and emotional, between head and heart, between ally and enemy. Add "blogger" to the end of every one of those words and the lines are apt to get razor sharp. I ponder why we draw these lines. Why do we need to carve out the borders of our territories so clearly? Nations do it and it leads to war. Religions do it and it leads to intolerance. I do it, too. I draw a line around myself and say "I am a peaceblogger or I am a female chavinsit or I am a irreverent non-believer." But, in truth,I do not mean these lines to separate me completely from those on the other side of the line; rather they are meant to define the place/s in which I prefer to stand -- the places where I take a stand and affirm and aver and assert, sometimes pretty loudly.

I prefer reading weblogs that reflect how the personal relates to larger issues (or the other way around), that focus more on feelings than facts. But I also read the more intellectual, personally detached blogs because they often trigger feelings in me that I then take back to my own site to explore. While I am rooted in Self, I am still fascinated by all of the Others. That's the dilemma: there will always be Self and Others. How do you keep the line you draw strong without having to build a barricade between yourself and your neighbors so that they don't trample it. it's a dilemma.

The Earth Quakes on Earth Day
Somewhere around 7 a.m. this morning, my cat began meowing inconsolably. And then my dresser mirror began rattling for no apparent reason. No, not ghosts, but rather an earthquake at more than 5 on the Richter Scale, centered way upstate but felt here in Albany, all of these hundreds of miles away. I heard from my daughter outside of Boston that they could feel it there as well. An earthquake on Earth Day, and I have 111 unread messages in my main in-box and 1 unread in a sub-mail box. That's 1111. Yesterday, as I walked into my bedroom the digital clock read 11:11. (Here we go again.) What next?

Nithia
Nithia is a relatively new blogger from South Africa. Nithia writes with savvy voice, graceful style, and strong soul. Nithia 's piece on growing up as a victim of Apartheid is worth leaving my blog and linking here right now. And after you read that, read a little more of Nithia's posts and then be sure to link to The Onion piece about a new Microsoft patent.

The Chthonic Challenge
While I was quoting to death Camille’s obsession with the chthonic, Tom Shugart was considering Jeneane’s challenge to blog “Not the outside stuff. The *inside* stuff” -- to write from the depths of the heart, from the chthonian netherworld of our deepest fears, angers, hurts -- and not just from the heights of the head.

I couldn’t help notice that when Tom mentions some of the bloggers who, he thinks, do write from that messy and fertile place, the names he offers are all female. Which brings me back to Camille Paglia’s assertion that it is the “female” that embodies the chthonian in our human natures. That disturbing, emotional, chaotic stuff makes many men uncomfortable (RageBoy notwithstanding.) So most men continue to blog from an emotionally protected distance.

So, Tom takes a step closer to accepting Jeneane’s challenge and looks at an emptiness he feels, despite a full and loving life. He admits: And yet….. there's a big hole somewhere in the middle of me.

I believe that that’s the “hole” into which the Shaman willingly strides, the rabbit hole into which Alice falls; that is the messy chthonian chaos of our unconscious that, if we traverse and survive, we come out much wiser for the journey.

I found this poem on an aptly entitled site:

Chthonic Rising
Many things rise from the earth --
the steam of ancient whispers,
seeds that fall like a vast blanket.
howls too playful to be lonely.

But these days ground yields only ash
and yellowed grass must
blink away the smell of blood.

Those that are wise
will walk with toes bared
to feel the rocks loosen

before they take to the air
proclaiming the return
of a red-eyed mother.

Tom’s blog quotes Jean Shinoda Bolen's directive: "Show up, and pay attention." I believe she means that we should show up at the empty entrance to our own chthonian netherworld and pay close attention to all of those rocks that we loosen on the way down.

Have I made the journey? Yes, when I needed to confront my shadow self in relation to my failed marriage. It was a lengthy and eventful journey, and eventually I was able to “take to the air, proclaiming the return of a red-eyed mother.” And then this is what I wrote, based on the synchronistic discovery and purchase of a disturbing art work depicting Eve wrenching herself from Adam’s side as he lay, spectral and spread-eagled, upside down, with red raining down on both of them:

The Real Birth of Eve
Don’t fail me now, Adam.
I did not choose this path,
this pain.
He woke you slowly.
With care he molded your form,
stroked your face to smile,
sang your ears to sound,
shaded your new wide eyes
from all but his vision of paradise.

He gave you a place, a name,
a chance to lie
with the fullness of earth
before his restless breath
stirred the question on your tongue.

But I --
I had no time,
no sure sense of shape,
no songs of promised lands
to free the reach of eager arms.

I have only had the quest,
the question
that has grown into this pain
--your pain—
and the pain of my knowing
that my only way out
is through you,
through the final rending
of heart and mind and will,
of the fabric of our common sky
that rains fire and blood
upon this sacred and willfull act.

Forgive me, Adam.
I can no longer be both self and other.
I need my own breath, my own blood.
He left me no choice
but to tear from you what belongs to me –
my sex, my soul, my song.

Forgive me, Adam,
for making my Word
from your flesh and bone,
for forcing you to share this eternal exile,
for taking it anyway –
my only way out.

So, yes, Tom. I agree that the emptiness is a gift, an invitation to take a journey where no one has ever gone before. As Jeneane said, “Not the outside stuff. The *inside* stuff.” Deep. Messy. Chthonic. True. And there are those who believe that not only daemons [not “demons”] live in that place, but also god.

For my mom; for moms everywhere.
Today, my mother was talking about how Poland was betrayed by the West as they struggled to refuse Hitler's tyranny.
Today, Marek blogs:
There are still people in Poland who lived during the War who are bitter and angry that Western Coalition, mainly France and Great Britain didn't do anything when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. Polish people said NO to Hitler. Great Britain and France promised to attack Nazis, they didn't. They didn't stand up for freedom. They didn't stand up for us. And now in Warsaw there are thousands of places marked by plaques where people were killed because somebody didn't stand up for them.

What about the Palestinians? Is somebody standing up for them? I know some of them blow themselves up and murder people but what about Palestinians who love their children? What about Israelis? Is somebody standing up for them? I know some of them just want to kill all Palestinians but what about Israelis who love their children?

Maybe, instead of talking cease-fire, Palestinians and Israelis could start talking about how much they love their children.

It’s time for some Camille.
I don’t remember where I first heard Camille Paglia speak. I think it was on the old Phil Donahue show. What I do remember is being totally enthralled by her perspectives on just about everything. Hated by both radical feminists as well as right-wing “fascinating womanhood” females, dismissed by most men because of her intense, confrontational, opinionated style, and shunned by many of her peers because of her controversial convictions about sexuality and morality, Camille is just the kind of woman that gets my attention.

As a bi-sexual, a serious scholar of contemporary culture, and a pretty much humorless conversationalist, Paglia is my opposite. Where my mind crosses hers, however, is in the belief that it is our chthonian natures that truly rule our actions, however much we have consciously or unconsciously tried to deny them. That is the “darkness” that we must acknowledge and learn to both embrace and “enlighten” if we, as a species, are to move beyond the periodic inclination toward mutual murder – both physical and psychological.

Here, for example, are some random quotes from her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. I have never been able to finish reading the whole book: it’s just too dense and too scholarly. However, I periodically go back and re-read her first chapter, which is where she articulates her larger perspective. She pushes the envelope in how we view ourselves in relation to the world we live in. Some quotes:

We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.

Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power.

Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from the ritual of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

Civilized life requires a state of illusion. The idea of the ultimate benevolence of nature and God is the most potent of man’s survival mechanisms. Without it, culture would revert to fear and despair.

Aggression comes from nature; it is what Nietzsche is to call the will-to-power….society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check.

Sex is power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships…. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.

Sex is a far darker power than the feminist has admitted. Behaviorist sex therapies believe guiltless, no-fault sex is possible. But sex had always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. I called it an intersection. This intersection is the uncanny crossroads of Hecate, where all things return in the night. Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts. It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.

Sex is daemonic. This term....derives from the Greek "daimon"..... meaning a spirit of lower divinity than the Olympian gods.... The word came to mean a man's guardian shadow. Christianity turned the daemonic into the demonic. The Greek daemons were not evil – or rather they were both good and evil, like nature itself, in which they dwelled. Freud’s unconscious is a daemonic realm.

The daemonism of chthonian nature is the west’s dirty secret.

The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory. In hunting or agrarian societies dependent upon nature, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility.

Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.

In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.

Daemonic archtypes of woman, filling world mythology, represent the uncontrollable nearness of nature.

Evenutally Paglia posits that if women ruled the world, we'd still be living in grass huts. That's where my mind takes a left turn as hers takes a right. I don't think we would disregard the accomplishments of men (to Camille, those sky-cult skyscrapers, power grids, space shuttles, fast cars, are both the actual results as well as the metaphorical symbols of the accomplishments of the male gender). Rather, I think we would so a better job of integrating the sky-cult mentality with the earth-cult heart, soul, and shadow. But that's just my un-scholarly, heterosexual, female chauvinist opinion.

Or maybe I'll just keep linking to Rushkoff
Thanks to AKMA, I've discovered the newly minted blog of David Rushkoff, who according to his bio, analyzes the way people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He sees "media" as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and "literacy" as the ability to participate consciously in it.

From I've been able to read so far, he articulates what I perceive and believe in the way that I wish I could.

So, please link here for the best I've read so far on the Middle East situation, where he concludes with a paragraph that I wish with all my heart I had written:
In my reality tunnel, the Palestinians and Israelis are basically looking in the mirror. The religions are quite quite similar, and the false notions of state-hood imported from Europe have the people acting out insanely unfounded mythologies of national identity. These people don't have national identities, because nations aren't real. And God certainly has no idea what they are.

What's the opposite of "warblogger?"
Doc Searls posts: In fact, I believe the war blog movement may be a more powerful political force in the long run than all of conservative talk radio and print journalism rolled together. He also says that we could use some peace bloggers.

I echo Shelley Powers' question: Doc, what do you want? People have been speaking out for peace -- they just aren't in your sphere. You just haven't been paying attention.

I hadn't intended my blog to become a political soap box. But neither do I intend to let the warbloggers take up all the blogspace. So I will continue to speak out against the murders committed by both sides; I will continue to insist that Israel is definitely not the good guy here. And I urge other bloggers to read Shelley's posts for peace and let her know in her comments that she should not stop -- despite all of the messages that she gets denigrating her eloquent efforts to hold the mirror of truth up the the hypocisies of the thugs who are keeping this war going for the most inhuman of purposes. We peace bloggers need to blog even louder, methinks. All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. (Edmund Burke)

Heh. And in checking for the author of the above quote, I came across this very appropriate Chinese proverb:
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.

Religious Leaders Offer Solutions to War, But No One Cares
I am posting the following as copied directly from an email I got asking for my support in sharing this information. I am posting the following because several people who left comments on burnigbird's blog said that they wish someone would make some positive suggestions for solutions instead of pointing fingers. Well, what if the world's religious leaders got together and vowed to take a unified stand on dealing with world violence, but nobody cared? Apparently they did, and nobody does.

THE ASSISI DECALOGUE
by David Waters, a columnist for the syndicated Memphis, Tennessee Commercial Appeal

What if leaders of the world's major religions got together one day and denounced all religious violence? What if they unanimously agreed to make this plain, clear and bold statement to the world?

"Violence and terrorism are opposed to all true religious spirit and we condemn all recourse to violence and war in the name of God or religion." It could change the world. At the very least, it would be big news, wouldn't it? Apparently not.

More than 200 leaders of the world's dozen major religions did get together Jan. 24 in Assisi, Italy. Maybe you missed the story about it the next day. Most newspapers didn't carry it. And it was hidden inside many of those that did. There was a lot of other news that day. The Enron hearings opened in Washington. John Walker Lindh made his first court appearance.

It's no wonder the largest meeting of world religious leaders in history couldn't even make the front page. Pope John Paul II and a number of cardinals were at the meeting. So was Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of all Orthodox Christians. So were a dozen Jewish rabbis, including some from Israel. So were 30 Muslim imams from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. So were dozens of ministers representing Baptists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Disciples of Christ, Mennonites, Quakers, Moravians, The Salvation Army and the World Council of Churches.

So were dozens of monks, gurus and others representing Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Zoroastrians and native African religions. They ignored the personal and political risk of attending such a high-profile gathering.

They convened and talked and prayed. They unanimously agreed to condemn "every recourse to violence and war in the name of God or religion." They also said, "No religious goal can possibly justify the use of violence by man against man." And that "Whoever uses religion to foment violence contradicts religion's deepest and truest inspiration." They called their statement the Assisi Decalogue for Peace. It consists of 10 mutual commitments to work for peace and justice in the world, including this one:

"We commit ourselves to stand at the side of those who suffer poverty and abandonment, speaking out for those who have no voice, and to working effectively to change these situations." On March 4, the Pope sent a copy of the to all of the world's heads of state.

Maybe you missed the story. It didn't even make the newspapers the next day, hidden inside or not. There was a lot of other news that day. Seven American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Israeli troops killed 17 people in the West Bank. Mike Tyson got a license to box.

What if leaders of the world's major religions got together one and denounced all religious violence---and no one cared?

DECALOGUE OF ASSISI FOR PEACE
1. We commit ourselves to proclaiming our firm conviction that violence and terrorism are incompatible with the authentic spirit of rreligion, and, as we condemn every recourse to violence and war in the name of God or of religion, we commit ourselves to doing everything possible to eliminate the root causes of terrorism.

2. We commit ourselves to educating people to mutual respect and esteem, in order to help bring about a peaceful and fraternal coexistence between people of different ethnic groups, cultures and religions.

3. We commit ourselves to fostering the culture of dialogue, so that there will be an increase of understanding and mutual trust between individuals and among peoples, for these are the premise of authentic peace.

4. We commit ourselves to defending the right of everyone to live a decent life in accordance with their own cultural identity, and to form freely a family of his own.

5. We commit ourselves to frank and patient dialogue, refusing to consider our differences as an insurmountable barrier, but recognizing instead that to encounter the diversity of others can become an opportunity for greater reciprocal understanding.

6. We commit ourselves to forgiving one another for past and present errors and prejudices, and to supporting one another in a common effort both to overcome selfishness and arrogance, hatred and violence, and to learn from the past that peace without justice is no true peace.

7. We commit ourselves to taking the side of the poor and the helpless, to speaking out for those who have no voice and to working effectively to change these situations, out of the conviction that no one can be happy alone.

8. We commit ourselves to taking up the cry of those who refuse to be resigned to violence and evil, and we are desire to make every effort possible to offer the men and women of our time real hope for justice and peace.

9. We commit ourselves to encouraging all efforts to promote friendship between peoples, for we are convinced that, in the absence of solidarity and understanding between peoples, technological progress exposes the world to a growing risk of destruction and death.

10. We commit ourselves to urging leaders of nations to make every effort to create and consolidate, on the national and international levels, a world of solidarity and peace based on justice.

Please share this with all those who, as far as you know, yearn for peace and freedom from terrorism of all kinds.

And, for a really far-out plan to end violence, check out this site on How to stop terrorism without resorting to military action.

Eavesdropping on the Pro-Israel Rally
The Jerusalem Post reports on the Pro-Israel rally that took place in Washington D.C. today and includes the following, which I find very disturbing:
When House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri) said the US is committed to preserving and strengthening Israel's security, the crowd erupted in wild applause. But when he spoke about securing a just and lasting peace for all, the crowd fell silent. [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, a staunch supporter of Israel, was heckled nonetheless when he said Israelis are not the only victims of violence in the Middle East and that the majority of Palestinians want peace.

When he started a sentence, "The people of Israel and Palestine..." some in the crowd started screaming "What Palestine?" Another, appearing dismayed, said, "This is Wolfowitz?" "No double standards," people chanted as Wolfowitz spoke.
The chanting was so distracting that Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference, asked people at the end of his remarks to stay silent until after the speakers were completed.

I'm not given to prayer, but I think it's time that even I start praying for peace. It doesn't sound like the Pro-Israel people are.

History in Song and Shadow
In Googling for the lyrics of the song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" to cite in the post below, I found it on a site called History in Song, which chronicles history-related songs from the American revolution through the Viet Nam War -- a war which I protested with all of my small voice and big mouth. In surfing that site, I found this entry related to the massacre, by our American soldiers, of the inhabitants of the village of My Lai:

According to accounts that suddenly appeared on TV and in the world press …, a cam-company of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early one morning and destroyed its houses, its livestock and all the inhabitants that they could find in a brutal operation that took less than 20 minutes. When it was over, the Vietnamese dead totaled at least 100 men, women and children, and perhaps many more. Only 25 or so escaped, because they lay hidden under the fallen bodies of relatives and neighbors.

The America GIs raced from house to house, setting the wooden ones ablaze and dynamiting the brick structures. Others routed the inhabitants out of their bunkers and herded them into groups....

Few were spared. Stragglers were shot down as they fled from their burning huts. One soldier fired his M-79 grenade launcher into a clump of bodies in which some Vietnamese were still alive. One chilling incident was observed by Ronald L. Haeberle, 28, the Army combat photographer who had been assigned to C Company. He saw "two small children, maybe four or five years old. A guy with an M-16 fired at the first boy, and the older boy fell over to protect the smaller one. Then they fired six more shots. It was done very businesslike."

The site shares this disturbing satirical song, sung to the tune of a popular romantic piece, "Wake the Town and Tell the People”
Strafe the town and kill the people
Let's declare a massacre.
Lay napalm in the square,
So you'll know that Jake was there,
Drop the candy in the courtyard,
Let the kiddies gather 'round.
Crank your twenty-millimeter,
Gun the little bastards down.
Come 'round early Sunday morning,
Catch the village unaware.
Drop a bunch of cluster bomblets,
Get 'em while they kneel in prayer.

As a species, we humans keep denying our shadow side, and in doing so, we allow our demons to rule our souls.

It is just this type of mother image that Kali represents. Starck and Stern say "Kali-Ma, the Dark Mother, holds the two edge sword; she has the power to slay the demons as well as the ability to be compassionate. At a certain point it becomes necessary to take Kali's sword and cut through the illusions that protect us from seeing and acting on the truth."

We, who do not learn from history.....
When an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps..... And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the world but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence. That is not peace.....We are approaching a major turning point in world history, in the history of civilization. It has already been noted by specialists in various areas. I could compare it only with the turning from the Middle Ages to the modern era, a shift in our civilization. It is a juncture at which settled concepts suddenly become hazy, lose their precise contours, at which our familiar and commonly used words lose their meaning, become empty shells, and methods which have been reliable for many centuries no longer work. It's the sort of turning point where the hierarchy of values which we have venerated, and which we use to determine what is important to us and what causes our hearts to beat, is starting to rock and may collapse.

These are the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from a yellowed Monday February 28, 1977 newspaper article that my mother unearthed this morning in cleaning out her stack of old newspaper clippings. He was writing about communism back then, but he could be writing our world situations today. When will we ever learn; when will we ever learn.

This is from a letter to the Editor...
...in today's Times Union:
To avoid the continuation of the unacceptable status quo, Israel has only two choices: to accept the creation of a Palestinian state and a reasonable resettling of the refugees, or to drive out or kill all the Palestinians in theWest Bank and Gaza Strip, an act akin to the Nazi Holocaust.

Let us hope that the assertion "never again" applies to everyone.

We have been here before, you and I, in our lifetimes.
Read b!X's concise chronicling of reports on current atrocities in the Middle East.

I will not take sides
I resent being prodded to take sides in the Middle East conflict. I have said before in these words, that I don’t support “the weary dreams of men reduced to war,” no matter what side they’re on. I don’t pretend to understand what drives the MEN who are the leaders in these conflicts to so willingly march their people to destruction. As a woman, I don’t share their testosterone dreams.

However, despite the fact that I protest war, if I found myself, my family, my community being systematically persecuted and destroyed, if I found myself facing a future of cultural and national annihilation, I might, indeed, resort to violence. I might, indeed, strap explosives to my body. BUT, I wouldn’t go and kill innocent people in a marketplace or bus stop. What I might do is enlist myself as a Mata Hari type and do what is necessary to get close to the murdering tyrannical bastards, and then I’d blow THEM up, sacrificing myself if I had to. (I guess you could call those estrogen nightmares.) Desperate people are driven to desperate, even self-destructive actions. It’s not right, it’s not moral. But if it’s war, that’s the way it is. Waging war has consequences. Suicide bombings are one of them.

I am monumentally grateful that I have never found myself in the position to make that choice and don’t believe I ever will. And I am profoundly disappointed that those who have never personally experienced the personal horrors of what is going on in the holy land are so willing both to take sides and to condemn someone like me for not.

Killing innocent people is wrong. It's wrong for the Palestinians and it's wrong for the Israelis. But if neither side doesn't want to deal with the consequences of warring on their neighbors, then they should simply stop making war and resolve to negotiate.

Personally, I think they should do what b!X suggests and put all the guys who want to fight in a big Thunderdome and let them wipe each other out. The proceeds from the tickets to watch the Final War to End All Wars can be used to help those Middle Easterners who want to live peacefully side by side to do so.

Voices from behind the front lines
I call your attention to the web diaries of the The Electronic Intifada Presents: Live From Palestine site.

When journalists can’t get in, local residents take over.

Most of the writers posting here are not professional journalists and their ability to confirm information in a warzone is often very limited. Despite this they represent a vital link to the beseiged towns that is almost entirely absent from the commercial media.

Residents of the occupied Palestinian territories are invited to submit accounts of developments on the ground to diaries@electronicIntifada.net.

Read.

Encounter with a poet from my past.

Our paths cross every decade or so. Today it was in the lobby of the college where she was giving a reading. She was coming out of the ladies’ room; I was coming in the front door. The first thing I noticed was that we had both become blonde.

I first met Lyn Lifshin in the mid-seventies, when she had just begun having her poetry published and was giving writing workshops locally. (One of the other -- at the time -- young women in our workshop has since gone on to win writing awards from both the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations. I envied Alice Fulton even back then. She was beautiful, an amazing writer, younger than I, and unmarried. She’s now a Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and she continues to write and publish. I don’t know if she ever married.)

But that summer in Albany, New York we were poets, each struggling to find her own voice. And we couldn’t have had a better workshop leader than Lyn, who had – and still has – a poetic voice as sharp and distinct and irreverent as her arresting face.

Her face today is the same as I remember: jutting cheek bones, dark eyes rimmed with kohl, long hair – once dark, now blonde – parted in the middle and falling across her stare with purpose and precision. She is dressed in black – a leather micro-mini skirt, tights and boots. Over her black leather jacket she wears a purposefully fake vintage leopard-look coat. I can’t help noticing that she is even thinner than ever, her hands clutching her bag of books are gnarled and claw-like. She is the millennium’s Hecate incarnate. Crone of Crones. She is who I once thought I might be. We walk together into the classroom, two blondes of similar age and obviously dissimilar inclinations.

I take my seat among the scattered audience – many of whom could be, well, under certain circumstances, my grandchildren. Even in jeans and a sweater, I feel too coiffed, too ordinary. Not looking exotic enough to ever be taken for a real poet. Real poets look like Lyn – live like Lyn – certainly, write like Lyn.

She reads poems that I hadn’t heard – or read -- before, talks about her choice to have cats instead of kids, her choice to love men often and well, her choice to open her wounds into her words and stare daringly into the faces of those who made them, even as she tosses those loaded words out to the whims of the world. She accompanies each poem with sinuous leanings of torso and hands, carefully placed intakes of breath, pauses to hold attention. She is who I once thought I might be.

One of her poems makes me think of Meryl Yourish and her anguished blogposts about the Holocaust. I Remember Haifa Being Lovely But ends with
once you become a
mother, blue numbers
appeared mysteriously
tattooed on your arm.

Lyn’s book the Blue Tattoo focuses on images related to the Holocaust.

As I leave, I buy her new book and she signs it for me. She says that she and her male partner (she uses his name, but I have forgotten it) will be moving back up into her house that is not too far from where I live. She needs to buy a new refrigerator. Where’s the best place to go for that? Sears, I say. I’ve always found good appliances in Sears. Well, she says, someone mentioned Home Depot. Yeah, I say. You should check them out too.

When I get home I take my mother outside to sit and snooze in the sun while I sit next to her and read from Lyn’s new book, Before It’s Light. The title of the first section makes me smile: “Blonde to the Bone.”

I’ve got the kids, you’ve got the cats, I think, as I get to her poem, “Cat Women.” I think of Anita Bora and her blogger cats project.

And then I get to its end:
……………..We’re mystical
about cats because some nights
we become one, slither away from
a lover’s side, wild to explore what
we sense in darkness, starved for
the prowl, the chase, the leap
from a life so domestic some of
us need to regrow claws, survive
on prey, give up safeness

Well, I, too, have a cat. And once I had a most remarkable growl. I'm sure it's still in there, somewhere.

It's a toss-up
Check out b!X's two satiric extreme solutions to the extreme satanic situation in what was once a holy land. In case you can't get to the whole post (there's some problem with getting his new system working consistently), here's the gist of it:

Option one: Give the land back to God.
It's quite clear that neither side in this age-old conflict is behaving like anything resembling God's children. If they're all so damned certain that this is Holy Land, and that God cares about who lives there, then perhaps we should just clear them all out and let God live there by himself.
Alternatively, we could give just it to Buddhists.
Option two: Build a dome over the entire region and sell tickets.
AOL Time Warner, in conjunction with Walt Disney, presents Holy Land. Two religions enter, no man leaves. Let them fight it out as intensely as they please, while the world pays $50 a head for dome-side seats and watches the carnage from within a disposable comfort zone of hotdogs and beer.

Honestly, I no longer know if I'm kidding or not. I'm simply unsure if either side deserves anything other than scorn, contempt, and a major international shunning.

Everyone over there is full of holy shit.